Dear Friends,
People often ask me how the Children Incorporated sponsorship program works.
I love having the opportunity to share with them, for it’s my belief that our operation is one of the best. For more than half a century, we have been addressing the most basic and immediate needs of children in the United States and in numerous other countries.
I love having the opportunity to share with them, for it’s my belief that our operation is one of the best. For more than half a century, we have been addressing the most basic and immediate needs of children in the United States and in numerous other countries, and our work has been honored with superb ratings from all of the major charitable monitoring groups as a result.
One thing that I value is that, unlike other child sponsorship programs, Children Incorporated does not pay our coordinators who work directly with our sponsored children. We work with a network of caring individuals, already employed by the schools and centers with which we are affiliated, and they include our program in their targeted efforts to improve the lives of those in their communities. This allows us to keep the portion of funds that go directly to helping children as high as possible, and for nearly 55 years, due to our system of using volunteer coordinators, we have succeeded in this effort.
Without your help, unsponsored children go without life-changing basic needs.
Additionally, our volunteer coordinators know the children and families we serve, often on a personal basis. They usually live within the same communities, and in many instances, have known or been familiar with the children included in our sponsorship program for a number of years. Many of the communities remain small and either church- or school-centered, so our coordinators develop a keen awareness of the families’ struggles and observe these struggles on a first-hand basis. In many of our international programs, as well as at some of our Native American sites, the children attend boarding-type schools where they actually live with those who work as Children Incorporated volunteer coordinators. This personal knowledge adds a special layer of uniqueness to the type of services we provide, for rather than dolling out cookie-cutter benefits to the youngsters, Children Incorporated addresses the needs of each child individually.
When we connect with a school or child-care center, we ask the coordinators to identify a group of their most needy or most at-risk children for enrollment in our sponsorship program. The coordinators work with the children’s parents and guardians to get them added to our roster of children who become available for sponsorship, and we then begin seeking caring individuals and groups to meet the needs of the children and families. Sometimes it takes months or longer for us to find enough sponsors for each child, so we created the Shared Hope Fund so that all of the children begin receiving the assistance they need as quickly as possible. The Shared Hope Fund is now one of our most important funds because it allows us to provide for those children enrolled in our sponsorship program, though not yet linked to individual sponsors, as they wait. The dollars raised for Shared Hope make it possible for unsponsored children to receive the very same benefits as sponsored children, sometimes for months on end.
Will you please help us by supporting the Shared Hope Fund today? It truly makes a difference in the lives of children whose needs would be unmet without Children Incorporated’s assistance.
Every donation today changes the life of a child tomorrow. Please consider donating to our Shared Hope Fund.
From the heart,
Ronald H Carter
President and Chief Executive Officer
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How you can donate to our shared hope fund
We enroll new children in our program every day, and finding enough sponsors for all of them is one of our greatest challenges. The global need is so profound that some children wait months for a sponsor. Donations made to our Shared Hope Fund provide immediate assistance to children awaiting sponsorship.