So you’re a Child Sponsor. But what does that really mean?

It’s a great question. And it’s one many of our Sponsors must wonder about from time to time. That’s why we’ve pulled together this list with three myths and a truth about your Sponsorship through Baptist World Aid—to help you understand what your Sponsorship is achieving, and how!

Myth #1: Your Sponsorship Provides School Fees, School Books, or Healthcare for Individual Children

In all our years of doing Sponsorship at Baptist World Aid, we’ve learned from experience, and our program has been adapted and strengthened accordingly.

While it’s a very valuable thing to provide children with their basic needs—like education, food, and healthcare—the impact of your generosity would be greatly limited if that was the extent of our Child Sponsorship programming.

Consider this: Your monthly Sponsorship might be enough to provide one child with a few of their basic needs but what about their brothers and sisters? Their cousins? And their friends in the wider community? Who would provide for them? And how would those siblings, cousins, and friends feel, when others were chosen to be sponsored and they were not?

While this style of Sponsorship was once the norm, in practice, it just wasn’t fair. That’s why, today, your Sponsorship helps to support project work outside of the provision of immediate needs for individual children.

For instance, it supports the creation of Child Clubs in communities, that all children can attend—even if they’re not linked with an Australian supporter. In these clubs, children learn important life skills, like cleanliness and hygiene (which helps to stop the spread of disease in their communities!); they gain confidence to speak with their peers and even adults (now they take part in important community meetings!); and they learn to stand up for all the things they deserve (like a safe home, education, and the choice of when to marry).

Children do not grow up in isolation. They are part of a family. They are part of a community. And that’s why your Sponsorship also supports the creation of community groups for parents and adults too!

When the mum or dad of the Child you support joins a Savings Group, they learn how to best take care of their children and find the means to do it! Through their Savings Groups, parents receive training on effective ways to start new livelihoods and grow incomes—like better farming techniques to increase their crop yield or learning the skills to keep and raise chickens. And because of those growing incomes, parents can now afford to send all of their children to school and feed every hungry belly nutritious meals each day.

So, your generous Sponsorship does provide for the immediate needs of the children you support but it’s also doing so much more! Not in the least, allowing parents the dignity of being able to care for every one of their children.

Myth #2: Baptist World Aid Staff Implement Child Sponsorship Projects Themselves

Every single one of our Child Sponsorship projects is carried out by one of our Christian Partners. We choose to partner with Christian organisations because they share our biblically framed understanding of the better future God intends for people living in poverty. And we choose to work through local organisations because of their intimate knowledge of context, language, and culture in their own communities. In short, we believe it’s the most effective way to carry out this kind of work. The role of Baptist World Aid in this partnership is to provide our Christian partners with funding, accountability, training, and the support they need to become powerful catalysts for change in their communities.

But secondly (and most importantly) children, young people and their communities play an important role in the implementation of the project!

At the beginning of every Child and Youth program, our Christian Partners spend a lot of time working with the community and doing a breadth of participatory exercises to help them gain an understanding of the community’s strengths and the challenges families face in their journey out of poverty.

The Partner staff will talk with children and youth, adults, and community leaders alike, to identify their needs—working together with the community to develop a program for the nine years ahead.

In all of our Sponsorship projects, it’s the community itself driving the work forward and leading their development.

Myth #3: Baptist World Aid And Its Christian Partners Are Planning To Work In These Communities Indefinitely

Our Child Sponsorship program runs on a nine-year cycle, consisting of three planned phases (you can find out which phase you’re currently up to, in your Annual Progress Report). This means that every project has an agreed end date—which is something to get excited about.

Why is it exciting, though? Let us explain.

Successfully reaching the planned end date of a project does not mark its failure, rather, it marks its success. It is the original goal that we (along with communities themselves and our Christian Partners) set out to accomplish at the start of every Child and Youth project.

If we were to provide for a community for decades, and never once invest in any work that helps to strengthen them or learn to take hold of their own development, would that be wise stewardship of your generosity? Probably not.

Will there still be challenges facing a community when it comes time for the project to end? It’s highly likely, because we live in an imperfect world. And even in our own communities, there continue to be struggles. That’s why, for us, a successful Sponsorship project is one where those who are part of it are fully equipped to continue their development themselves.

It’s not about every problem being ‘fixed’ by the nine year deadline, it’s about the community—and the children and youth themselves—having the knowledge, attitudes, structures and skills to organise themselves, identify ongoing challenges, and identify who (or what) can help them continue to address those challenges.

It’s not about work ending in a project area, it’s about the responsibility for that work being passed over to a strengthened and skilled community of people who now can successfully continue existing development activities and even start new activities of their own.

And that’s the truly wonderful thing about your Sponsorship. What you’ve set in motion will continue to operate—and operate effectively—well into the future. You’re not fixing a problem once. You’re giving children, youth, and communities the tools to be able to keep fixing things for decades to come.

Here’s The Truth: You Play An Important Role!

While your generous monthly gift supports important work to benefit not just a single child, but their family and their whole community too, you (and ONLY you) have been linked with a child or young person for a very important reason.

At the start of every Sponsorship project, our Christian Partners work with the community to nominate child partners. Their role is to act as ambassadors for their community and to help keep you up-to-date with the incredible impact your sponsorship is helping to achieve.

Most importantly, however, by developing a relationship with you, the child you’re supporting is given an opportunity to grow in their confidence and leadership as an ambassador in their community. And they value your letters and encouragement too. That sense that they’re part of a bigger world and bigger story comes from being connected to someone outside the boundaries of their village.

This post was first published in 2019 and has since been updated for accuracy.