Child Sponsorship - the NCP perspective

We all want to "do something" when confronted by the poverty of our neighbors and especially a lack of opportunity for children. Child sponsorship programs present themselves as an appealing option, offering the chance to send a child to school for a modest amount of money per month. In return, the donor receives regular reports, occasional photos and letters, and the good feeling that comes from seeing our money help a specific child.

As you can imagine, NCP has some thoughts on the topic of child sponsorship...

About us or about them?

While child sponsorship holds great appeal for donors, the New Community Project doesn't offer sponsorship as an option for giving, instead inviting contributions to community schools through our Give a Girl a Chance program. There are several reasons:

• We feel sponsorship is a bit self-congratulatory (see what I did!)
• The "sponsorship" arrangement sends a message that we have the money and the child needs our help and that's the key dynamic in this arrangement
• Sponsorship makes too direct a connection between donor and recipient--which may not be healthy for either (We have heard stories of children who have had to "produce" thank-you gifts that had little to do with their community and culture, but were what the donors expected.) NCP certainly tells stories of particular children or schools to help "put a face" on poverty and begin to establish a sense of relationship, but does not add the expectation of direct connection between children who are assisted and our organization.

About us AND them...

We work hard to make our interaction with these children and their communities more than just about money. One way of doing this is to visit them on our Learning Tours. Our purpose on these trips is not to gloat or assess or be thanked, but to build relations and to receive the gifts (faith, hope, stamina, hospitality) they have to offer us. So it becomes a two-way interaction, with giving and receiving--and dignity--flowing in both directions.

When visiting or in other correspondence, we also try to acknowledge that while we may be offering funds that make education possible, it is the children and their families who really do the work of overcoming the other obstacles that may stand in the way of going to school (including things like insecurity and war, gender bias, lack of water or toilet facilities at school). So we are each doing our part to make their education possible.

Doing the math

In order to cut overhead and insure effectiveness, we work directly with local grassroots organizations (minimal staff time on our part), so that we actually send 100 percent of donations made to our Special Funds (girls' ed, malaria prevention, reforestation) to the projects themselves. (For groups for whom this is their only work, this is not possible--they have to pay their staff--which is understandable.)
We don't ask for any "thank-you" gifts from the children (which would be another cost for NCP to administer as well as the children to send), although sometimes schools send letters which we pass on to donors.

Our education about their education

We work hard to set a child's education (or lack thereof) in the larger context of why the child is not in school (gender bias, poverty, the global justice equation), so it's not just about our charity to them, but also our work to arrange the system so that everyone has a fair chance (including challenging our greed, our nation's aid priorities, global economic policies). We also support our partners' work in challenging their culture's biases against women. The overall goal would be to equip and empower families and communities and societies to support their own children's education. Here's an example of a group we support.

The bottom line

In summary, NCP believes it's about more than our feeling good about helping a child and their sending us photos and thanks--it's about a) the relationship between us and our neighbors, and b) the importance of thinking about how this world needs to change-and our role in bringing this about.