A good homemaker. A good farmer. A good parishioner. These are all titles that have long followed Charity’s introduction within her community. But these days she proudly wears another one too – a good leader. One she earned by serving as the Accountability Person in her TIST Cluster and successfully training other TIST farmers in Conservation Farming in her community in Kenya.

“TIST promoted me from underground to up and makes me more courageous of a leader and helped me know I had the capability of leading,” Charity says. But anybody who has witnessed her drive first hand can attest that the seeds of leadership were always nestled in her. All they needed was some nurturing and an opportunity to blossom. Today, Charity is not only a leader within the TIST community, she is also a leader within local community-based organizations in her region and in her church.

This is Charity’s story and that of many other women like her, who find themselves planted in a society where they have to be twice as loud as their counterparts to be heard. But at her Cluster training sessions, when Charity takes the stage, everyone listens, and for that time the playing field is leveled.

Charity truly embodies the spirit of TIST – growing trees, growing leaders. And although she has come a long way she is still reaching for the skies. She is now using her position as a TIST trainer to interact with farmers from other Clusters to discuss their Best Practices and come back to implement those in her farm and in her community.

Charity is a woman on a mission, one who happens to be saving the planet along the way!