Find Your Feet is an organisation that has a special relationship with Health Poverty Action. We are working in a strategic partnership together to save costs (by sharing some essential services) and to pool some knowledge and resources so that we can increase the scale and effectiveness of our global work on health and livelihoods.
Health Poverty Action and Find Your Feet share many of the same key values, and the complementary nature of our work makes this a strong partnership. Find Your Feet works with rural families in Asia and Africa to grow enough food so they don’t go hungry, to strengthen their voice so they can speak out against injustice and to earn enough money so they can find their feet.
Health Poverty Action believes poor health is not a purely medical issue but is strongly linked to social and political factors. We have always worked on the various social issues that impact on health, from helping communities grow the nutritious foods they need to keep their families healthy, to supporting girls through school to make sure they get a good education.
Sharing our expertise has helped us enhance our work on all of these complex social determinants of health, whether that be by improving livelihoods through sustainable farming methods, engaging local governance, or supporting communities to set up local lending groups and businesses. We are working together to create stronger, more holistic health and livelihoods projects that directly benefit the communities we work with.
We are also be strengthening one another financially by sharing management and governance structures to increase efficiency. This cost sharing technique allows us to get even better value out of the generous donations we receive from our supporters.
Our work together
Our first combined project has seen us expand our work to communities in Malawi, to address the challenges they face accessing clean water. Water is not only crucial for growing crops, but it is also important for sanitation, health and hygiene. Supporting communities to improve their access to clean water, toilet facilities, and hygiene practices has been the perfect way to combine the approaches of Health Poverty Action and Find Your Feet.
Together we are also pioneering new approaches to tackle the complex global challenge of mental illness. Mental health is closely linked to poverty, discrimination and overall health and wellbeing, so medical treatment alone is not enough. Whilst mental illnesses are recognised as an urgent health challenge, they are often severely neglected due to a lack of awareness, resources and funding; it is a silent epidemic, and those suffering are often not in a position to demand action. Together we have launched a programme in Zimbabwe on strengthening services for better mental health and we have started integrating mental health into our work in Somaliland.
