PEPEA case study · October 2026
When a Young Person thrives, a Community grows
How PEPEA Is Turning Loryne’s Potential into Community Leadership
When Loryne first joined THRIVE Action CBO as a Youth Resource Person, she brought raw dedication, curiosity, and a genuine desire to serve her community, something that could never be learned in a typical classroom.
What the Pathways to Excellence, Professional Development, and Economic Agency (PEPEA) has helped unlock is the confidence and structure to turn those qualities into a deliberate journey of excellence, professional growth, and agency.
From peace building, to digital inclusion and community leadership, Loryne’s journey is becoming a powerful illustration of what can happen when a young person is supported to tap into her potential and pursue growth with intention.
From potential to purposeful growth
PEPEA is designed around a simple but powerful belief that young people can move further when they have the tools, guidance, opportunities, and agency to shape their own pathways.
When Loryne set her personal PEPEA Fellow Goal plans at onboarding, she was certain that Peace and Development pathways excited her. For Loryne, that pathway has sparked something deeper than participation. It has nurtured a commitment to lifelong learning. She keeps learning, keeps showing up, and increasingly, her community is feeling the difference.
Today, as a PEPEA Fellow and Youth Resource Person in the program, she is not only participating in opportunities, but is actively seeking them out, learning from them, applying what she learns, and increasingly using her growing capabilities to create opportunities for others.
Rather than waiting for someone to offer what she needs, she now actively explores all PEPEA resources, seeks out relevant trainings, learning spaces, and platforms that can strengthen her agency and ability to contribute meaningfully to her community. From peace and conflict-resolution trainings to subscribing to social justice organizations and networks, Loryne has increasingly taken ownership of her professional and personal development.
Her growing involvement in community development initiatives, including waste management, policy advocacy, community dialogues, peace and conflict-resolution activities with strengthened confidence and informed perspectives is typically how she puts that learning to work. She recently mobilized a team of local human rights defenders and social justice organizations to participate in dialogue with a regional mining company in her community around peaceful coexistence and environmental safety.
She is learning not simply to speak about peace, but to create spaces where difficult issues can be discussed constructively.
This is an important part of her PEPEA journey. Professional development is not an end in itself. It becomes meaningful when knowledge is translated into confidence, action, relationships, and results.
This is the kind of self-directed excellence PEPEA seeks to nurture: not young people simply collecting certificates or recording volunteer timesheets, but continuously building the knowledge, confidence, relationships, and practical skills needed to create sought portfolios, agency, and meaningful change.
From learning to serving others
Loryne’s growing agency is visible across several areas of THRIVE’s work.
In child protection, she has helped activate the VOICE Club at Angoro Comprehensive School, creating space for underserved adolescents to build interest and confidence in climate-smart STEM pathways, communication and literacy, lifeskills, and civic participation. She has also represented THRIVE in public consultations around Kenya’s draft child labour elimination policy, bringing community-level perspectives into wider conversations about protecting children.
Another small moment captures Loryne’s growing sense of responsibility particularly well.
Following a local International Day of Peace event at Kopere Grounds, the grounds were left littered after participants had gone home. Rather than walk away, Loryne stayed behind, improvised gloves and a broom, asked a fellow young person to join her, and they began cleaning. There was no applause, payment, or formal assignment. She simply saw something that needed to be done and acted.
That moment may have looked ordinary but it represented something agency in action. The willingness to take responsibility, and the confidence to initiate the understanding that community ownership is demonstrated through action, not just words.
That mindset has continued to grow. As Loryne becomes more active in her community, her growing confidence and knowledge is steadily translating into practical support for others.
Under THRIVE Action CBO’s Career, Skills, and Talent Development initiatives, Loryne continues to support vulnerable families with outstanding passion, doing what it takes to connect marginalized girls and young people to opportunities that might otherwise remain out of reach. She does not stop at sharing about opportunities or helping the many families that need help navigating online applications, but in most cases goes ahead to use her own smartphone to guide them through the process, step by step.
Among the opportunities she has helped young women navigate are the Kenya Blue Economy Skills Training Program (KBEST) scholarships, which seeks to expand access to market-relevant skills for women, youth, and vulnerable groups in Kenya’s emerging blue economy.
For Loryne, digital inclusion is therefore not simply about connectivity, or helping someone access a website. It is about making sure that information becomes access, and access becomes possibility.
When service becomes trust
Something powerful began to happen.
The community started noticing.
Loryne’s growing presence in the community has increasingly positioned her as someone people can turn to. Her service has been consistent, her learning has been intentional, and her willingness to step forward has become increasingly visible.
That trust was recently reflected in a significant milestone.
During a public participation forum held at Holo Community Dispensary, members of Angoro community nominated and unanimously elected Loryne as the youth representative to the Holo Dispensary Board.
In this 5 year role, she is now preparing to bring the youth perspective into the governance and development of Holo Dispensary, where she joins a 7 member Board committee, working alongside other community representatives and stakeholders to support the successful development and functioning of the community-serving dispensary.
For THRIVE, this moment carries particular meaning.
She did not receive this responsibility simply because she was a PEPEA Fellow. Her community saw her work before it entrusted her with a role. The leadership followed the service, the trust followed the consistency, and the opportunity to represent young people followed her willingness to keep showing up.
Growing Together
Turning growth into community action
Across these experiences, what remains constant is that Loryne is learning, and then using what she learns. She is also learning to document her own journey.
By uploading her activity reports and experiences to the PEPEA Resource Space, she is building her professional portfolio while creating a source of encouragement for other NEET young people navigating their own pathways.
She is strengthening her writing, documentation, and analytical skills, precisely why her journey matters, to demonstrate that PEPEA does not define excellence as perfection, but a commitment to keep learning, improving, reflecting, and trying again.
Loryne embodies that mindset.
Despite Loryne's desire to pursue tertiary education, she was forced to drop out of a partially sponsored Food and Beverage Production course at the Kisumu National Polytechnic due to financial constraints. To her, that is not a set-back anymore, but a lived experience that continues to shape her service. Given a second chance, she would pursue Development Studies
She applies for the trainings, attends the sessions, asks questions, builds relationships, tries what she has learned, documents her experience, and then she looks for the next opportunity to grow.
That cycle is gradually transforming not only Loryne, but also the value she is able to bring to the people around her.
PEPEA does not define excellence as perfection, but a commitment to keep learning, improving, reflecting, and trying again.
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