By Ravonna Martin | Founder & Executive Director
Read our entire 2025 Annual Report here!
A Letter from our Founder:
When I look back at 2025, I struggle to find words enough to hold both the heartbreak and the triumph of this year.
In January, we watched as eastern Congo descended into violence as M23 forces advanced into Goma and beyond. Friends, doctors, families, and humanitarian workers faced unimaginable danger. Our team in Kisangani lived for months under the constant fear that the conflict would continue westward toward our home base. We worried about everything: our staff, their children, our patients, our medical supplies, and our future.
And still, every single day, our Congolese team showed up. They continued surgeries. They administered chemotherapy. They supported women facing cancer, trauma, displacement, and fear. They continued teaching young girls about menstrual health and reproductive care. They kept building toward something bigger than fear.
Navigating uncertainty, we made the boldest decision in the history of the Ida Lee Project: to open our own permanent women’s health center in Kisangani.
For years, the Ida Lee Project operated through temporary offices, borrowed spaces, mobile clinics, and referral networks. We dreamed of creating a permanent sanctuary for women — a place where they could receive screenings, surgery, chemotherapy, education, rest, dignity, and safety all under one roof. In August 2025, in spite of all the obstacles, that dream became real.
Today, the Ida Lee House stands in Kisangani as a testament to what solidarity can build. In just five months of operation, we served an estimated 636 patients— nearly four times the number we served during all of 2024.
Behind those numbers are real women. Women fighting cancer. Women surviving violence. Women who had nowhere else to go.
This work belongs first and foremost to our Congolese staff and partners, whose courage humbles me daily. It also belongs to the global community of supporters who believed in us long before this hospital existed.
Thank you for walking beside us through one of the most difficult and transformative years in our history. This is just the beginning.
With gratitude and determination,
Ravonna Martin
Founder & Executive Director
The Ida Lee Project
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