I am a big believer in the idea of maintaining “an attitude of gratitude.” I have discovered over the years that I can weather crisis, hardships, trials, and difficulties much better when I remind myself of just how blessed I am. Even during my most trying days, I am aware that there are always others who perhaps struggle more, face greater challenges, and lack many things that I daily take for granted. I try very hard, even when I am frustrated, disappointed, or disillusioned to see the proverbial light at the end of the tunnel, and I constantly work to hold on firmly to my “attitude of gratitude.”
I want you to know that Children Incorporated appreciates each and every one of our sponsors and donors. Thank you for allowing us to serve those in need.
As we begin yet another year – Children Incorporated’s 60th year of assisting those living in poverty – I want to clearly express my thanks to each of you who contributes to our special funds and sponsors our beautiful children. Your generosity over the decades is what has allowed us to feed, clothe, and help educate children and youth in many varied locations around the globe.
Children Incorporated would not and could not exist without your financial support and the trust you place in us to use your gifts for good. We take this responsibility quite seriously and constantly work to make each dollar go as far as possible in meeting the huge volume of needs before us.
I am grateful – truly thankful! – for your generous support, and I want you to know that Children Incorporated appreciates each and every one of our sponsors and donors. Thank you for allowing us to serve those in need.
From the heart,
Ronald H. Carter
President and Chief Executive Officer
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Ron Carter |
Dear Friends,
December is an important month. For some, it is the end of yet another year, a time to wrap up loose ends and bring matters, personal and professional, to closure. For others, both religious and otherwise, December is the season of advent, of fresh starts, of hope, peace, joy, and love. Sprinkled throughout the month are all sorts of days of special recommendation. For example, December 4th is “Wear Brown Shoes Day,” December 6th is “Bartender Appreciation Day,” and December 13th is “Ice Cream Day.” Of course, the majority of us celebrate Christmas on December 25th.
Children Incorporated, as a business, operates on a fiscal year calendar (July 1 through June 30), so December is definitely not a month of endings for us, though the end of the calendar year is crucial for us as far as contributions go. As our financial supporters bring their annual contributions to an end, we always anticipate the generosity of those wishing to support our work with monetary gifts before the close of the calendar year.
Our Annual Fund is what drives our mission and vision and allows us to plan for the future of our organization — one in which we can help more and more children each and every year.
This year is no different. As always, we need your support and ask that you seriously consider what you may give to help us continue our life-changing work around the world. The needs of those we serve are ever-present and ever-real as children and families struggle with food insecurity and poor nutrition, the high cost of education, a lack of adequate clothing and hygiene items, and sub-par housing and shelter.
We do all that we can with the funds we receive from sponsorship and general contributions, and our honest efforts are recognized by the major charitable monitoring groups — Charity Navigator recently awarded Children Incorporated a score of 99 out of 100! — but the needs always seem to outweigh the dollars collected. This December, we ask for your help once again by considering making a donation to our Annual Fund. Our Annual Fund is what drives our mission and vision and allows us to plan for the future of our organization — one in which we can help more and more children each and every year, while keeping up with meeting the needs of the children we already support.
Yes, December is an important month. I’d like to designate it as “Children Incorporated Thanks Its Incredible Sponsors and Donors Month” and share my gratitude to each of you for allowing our small but dedicated staff and me, personally, to do the work of helping and improving the lives of children and families. You make it all possible. Thank you.
We recently received a letter from our volunteer coordinator, James, at the Dandora Center in Nairobi, Kenya, who writes to us to express his gratitude for Hope In Action funds that have allowed him to improve and expand the school, which is all to the great benefit of the children we serve there.
“I look back and appreciate with gratitude how much we have been able to achieve at the center through your support.”
A letter from James
“Dear Children Incorporated,
Receive warm greetings from us all at the Dandora Center, and we hope that this finds you well! The children are fine and getting on well with their daily school activities in this rather short but very busy term. Soon, national examinations and assessments will be setting in, and afterwards, the children will be entering the long December holidays.”
“At this juncture, I look back and appreciate with gratitude how much we have been able to achieve at the center through your support, which has made the environment for the children so conducive to learning.”
“I am glad that the boys’ restroom that I mentioned to you during my last communication is now complete and only needs to be painted. We have now begun constructing the girls’ restroom hoping that it will be complete by the beginning of next year. Upon completion of these restroom blocks, we hope to renovate the current room being used as toilets and convert it to a more spacious computer room that will be able to accommodate all the children with ease.”
“I appreciate the support you gave us to construct the first floor of the new classroom block which is currently being used by the children in the junior secondary school. We hope that next year we can manage to do the final floor and roofing of the block to prepare for ninth grade classrooms. Your love for the children at the center gives us hope as we make this request.”
Finally, it’s my great pleasure to share with you a few photos of the children carrying out different activities together with a few structural developments. We forever remain indebted to you as well as all the Children Incorporated sponsors for all the things you do for children.”
You can sponsor a child in one of three ways: call our office at 1-800-538-5381 and speak with one of our staff members; email us at sponsorship@children-inc.org; or go online to our sponsorship portal, create an account, and search for a child that is available for sponsorship.
When our Director of International Programs, Luis Bourdet, and I discussed traveling to Bolivia in March of 2023, he was most excited about getting to visit the Montero School outside of Santa Cruz.
The support they receive from Children Incorporated sponsors goes a long way to help supplement food items, school supplies and hygiene items for children in our program.
Not only had Children Incorporated donors funded the construction of seven classrooms at the school seven years ago, for which Luis and I were invited to attend the community inaugural event, but more recently, we have supported the school’s efforts to build an agricultural school that had been completed just last year.
Luis is passionate about agriculture. As a young university student in Guatemala, he majored in agriculture before moving to the United States and becoming a teacher, and eventually working with Children Incorporated. He understands the importance of learning a trade and more specifically, a trade that generates an income while really helping the local economy.
Visiting the Montero School
When we arrived in Santa Cruz in early March, we visited our affiliated site, Villa Emilia, before making the trip to Montero, which was about two hours away from the city. Our volunteer coordinators picked us up early in the morning of our scheduled visit, and we headed almost directly north for roughly 60 kilometers, arriving to the school with a warm welcome from our sponsored children and their parents, who had prepared a full morning of presentations for us that included speeches, poem readings and traditional dances.
The Montero School itself is located on a beautiful, large piece of property, where school-aged children attend throughout the day, and classes for older children and adults are held in the evenings. The support they receive from Children Incorporated sponsors goes a long way to help supplement food items, school supplies and hygiene items for children in our program — things they need to make sure they can attend school fully prepared and ready to learn.
A site that continues to grow
After the presentations were over, the children enjoyed a snack from the school’s kitchen and then headed home for the day. Luis and I enjoyed a nice lunch with our volunteer coordinators, and took a quick tour of the school, revisiting the additional classrooms Children Incorporated had built, which now showed signs of many wonderful days of use, as teachers had decorated with lessons, written on the chalkboards, and arranged desks to best fit their students’ learning styles and needs.
In next week’s edition of Stories of Hope, we will visit the agricultural school along with some of the students and teachers who are involved with this new program on a daily basis — another great reminder of just how much our donors help children around the world receive an education.
You can sponsor a child in one of three ways: call our office at 1-800-538-5381 and speak with one of our staff members; email us at sponsorship@children-inc.org; or go online to our sponsorship portal, create an account, and search for a child that is available for sponsorship.
One of my very first site visits with Children Incorporated is something I will never forget. After a brief few days in La Paz, Bolivia, our Director of International Programs, Luis Bourdet, and I flew to Santa Cruz, in anticipation of meeting with our volunteer coordinator, Sister Pilar, at our affiliated site, Villa Emilia.
The same families still live in the homes, and the sense of community among the children and mothers was endearing.
When I initially met her back in 2016, Sister Pilar really stood out to me. A small, gregarious woman who has dedicated her life to working within underprivileged communities, she walked briskly in front of us as she showed us around Villa Emilia, an expansive compound where women and their children are given a safe place to learn trades and interact with other children away from the dangers of impoverished neighborhoods in the city.
The facility itself impressed me from the first moment I saw it, and made me very aware of just how much work was going into supporting these families. Their main goal is to help get women steady jobs so they can send their children to school and provide a consistent life for them that will help them get out of poverty as they grow into adults themselves. Because the housing on the Villa Emilia campus was limited, the amount of time that women could stay there with the children was also limited, and that was something that Sister Pilar really wanted to change.
looking to children incorporated for support
And change it did. Before we finished our visit with Sister Pilar 7 years ago, she drove us out to a plot of land 20 minutes outside of the city to show us her vision for the future — an empty field where houses would eventually be built that would offer permanent housing for families in need, so they would never have to worry about where they would live ever again.
Sister Pilar explained that Villa Emilia had already purchased the land and gotten permission from the government to build — all they needed now was help with funding the construction of the homes. Luis picked up on her not-so-subtle request for support, and ask Sister Pilar on the spot to send in a Hope In Action request to Children Incorporated for the cost of building the houses.
Three years later, Luis returned to Santa Cruz, where Sister Pilar had been hard at work overseeing plans for eight single family homes to be built. The celebration was joyous for everyone, especially for the mothers who were getting to move themselves and their children into their brand-new houses — all thanks to our donors. Four years after that, I once again traveled to Bolivia to see the homes that Sister Pilar was just as excited to show off as she was when she initially showed them to Luis a few years back.
The same families still live in the homes, and the sense of community among the children and mothers was endearing. As we toured the houses, each similar yet with their own special decorating touches, the children ran from yard to yard and into each other’s homes. I loved seeing how welcoming everyone was with one another — so comfortable and secure in their own neighborhood, where they had little to worry about, which was a drastic change from the lives they had before receiving such amazing support from Villa Emilia, Sister Pilar and Children Incorporated sponsors and donors.
You can sponsor a child in one of three ways: call our office at 1-800-538-5381 and speak with one of our staff members; email us at sponsorship@children-inc.org; or go online to our sponsorship portal, create an account, and search for a child that is available for sponsorship.
This past July, we had a special surprise at our office in Richmond, Virginia when we received notice that our volunteer coordinator, Peter Njuguna, from the St. John’s Community Center in Nairobi, Kenya, would be visiting. Peter has been a long-time coordinator with Children Incorporated, running our sponsorship program that supports children living in poverty in the Pumwani area of Nairobi.
“Our mission is to promote a just, healthy, and transformative community through capacity building, social inclusion, and accountable interventions,” explained Peter.
Peter arrived at the office prepared with a presentation in which he discussed the mission, vision and curriculum at St. John’s. He explained that the school is especially focused on providing a quality education to help break the cycle of poverty in their community through education, sports, nutrition, life skills, and spiritual guidance, which enables students to reach their full potential and become future leaders.
“Our mission is to promote a just, healthy, and transformative community through capacity building, social inclusion, and accountable interventions,” explained Peter.
“We do this through our Competent-Based Curriculum which helps to individualize each learner within a classroom to improve their critical thinking skills, enhance reading culture, and motivate parents to work closely with teachers to help ensure that comprehensive results are achieved by everyone.”
Peter went on to describe the ways in which this model of teaching has its own challenges — mostly in that it requires new textbooks and computer equipment that are not cost-friendly. It also requires training teachers, which is time consuming. Regardless, Peter is optimistic about this approach to learning, especially since many of the children in the community face so many challenges living in poverty. Their lives became even more difficult during the pandemic, when parents lost their usual labor jobs like housekeeping, construction work, and food vending. Peter watched as more and more children dropped out of school to try to help their families when they needed the support of a school environment more than ever.
Today, according to Peter, 102 children are supported through our sponsorship program from first grade all the way to vocational training which takes place after graduation. This constitutes almost half of the 206 children in total attendance at the school, which means our sponsors have a huge role in making sure students are receiving an education. Beyond providing school supplies and funds for uniforms and text books, our sponsors and donors also provide daily meals for students at the school, which improves their physical fitness and makes it possible for parents to carry on with their work without having to worry about the safety of their children, who no longer have to leave school to come home for lunch.
“We take retention very seriously at St. John’s, so we work hard to follow up with parents and guardians about the learning process so they can express any concerns. We also host parenting classes and give life skills lessons to students about substance abuse, child rights and responsibilities, career paths and personal studies,” said Peter.
Before he finished his presentation, Peter shared with our staff success stories of students who had graduated from the school to go on to work in education, mentoring, and youth leadership. Peter feels strongly that these children, who are now young adults, were able to focus on school and become successful in large part due to their sponsors, and was so happy to be able to express those feelings to all of us in person.
You can sponsor a child in one of three ways: call our office at 1-800-538-5381 and speak with one of our staff members; email us at sponsorship@children-inc.org; or go online to our sponsorship portal, create an account, and search for a child that is available for sponsorship.
