In 2013, a young girl’s question to her father in Burkina Faso exposed something we couldn’t unsee — and it’s still shaping where Amoveo is headed today.
In 2013, during a mosquito net distribution in Burkina Faso, a member of Robert Sanou’s team handed a family exactly what he came to give them: protection from malaria. That’s when a little girl tugged at her father’s sleeve and asked a question that would end up shaping everything Amoveo has become.
“Papa, have you told the man that we have not eaten in two days?”
That question made its way back to us, and neither Matt Peace nor I could shake it. She wasn’t just describing her own family’s current reality — she was describing her whole community. This wasn’t one family’s hard week; it was famine, and everyone in her community was living inside it. We’d both spent years in traditional missions and development work, doing things that genuinely mattered — nets, wells, clinics, meals. But that one sentence taught us something we’ve carried ever since: meeting the need in front of you is only the first step. Real change happens by understanding the whole community around it.
It’s called Isolated Impact — solving the need in front of you without yet understanding the whole picture around it. Nets handed out in a community still going hungry. A well built beside a school with no jobs waiting for its graduates. Good work, done in pieces, that never adds up to a whole, thriving community.
That question is why we built Amoveo around a different posture: listen first, invest after. We wanted to find the local leaders — the Robert Sanous of the world — who were already doing the work, and come alongside them. We wanted to see the whole picture of a community’s life, not just the one need that was easiest to see and fix. It’s a posture we’re still learning to hold onto.
Thirteen years later, that same posture is carrying us into communities right now — in Philadelphia, in Ensenada, Mexico, and in Dublin, Ireland. Local leaders are already doing the work in each of those places, and we get to come alongside them. It’s the same posture we’ve carried into communities all over the world since 2013. Different countries, different needs, same conviction: how you help matters as much as that you help. Our vision hasn’t changed since that day in Burkina Faso — a world of healthy, thriving communities, restored by their own local leaders and the people willing to invest in them for the long haul
We’re still listening. We’re still looking for people who want to invest in the whole picture of a community’s life, year after year. If you feel led to be part of what’s next, we’d love to have you along.
Tim Brokopp
Tim Brokopp and Matt Peace co-founded Amoveo Group in 2013, after years of traditional missionary and development work led them to a different way of helping. Tim serves as Amoveo's Executive Director of Operations, while Matt continues to help shape the partnership-driven approach the two of them built from the start and serves as one of Amoveo's site coordinators in Philly. Together, they've invested their lives in building an organization that has spent over a decade building relationships with local leaders in communities around the world.