Every month, thousands of sponsors send Children, Incorporated $28 to help their sponsored children with their needs. But where does this money go? What does it do? How does it help the children? I asked the same questions, and as an intern at CI, I was given the opportunity to find out for myself. For the past few months, I have been shadowing Charlotte, a CI volunteer site coordinator at an elementary school in Richmond, Virginia. Charlotte is an energetic and cheerful woman who does her best to serve the children she works with, and she has taught me all about the nitty-gritty details of what is required to run a CI project. In working with her, I have been able to satisfy my curiosity about how sponsorship helps children in CI’s programs.
As the site coordinator, Charlotte works with the teachers and social workers at the school in order to identify which children are in need of assistance. The children who are enrolled into the CI program are generally those who come from low-income or single-parent families in need of some assistance to provide for their children. Every project is different; needs vary from project to project, region to region and country to country.
From my experience, I have found that the parents of kids in Charlotte’s inner city school program are able to meet basic survival needs: housing, food and medical care (with some government assistance). But they lack the additional resources to fulfill other material needs that seem secondary but are in fact extremely important. Kids need clean clothes and sturdy shoes that fit. They need functional school supplies to study effectively. This is where Charlotte steps in to help. She uses monthly sponsorship payments to pay for a clean set of clothes or a new pair of shoes when a child grows out of their old ones and their parents can’t afford to buy them anything new. She buys new pencils, folders, and notebooks when a child’s supplies are all worn out but their parents can’t take money out of their paycheck to buy these things.
In December, sponsorship helped to make the holidays for the children in Charlotte’s project a little brighter and a little merrier. I had the chance to go out and shop for some of the kids and it was extremely fulfilling to see how grateful they and especially their parents were for the extra help during the holiday season. I saw the kids happily writing thank you letters to their sponsors for the things they got for Christmas, and it was clear how important sponsorship was for making their holiday a happy one. Seeing firsthand what CI and its site coordinators do for kids has been a great experience for me. I have gotten to see how the work that I do at the CI office translates into action at a CI project. Although my experience at this project in Richmond is by no way representative of all of CI’s work in the field, it has given me, and hopefully you as the reader a better understanding of what sponsorship means for many children.
If you would like to be the change in a child’s life, click here and become a sponsor. Or, if you already sponsor a child, we urge you to consider sponsoring just one more today. With nearly 2,000 children in our programs who are without a sponsor, there never has been a better time.