CULINKE was founded in December 2001 by Kisumu Town youths as a small community-based youth-led platform to use cultural theatre approaches to create awareness on the devastation caused by HIV and AIDS and to promote behaviour change amongst the youth in regard to HIV/AIDS. 

With time CULINKE broadened her approach to fighting HIV and AIDS to include fighting poverty as a driver of HIV and AIDS. In the Kenyan rural areas poverty and disease are part of culture as is dependency syndrome. Since culture is a total way of life CULINKE is influencing the cultural mind frame to change the belief that poverty is part of culture in the rural areas. The "culture of poverty" is a perpetuation, at society's lowest levels, of the patterns of life that form, over generations and sometimes centuries, a kind of prison. "It is much more difficult to eliminate the culture of poverty than to eliminate poverty per se." CULINKE is helping people escape poverty. People in the culture of poverty have a strong feeling of marginality, of helplessness, of dependency, of not belonging. 

Since poverty anywhere affects humanity everywhere, CULINKE unites Humanity to fight poverty, hence Humanity United Against Poverty, and since the MDGs unites the world in the fight to improve human welfare, CULINKE ascribes to the MDGs. Because the MDGs are diverse and interlinked, CULINKE is sectorbroad with crosscutting programmes addressing poverty, its root causes and effects along the lines of global development goals. CULINKE is using the power of humanity to break the cycle of poverty in Western Kenya.