The Truth about Child Sponsorship

1. The Truth about Child Sponsorship Jewel Anita Hendrix

2. Strategy and Goal of the Child Development Program (CDP) • Strategy: To strengthen and equip the community - the family, the church, the leaders - to nurture and provide for all their children as God designed, focusing on 3 areas: • Ideas that Transform (This is bringing Biblical truth and principles about the child’s identity, worth, purpose, calling and relationship with God into the life of a child and community. It is bringing God’s good purposes and design for living into every domain of life - relationships, family, vocation, leadership, education and health) • Education (opportunity to develop their mind and potential) • Health and Nutrition (survival plus growing healthy and strong) • Goal: All the children thrive as God intends, overcoming poverty in their lives.

3. How does God intend for children to develop? • How do you think that children should develop? • How does the community you live in think that children should develop? (If you’ve had experience in other cultural contexts, discuss what they think, too) • How do you think God intended for children to develop?

4. How God sees children • Every child is wonderfully created in His image. • Every child is given creativity and intellect. • Every child is unique, special and full of potential. • Every child is known and loved by Him. • Every child is desired by God for relationship. • Every child has a story and a unique purpose. • Every child is affected by the brokenness in the world and needs healing transformation. • Modified from Dr. Elizabeth Youmens

5. Wholistic Child Development • Personal Development - establishing identity • Physical • Intellectual • Emotional • Spiritual • Relational Development - living their purpose • Relationship with God (purpose: love God, glorify God, etc.) • Relationship with Others (purpose: love others, bless others, etc.) • Relationship with the rest of Creation (purpose: stewardship, etc.)

6. Why children? • Children are among the most vulnerable. • Every child (every person) is uniquely and specially made in the image of God, immensely valued by God, and full of potential. • Children not only are the future, they change the future.

7. Why families, church and leaders? • God’s plan (since creation and continuing through today) is for their family (parents/guardians) and then the church and community to be responsible to nurture their children, so they grow as healthy well-equipped persons. • God in His wisdom entrusts children to families and assigns to those families, and then to the larger community, the responsibility to provide for and enable their children to develop as God intends.

8. What does God want for the Families? • The family is a safe place where each other’s needs are being met. • Each person is known, loved and encouraged to develop their gifts and talents. • It is a place where God’s unconditional love is demonstrated. • The child has the freedom to experiment with new ideas, fail and still be loved.

9. What does God want for the Parents? • To love (cherish) their children • Bless their children • Provide for their children’s needs • Teach/train children in God’s ways (values, character) • Develop the potential of the children • Be good examples (role models) for their children

10. What does God want for the Churches? • The church in the community is actively sharing with others, especially the children, all aspects of God’s Grace and Truth, it is reaching out to meet the needs of others in the community. • Pray for the community • Minister to others as Jesus did (wholistically, in love) • Manifest God’s wisdom • Demonstrate God’s love • Bring healing and restoration to the community

11. What does God want for the community Leaders? • The leaders are serving their community by solving the problems that affect the community and their children. • Lead with responsibility • Fulfill their role • Be role models • Protect the children • Serve all justly • Be in right relationship with God • Help solve problems/conflicts

12. What does God want for the Community? • The people of the community are advancing towards their God-given potential, progressing beyond their basic needs. • The community is a safe place where children are valued and protected. • Everyone sees everyone else as God sees them • Serving one another • Moving towards its potential • Growing in love/service • Living in harmony with others

13. Discovering Basic Beliefs • About all of life • Aligning to God’s truth • Field exercise • Take one group of questions. • Answer each question with each of the following perspectives: 1. Your own perspective – how would you answer the question (what do you say you believe, what do you really live out?) 2. The community’s perspective – how would people in your community answer the question (what would they say?, what do they do?) 3. Scripture’s perspective – what does Scripture say about this question?, how else does God reveal the answer to this question to us? 4. Implications of Scripture’s perspective – based on what Scripture says, how should we live our lives?

14. How do we discover truth? • Ask questions (the “big” questions) • Bible • Prayer • Wrestle with it together (in fellowship) • Live it (what fruit does it bring?)

15. Our Approach is to Align ALL aspects of Life to God • “To live in healthy relationships, we need to examine all aspects of our lives and seek to align them with God’s way, and His truth which results in a truly transformed life! • “In FH, we want our lives to continue being transformed and we want to help facilitate other people living according to their God-given potential. We know that God who created us and has a good plan for His creation knows the best way to live life. His ways and His truth bring life. So we want to facilitate the process of aligning lives and relationships to God – His way and His truth in order to overcome poverty. Clearly, transformation is God’s work and plan. Human effort alone cannot accomplish God’s purpose. Ultimately, to align our lives to God’s reality we are dependent on His supernatural, sustaining power and His grace.” -VMV booklet FH

17. Aligning to God’s intentions • Affirm accepted truth that promotes the development of children; • Identify critical issues that hinder the children from developing as God intends (compare current situation to God’s intentions) • Identify the misaligned behaviours, knowledge, values and root beliefs that create these barriers; • Share truth that responds to misaligned belief; • Teach knowledge/skills that counteract the misalignment; • Encourage behaviour changes based on the truth instead of misaligned beliefs; • Present God’s intentions for all of life and how these purposes can be achieved. Grace and Truth must permeate everything we do.

18. Strategy To strengthen and equip the community - the family, the church, the leaders - to nurture and provide for all their children as God designed, focusing on 3 areas: • Ideas that Transform (This is bringing Biblical truth and principles about the child’s identity, worth, purpose, calling and relationship with God into the life of a child and community. It is bringing God’s good purposes and design for living into every domain of life - relationships, family, vocation, leadership, education and health) • Education (opportunity to develop their mind and potential) • Health and Nutrition (survival plus growing healthy and strong)

19. How do we design child development programs and apply sponsorship funding to strengthen and equip the community in these ways? • Our approach is to: • Increase vision, knowledge, and skills; influence practice and behavior of the family, the church, the leaders, the school teachers, etc. in the roles God has given them to develop their children. (FH provides transformative truth/ideas; tools/curriculum like AMO, Footings; trainings for parents; leadership development; youth programs for churches, teacher training, etc.) • Increase family income so they can purchase adequate food, basic medicines, school supplies, clothing for their children. (FH helps set up savings and credit groups, literacy for parents, ideas, connections, support) • Improve cooperation and function of community organizations so they can better provide for their children. (FH provide ideas, skills, and resources to strengthen community leadership, Cascade Groups, mother’s clubs, school councils, etc.) • Increase community access to additional resources that will help them better serve their children better with infrastructure and programs. (FH helps connect community to local resources, to teams and C2Cs, to local government, other types of project funding, etc.

20. CT Strategy for Child Development Transforming the Community to Impact the Children Community Transformation for Child Development • Asset-based Community Development (ABCD) - begin with resources that God has already given each community • Appreciative Inquiry thinking - recognizing strengths, listening • Participatory planning approach and posture - in line with the FH mission of walking with communities. • CT Plan -- The strategy is summarized in a Community Transformation (CT) plan, combining: • long-range vision (including history, current state and future vision of the community) and • 3-year Priority Planning to address critical issues that hinder the development of the children.

21. Community Transformation Strategy for CDP - steps • Keep the children in the community as the focus. • Set a vision together with the community. • Identify and prioritize, with the community, the critical issues that affect the development of the children. • Empower the community to build a plan, that they take responsibility to implement, to address the top 3 to 5 critical issues.

22. CT Strategy for CDP - steps • Assess what local and FH resources(including people, ideas, tools, materials, funding) are available that can strengthen and equip the community to meet their children’s needs. For FH, the critical core resource is child sponsorship funding and staff – which is then complemented by other resources. • Develop and implement a strategy for FH to strengthen and equip the family, church and the community to better meet the identified critical needs of their children in terms of their relationship with God, their identity and understanding of life, their education, their health and nutrition, etc. • Evaluate progress • Adjust for progress

23. Sponsorship funding base The critical role of the child sponsorship funding in a community:1) To fund core staff who work in the community and establish relationships with it and who guide and support implementation of the community transformation plan. 2) To fund activities that address critical needs/issues. For example, there may be a critical need for mosquito nets in a community and no other funds to cover this apart from community resources which only cover part. Sponsorship funding can fill the need. 3) To maximize other available FH program resources or other local resources in the community. For example, if there is an FH church donation to provide a well that will provide clean water for the community and its children, sponsorship funding maximizes this by funding the hygiene and education aspect.

24. Integration of resources • Sponsorship funded staff and resources: • - Fund core staff and key activities- Maximize and harmonize other FH and Local resources toward common goal To Strengthen and Equip: • To Nurture: • all their children (to develop 4 healthy relationships and wholistically - spiritual, physical, intellectual, social/emotional) Parents/Guardians Church Leaders School teachers Local groups Community resources Support Sponsorship funded staff and resources Other • Focusing on equipping the community to better provide: • - Ideas that Transform- Improved Education- Improved Health and Nutrition • By Increasing: • - Vision, knowledge, skills (impacting practices) • - Family income (savings, agriculture, business, skills) • - Cooperation (strengthening local organizations and groups • - Access to other resources Church projects and Team visits Local gov’t personnel and funding Gov’t grants Int’l Org or Foundation grants

25. Sponsorship as the foundational, long term funding Church Strengthening Community Transformation HIV/Aids Micro-enterprise Water Project School Construction Livestock Program Agriculture Child survival Child Sponsorship Funding Time

26. Why Sponsors? • Building restorative relationships • Walk with the children • Share Christ’s love • End to end transformation

27. Why Sponsorship? • Dependable and long-term. • Flexible and makes it possible to maximize, multiply, and leverage the impact of other resources. • Gives the FH staff freedom to appropriately and effectively communicate ideas that transform where other grants may have limitations that we choose to accept with the grant – knowing there is sponsorship funding to fill the gap.

28. MUTUAL TRANSFORMATION C F L

29. Transformed Sponsors

30. What we want a sponsor to know • The essence of our strategy.Transforming the community to impact children • We influence the difference-makers in a child’s life who then directly impact the child. • How our strategy is working in their child’s community or area. • Critical issues • Strategy to strengthen and equip the family, church and community • Resulting impact on the children

31. Pray. Provide faithful and generous funding. Encourage. Advocate. The vital role of the sponsor

32. How do we motivate a potential sponsor to sponsor

33. Are we doing the right thing? • Is God being glorified? • Are people being blessed?