Our story
The founder of Just One – Sam Lockhart – touches on what gave him the idea and how he wants others to be granted the same opportunities that he was. He is currently a support worker for teenagers in the care system
At the age of sixteen I dropped out of school. People call it going off the rails, but anti social behaviour just seemed more appealing than work or education. Looking back on it now, I could never see how big the opportunities I had in the UK were, or how capable I was of doing good. I was lost and angry.
Then a local youth worker got in touch out of the blue. Over a coffee, he told me he was organising a trip to Uganda to visit a charity called Jenga. It was a Christian based trip, but I wouldn’t have to go to church and no-one would make me pray! He believed what I could experience out there would have a big impact on me.
He was right.
I saw immeasurable poverty, a world away from the Hertfordshire comfort I’d grown up in. Toddlers eating from rubbish dumps and children dying of Malaria. It’s one thing seeing it on comic relief, another being there first hand.
But I saw something else too.
Hope. Hope and joy and love. This is what hit me the hardest. How a hundred children packed into basic classrooms could still have so much desperation and happiness to learn. How people with almost nothing formed communities working together, to farm and cook meals and stock the local shop.
What I remember most was people smiling.
“We are blessed
with life”
said a local pastor, when I asked him why some of the poorest people in the world could always be smiling.
Sam in Uganda, July 2006
As well as opening my eyes to just how good I had it, it also left me with a feeling of purpose. A sense that the world extended much further than I had imagined. Through the generosity of people with much less than me, I realised that small acts can have a massive impact on others.
That trip shaped who I would go on to be as a person. It taught me that we only get one chance at life and I wanted to make the most of it.
I’ve now spent years working with children and teenagers, I’m currently a support worker for sixteen and seventeen year olds in the care system. In them, I see a generation of lost young people like I was. They lack the opportunities to see outside of the box they’re trapped in.
I’m excited to be able to give teenagers in similar, or worse, positions to mine the opportunity to experience change in the same way. I’m confident that lives will be changed through the work we are embarking on with Just One. More than anything, I’m determined to make that happen.
Sam Lockhart – Founder
