Our programs
Sodzo’s two core programs work together in rural Kenya.
Each group brings together 25 to 30 families who meet every week. The group participates in weekly community banking where they give, lend, and invest. They learn from experts on business, farming, parenting, psychological resilience, and other topics. They set their own goals, use their own money, and nourish their own community.
The Flourishing Community Model
Just like a tree, we start at the roots.
KPJ follows the Flourishing Community Model, Sodzo’s evidence-based approach. Each group grows through five steps.
Roots
Inclusion and reconciliation
We start with the families who’ve been pushed to the margins, often the caregivers of children we meet on the street. Their neighbors join them in a KPJ group.
Trunk
Saving and lending together
Each group saves together and lends to its own members. Members take turns running the meetings, so everyone practices leading and no group depends on one person.
Branches
Pathways to Flourishing
Our Pathways to Flourishing curriculum helps members work through depression, trauma, and conflict. As families feel safer, they build hope, compassion, and the confidence to lead.
Leaves
Linking community goals to resources
Each village chooses its own goals, such as a new well. We help connect the group with the people and resources to reach them.
Fruit and seeds
Sharing the story
Members share their successes and struggles at meetings and on the radio. Their stories bring in support and carry the model to new villages.
Why it scales
Built to spread.
Led by members
Members take turns leading each meeting. There are no permanent leaders, so every member learns to lead.
Funded by members
Groups lend to each other from their own savings, so the money stays in the village.
Grown by word of mouth
Our staff start the first group in a village. Neighbors bring in the families who follow.
One group, many needs
A single weekly group takes on whatever its members need, such as income, health, parenting, or HIV stigma.
The evidence
Results across sectors
Each result comes from a peer-reviewed study of our program in Meru County.
The science
Grounded in published research
Sodzo pioneered the Flourishing Community Model and published it in the Journal of Community & Applied Social Psychology in 2022, with researchers from the University of Texas Medical Branch and the University of Pretoria. The National Institute of Mental Health funded the study.
The model draws on three fields of research: community-led development, resilience across the systems around a family, and how positive emotions build lasting strengths. Our team has published eight peer-reviewed papers since 2016.
For every child everywhere: a safe place to become.
Sodzo began by asking why children in Maua were living on the street. Our research with their families and villages found the causes upstream, at home: poverty, parents’ own hard childhoods, depression, and villages without support.
The ARC is where children who are already on the street find safety. Our social workers first try to bring each child straight home, and about 70% go home this way. The rest live at the ARC for 6 to 12 months on average, with trauma care, school, and a family structure, while we work with their families.
KPJ works on those upstream causes. Many of these families join a KPJ group with their neighbors, so the home a child returns to has support around it. It’s how we work to keep the next child from leaving home.
Partner with us
Bring KPJ to more communities
We work with universities, governments, and funders to study, grow, and fund KPJ. If that’s you, we’d like to hear from you.