Winner of the Africa Rising Award at the Black Star International Film Festival, The Star Boy was created to showcase the mission of Holy's Home for Children to create a community-owned project that ensures children have the right to a safe and supportive home.

With its rich, vibrant and welcoming culture, Ghana is often chosen as a popular volunteer destination. Holys Home is committed to ensuring foreign intervention is translated in to lasting, sustainable impact in the hands of Ghanaian communities themselves.

Set in the beautiful Kwahu region, the area is steeped in agricultural history and infamous for its annual Easter celebrations, bordering Lake Volta, the largest man-made lake in the world. Despite its natural beauty, recent reports estimate that there are more than 20,000 children working on the lake, often risking their lives to dive down and undo fishing nets caught in the reeds. Children who are out of school or without parents are at particular risk.

Holys Home is currently constructing its first financially self-sustaining project for vulnerable children like this in the Eastern Region of Ghana. On-site facilities that purify and sell clean drinking water, locally known as 'pure water' to villages and towns for miles around will ensure regular income, making this a lasting, community-centred project.

Since acquiring the land through the permission of the local Chief of Kwahu Nteso, Holys has raised over £35,000 in community fundraising with more than 70 volunteers running assault courses, climbing mountains, kayaking lakes and swimming fresh and salty seas. With that money, Holys has built the six-bedroom home including an IT lab, installed electricity connection to the town, constructed two biodigester toilets, drilled a fresh water borehole, completed a separate building for pure water production, developed a farm producing year-round crops and raised 7 friendly goats, 22 chickens, 5 rabbits and 1 cat. This has already given more than 30 local people employment in an area that has limited opportunity for work.

But more needs to be done. The pure water building is ready for machinery and production capabilities to unlock the projects vast potential to impact both its immediate beneficiaries and the entire surrounding community. By fulfilling this next target of £8,000 Holys will complete the income generation needed to make the traditional overseas charity model obsolete. This includes; water purification equipment; packaging machinery; piping and water pumping from the borehole; transportation for selling the water to local communities; landscaping and security of the site and appropriate licenses and certification.

This is a sensitive, real and raw story created on a low budget raised through crowdfunding and supported in-kind by dedicated professionals in the industry. Special thanks to the team Amelie Exton, Ben Carr & Johnny Yates with feature music 'Eagle' by Erin Jae.

We hope you enjoy watching our short film, The Star Boy, and thank you for your kind donation towards the completion of Holys Home for Children.