Moving Mountains

Gavin Bate started the charity during some years spent living in the slums of Nairobi and travelling in the Himalayas. In Africa he worked ad hoc for various aid agencies and organisations, and taught in a local slum school. In Nepal he trekked through the foothills extensively and spent time living with the Sherpas in their traditional homes.

Nearly twenty years on and Moving Mountains now has many projects in Kenya and Nepal and also in the jungles of Borneo. Gavin has set up separate MM NGOs in four countries, allowing each group of Trustees to self-manage and build capacity. The very people he met in the early years are still the people managing everything from building, education and health programmes, social welfare initiatives and micro-finance projects. The charity employs many people locally and provides extensive training and mentorship, which has always been a central pillar of the development ethos.

Gavin has instilled some very specific rules of implementation and policy in the charity, not least that the essential overheads are covered by his company Adventure Alternative, and that all the staff in the company involve themselves in the charity. By using the charity to provide capital investment and the company to provide revenue streams from tourism, the combined influence has successfully dealt with more than the symptoms of poverty, but tackled the cause of it.

The climbs of Mount Everest have provided a high profile image for the charity, and a way of raising substantial funds over the past ten years. The advent of social media has enabled people to follow expeditions live, and hopefully inspire them to donate to a good cause. This year Moving Mountains has more goals than ever:

Nepal – installing special efficient cooking stoves in hundreds of homes, building water tanks for hydro-electric power plants, running mobile medical stations and supplementing schools and monasteries for the benefit of hundreds of children and several communities in the villages of Bupsa and Bumburi

Borneo – planting 40,000 trees every year in the jungles of Sarawak

Kenya – building schools, water wells, clinics and houses for a camp of some 18,000 internally displaced people on the slopes of Mt Kenya in an area called Solio, and multiple education and health programmes all over the country.

See the website movingmountainstrust to see how much we’re doing.