If only poverty were a temporary condition, like a passing squall that quickly gives way to clear skies.
The goal of child sponsorship is to change a child’s life, for life, which means improving their local, national, and global environments.
1. Children feel loved, valued, and valuable through sponsor letters, health checkups, educational, stimulation, and more.
2. Families are ready and able to care for their children thanks to parenting skills, mothers’ training, and school support.
3. Communities are safe and strong, encouraging children’s contributions through children’s clubs, leadership training, and child protection.
4. Nations place a high priority on the well-being of children, ensuring funding for community services, birth registration, and more.
5. The World becomes just when those in power and influence make good choices for children and families.
(©2015 World Vision/photo by Jon Warren)
It isn’t in the development world. The lack of basic things — compounded by a paucity of profound things, like rights and dignity — consumes families for generations. They find themselves trapped by stubborn, interlocking circumstances. And one unexpected complication can wreak havoc on their lives like a Category 5 hurricane.
There is no easy escape from poverty. It is a gritty, in-the-trenches, face-to-face, long-term, systematic, and deeply human process. It requires much more than parachuting staff into a developing country to drill a well or drop a few bags of food.
To free a family from poverty, all problems, and their root causes, must be addressed. That requires time, monumental effort, resources, passionate people, and above all, faith in a sovereign God who sent his Son to join the poor in ultimate empathy — “though he was rich, yet for your sake he became poor, so that you through his poverty might become rich” (2 Corinthians 8:9, NIV).
God calls us to work for a better world for children, one in which they can weather life’s storms surrounded by strong families, safe communities, and thriving nations. Child sponsorship has been World Vision’s way to fight poverty for more than 60 years — together we are greater than hardship.
Sponsorship rallies a community to work alongside development experts and solve the things that bedevil children: contaminated water, malnutrition, preventable diseases, lack of schooling, exploitation, economic hurdles for parents, and stifled beliefs. In the course of projects lasting 15 or 20 years, people become who God intended them to be: productive, self-sufficient, and resilient. And generations of children benefit.
In the following seven stories, learn how sponsorship-funded programs bring community-wide improvements in:
- Clean water: Just add water, and lives change
- Food: Fighting malnutrition in children
- Education: Removing obstacles to knowledge
- Health: Combating preventable diseases
- Child protection: Safeguarding children’s futures
- Economic empowerment: Helping hardworking parents
- Christian commitments: Demonstrating Christ’s love in Armenia
