Christianity Today's Article On Child Sponsorship....Leads To Compassion

 Last week, I grabbed the mail off the front porch and waited a day to look through it due to the nature of our busy life. When I finally did, I was excited to see the newest issue of Christianity Today had arrived.

The cover story was about child sponsorship...and if it really does work.

My stomach dropped. The cover read: “The Surprising News About The Photo Hanging On Your Refrigerator. Does Child Sponsorship Work? A Top Economist answers.”

Well, apparently, I’m not the only one who wonders what good our $38 a month really does to our child in El Salvador.

We sponsor a child through Compassion International. What I truly love about Compassion is that they put it out there, even in their slogan, that it’s all done “In Jesus’ Name.”

But, this cover, even before opening the plastic surrounding it, had me worried.

That night, the second I got the kids to bed, I grabbed my magazine and sat down to read the article I had been thinking about all day.

Top economist, Bruce Wydick, says that he would use the same answer when asked “what could someone like me do to help the poor.” His reply was always, “Perhaps, sponsor a child?” But, he began to wonder if that really was the answer.

He found that despite “9 million children worldwide and more than $5 billion per year channeled into sponsorship,” no one had ever investigated the topic.

So, he, and a small team, decided to go there.

Compassion International was the only major organization willing to let their “program be scrutinized.” This gave me relief immediately...although the data of the study I had yet to read.

The first part of this research was done by two doctoral students of his from The University of Washington. They spent the summer of 2008 in Uganda obtaining data on 809 individuals, including 188 who had been sponsored as children.

The students brought back the data from their summer study and Mr. Wydick says “it was incapable of showing anything other than extremely large and statistically significant impacts on educational outcomes for sponsored children.”

They approached Compassion again to see how they felt about “trusting a bunch of San Francisco academics with the public credibility of his organization.”

The other child sponsorship organizations were not interested in having a study done.
I’ll be honest when I tell you, reading this gave me great comfort in Compassion.

The study continued in Uganda, Guatemala, The Philippines, India, Kenya and Bolivia. Money was sought after for the research project, and obviously they got it.

The results of this study are absolutely amazing.

“Sponsorship makes children 27 to 40 percent more likely to complete secondary school and 50-80 percent more likely to complete a university education. ....To put it simply, the educational impacts of sponsorship are large -roughly equal to the substantial effects of the Rosenwald Schools program that from 1913-31 educated blacks in the Jim Crow South.”

You MUST read this article. It gets better.

“We found that child sponsorship means that when the child grows up, his is 14-18 percent more likely to obtain a salaried job, and 35 percent more likely to obtain a white-collar job.”

The author of this article had the opportunity to present this information to Compassion’s team in Colorado. He gladly accepted. When he met Wes Stafford, then president of Compassion, he said “your program works.” 
Mr. Stafford replied, “I know.”

This is the amazing part...really, quite amazing.

When Mr. Wydick said to Mr. Stafford, “We’re not just finding positive correlations, but substantial casual effects from the program, in every country, especially Africa. I’m wondering what is happening here,’ Mr. Stafford said, “Try hope.”

“Hope?”

In part of his reply, Mr. Stafford says “...You see, poverty causes children to have very low self-esteem, low aspirations. The big difference that sponsorship makes is that it expands children’s views about their own possibilities. Many children don’t think they are capable of much. We help them realize that they are each given special gifts from God to benefit their communities, and we try to help them develop aspirations for their future.”

This is where the Hope Hypothesis started. More studies were done to test the “hope” that Mr. Stafford spoke of. They did more studies with the children using drawings and how they see themselves. Again, the results are amazing.

Letters from our Bryan in El Salvador

“..the patient nurturing of self-worth, self-expectations, dreams and aspirations may be a critical part of helping children escape poverty. It is a holistic approach that secular antipoverty initiative shave largely downplayed, but an approach that Christian development groups have championed for decades.”

Hope. It gives children Hope, and that’s all it takes.

“The child development approach advocated by Compassion appears to get under the hood of human beings to instill aspirations, character formation and spiritual direction. In short, it trains people to be givers instead of receivers.”

I’m going to state my opinion here that Compassion is doing exactly what Christ teaches, and I am proud to have my family part of this larger picture.

To read the entire article, CLICK HERE.......