Peter Kamau Muthui
Founder & Director
Care leaver, social worker, and care-reform leader. Co-founder of Child in Family Focus Kenya.
It was built by someone who lived it.
Second Chances was not built by people looking in. Its story begins with a boy in a Nairobi children's home, waiting for a family that never came.
Thirty children. Two house mothers. One long wait.
After the loss of his parents, Peter and his five siblings were separated and placed in an orphanage in Nairobi. He remained in a children's home until he was twenty, one of thirty children under the care of two house mothers working in shifts.
He spent years hoping, as so many children in care do, that one day someone would come to take him home to a family.
I watched my friend John leave for a foster family. I told myself, I will be next. I was not next.
Peter Kamau Muthui, Founder
He went back to the place that raised him.
That pain never left him, but instead of letting it harden him, it directed him. Peter returned to the very same children's home, first as a social worker, then as a social programmes manager.
For a decade he worked from inside the system he had survived, becoming a respected, globally recognised champion of care reform rooted in local realities. He went on to co-found Child in Family Focus Kenya (CFFK), one of the country's most reputable organisations championing family-based care for orphaned and vulnerable children.
The gap that wouldn't close.
Even from within strong care-reform work, a gap remained. Young people kept arriving, discontinued from sponsorship, aged out, or abandoned by orphanages, having lost everything from shelter to education, with nowhere left to turn.
When Peter extended a second chance to young people discontinued from care, he was not offering charity. He was offering what he once needed himself.
And so Second Chances was born, not as an institution, but as a promise: that no young person leaving care would have to do it alone.
Our mission.
To walk alongside young people leaving institutional care across Kenya, meeting them at the most vulnerable moment with healing, education, justice, and a community that will not disappear.
Our vision.
A Kenya where leaving care is not the same as being left behind, where every care leaver has a bridge to their full potential, and a second chance whenever they need one.
A message from the founder.
I have seen what happens when someone simply refuses to give up on a young person. I have watched lives turn quietly, completely, in the direction of something better.
That transformation is not complicated. It does not require perfection. It requires presence: someone looking a young person in the eye and saying I am not going anywhere.
There are no chances in a family; family will always be there. We are giving second chances to life. That is what we will always be. To every young person reading this: you were never meant to do this alone. And now, you don't have to.
Peter Kamau Muthui
Founder, Second Chances · Executive Director, Child in Family Focus Kenya
The people who stay.
A team that leads with lived experience, and a board that holds us accountable. (Placeholder profiles, to be replaced with the real team.)
Programme Lead
Counselling & Healing
Trauma-informed practitioner guiding our confidential support for survivors.
Legal & Rights Officer
Legal Aid
Supports survivors pursuing justice and care leavers navigating documentation.
This is a story still being written. Yours can be part of it.