About Cura

Cura Orphanage, near Nairobi, Kenya, was founded in the early 2000s, because of Mrs. Evelyn Mungai’s desire to improve the lives of people in her home village. 
 
To that end, she inspired the Nairobi Rotary, for which she was serving as President, to initiate a needs analysis which revealed that the community had been devastated by the AIDS epidemic. The Rotary Club, in consultation with Cura’s local leaders, implemented a plan to fund and build a Home for vulnerable children orphaned by the disease, and
simultaneously funded and built a Clinic that would provide care not only for the Home’s children, but also for the local community.
 
As of 2006, Cura was struggling to support 50 orphans. Mike Eldon, Evelyn’s husband, reached out to Creative Visions Foundation, inspired by the life of his son Dan Eldon, an
artist and photojournalist who had been killed in Somalia in 1993. Dan’s sister Amy, co-founder of CV, launched a fundraising campaign, and encouraged the organization to
commit to helping support the Home financially. Over the years, CV has provided much-needed funds to ensure the sustainability of the Home, and Creative Visions’ volunteers
have visited Cura regularly, contributing to its successes in many ways.

To give even more to the community, CV expanded its impact to include not only funding the operating expenses of the Home and Clinic, but also to supplement the primary school curriculum and resources, which meant adding a computer lab and library for community use. 

By 2010, it became clear that the community would need to have its own secondary school (high school) if it was going to provide ongoing education for all its children. The

Creative Visions team, led by Amy Eldon Turteltaub and Hayden Bixby, sprang into action to raise funds and develop partnerships that led to the construction, finalized in 2012, of Cura Secondary School, which graduated its first class of seniors in November of 2016. 

While the schools in Cura are attended by local children as well as some of Cura’s children, we also sent our students to boarding and day-schools in the region, provided they were offered acceptance based on their Class 8 test scores. We were committed to providing for the best education each of our students could pursue, and to supporting their transition to independent young-adult life for at least one year after graduation. We have been proud to send our students to universities and training programs in many disciplines, and to partner with John Kaheni Residence as a transitional home for some of Cura’s graduates.

Our youngest, Henry, finished secondary school in 2024, so we are now well on our way to the proverbial “empty nest.” All our projects in Cura village have been formally turned over to the community, and all your young people live elsewhere – though they maintain their connections to their extended families there. We will continue to support them as they finish their vocational training and post-secondary education, and we maintain a fund for emergency expenses, as well as annual family reunions and “give back” events so that they have opportunities not only to gather but to pay forward the generosity others have shown them.

Your generosity, and that of others like you, continues to make work like this possible.

We are grateful.