Maxwell Chacha’s Story

Valid Dream Mentorship, Kenya

I grew up in Eldoret, Kenya, witnessing neighbours, friends and family members pushed to the edges not because they lacked dreams, but because the world told them their dreams were invalid. Some used drugs. Some sold sex to eat. Some became mothers at fifteen. All were labelled, shamed, and forgotten.

My journey into mental health advocacy began not in a classroom or conference hall, but on the streets, sitting with young women injecting heroin behind a market. I asked no questions about their past. I simply stayed. Over weeks, they began to speak—not about addiction, but about childhood violence, lost children, police brutality, and the profound exhaustion of being hunted simply for surviving.

I learned that their mental distress was not pathology. It was a legitimate response to an illegitimate system.

In 2021, I founded Valid Dream Mentorship from this understanding. We are a community-based organization rooted in a simple belief: every person holds within them a valid dream and the inherent potential to achieve it. We walk alongside people who inject drugs, women who use substances, young mothers and sex workers not as saviours, but as partners. Our programmes are built on dignity, non-judgment, holistic support, and fierce advocacy against the criminalization and stigma that manufacture suffering."

Please share your reflections on what you've learned and you would like to share with our global community.

Three truths have shaped me:

First, lived experience is not a perspective, it is expertise. The women we serve do not need us to speak for them. They need us to step aside so they can speak, lead, and be compensated for their knowledge. The most effective mental health intervention in Eldoret is not a clinic; it is a peer supporter who has walked the same street, paid the same bribe, lost the same child, and found a way to breathe again.

Second, policy can heal or it can harm and right now, it mostly harms. Criminalization is not a backdrop to mental distress; it is the active wound. Decriminalization of drug use and sex work is not a separate advocacy silo; it is the foundation upon which all mental health recovery must be built. We cannot treat trauma while the State continues to inflict it.

Third, the global mental health movement must confront its own exclusions. Too often, the voices centred are those already closest to power—clinicians, academics, advocates from high-income countries. The women I sit with in Eldoret are never invited to Geneva. Their absence is not incidental; it is structural. Until our movement intentionally, accountably, and financially invests in leadership from the global majority and from the most stigmatized, we are not a movement we are a mirror of the very hierarchies we claim to dismantle.

What has been your favourite moment as a member of GMHAN?

Though I am a newer member, the invitation to contribute to this International Women’s Day spotlight has already been a profound moment. To be asked not about our deficits, but about our solutions is rare for organizations like mine. It signals a shift toward genuine inclusion and I am deeply grateful.

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