The Dreamers of the day
Inside an artisanal mine in the DRC, summer 2024
March 2026 | Mark Preston
T.E. Lawrence wrote that all men dream, but not equally. Those who dream by night wake to find it was vanity. But the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, because they may act their dreams with open eyes, to make it possible.
I have thought about that line a lot over the past two years.
I have spent most of my career in the charity sector. Senior Director of Partnerships at Compassion, leading fundraising at Exeter University’s medical school, and now founding and running Start Bay. I know how the sector works. I know how proposals get written, how cases for support get built, how impact gets measured and reported. I have been on both sides of the table many times and yet none of that prepared me for standing in an artisanal cobalt mine in the DRC. Sure, I’d travelled to some of the poorest parts of some of the world’s most challenging places. But nothing prepared me fully for what I saw in the summer of 2024.
Dreaming by night
In January 2023, I read Siddharth Kara’s Cobalt Red. It is a brutal, forensic account of what artisanal cobalt mining looks like in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Children, some as young as six, digging by hand for the mineral that makes our phones and electric cars possible. I was appalled by it. I thought about it constantly. I talked about it with anyone who would listen.
And for a while, that was all I did.
C.S. Lewis warned about this: the danger of experiencing an emotion and mistaking the experience of the emotion for having done something about its cause. He writes, "The more often he feels without acting, the less he will be able ever to act, and, in the long run, the less he will be able to feel."
The charity sector is full of it. We read the reports. We attend the conferences. We nod solemnly at the statistics. Then we go back to our desks and carry on with whatever was already in the diary. I know, because I did exactly that for months.
Dreaming by day
In the summer of 2024, my colleague Carl Beech and I travelled to Kolwezi in the DRC. We went on our own, self-funded, without organisational backing or security. We gained access to an artisanal mine and filmed what we found. Hundreds of men, women and children, digging for cobalt and copper in conditions that most people in this country could not imagine.
We brought the footage back. And then we did something with it.
Since that trip, we have shown our footage in the Houses of Parliament, at two major report launches. We have sat in rooms with Lord Alton, Sir Iain Duncan Smith, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Ambassador Tony Hall, and many others. We have engaged in Parliamentary roundtables on supply chain accountability. We have built the Freedom and Justice Partnership from nothing into an organisation that is present in the rooms where policy on this issue is being shaped. Just as importantly, through kind donations received, we are already funding the education of 30 children from the town of Kolwezi, where our covert entrance to the mines happened.
I am not saying this to impress anyone. I am saying it because for most of my career I would not have done it. I would have cared about it, talked about it, maybe donated to it. But I would not have got on a plane to Kolwezi. I would not have walked into a mine with a camera and no security. I would not have stood in front of parliamentarians and played them footage of children digging in the dirt.
Something changed. I decided to stop dreaming by night and start dreaming by day.
What this costs
I am not going to pretend this has been easy. Visiting that mine was dangerous. Building FJP alongside running a business is exhausting. The funding landscape for this kind of work is difficult. The supply chains we are trying to make transparent are designed to resist transparency.
But the alternative is going back to sleep. And once you have stood in a place like that mine, once you have seen a child covered in dust carrying a sack of cobalt ore, you cannot go back to sleep. You can only decide what you are going to do next.
If you work in a purpose-driven organisation and what I am talking about resonates with you, I’d welcome a conversation with you. You can find me on LinkedIN or you can email me here mark.preston@startbay.org
The podcast
I recently recorded an episode of the Transform for Value podcast with Suzie Lewis, talking through the full journey. From Cobalt Red to Kolwezi to Parliament. If you are curious about what happens when someone from the charity sector decides to stop reading reports and start acting on them, it might be worth 26 minutes of your time.
Listen on YouTube | Available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and all major platforms.
You can find out more about the Freedom and Justice Partnership here.