Articles tagged with "sponsorship"

At the end of part one, charities that used child sponsorship were facing a period of transition, both at home and in the countries they served. Conflicts throughout Asia during this time obviously hampered child charity operations, regardless of their fundraising model: World Vision had to abandon operations in Vietnam and Cambodia, and SOS Children's Villages had two of their villages taken over by the Vietnamese government in 1976. The retreat from parts of Asia experiencing war or other conflicts would be a boon for other countries, although World Vision described having to abandon 23,000 sponsored children with their retreat. By the 1980s child sponsorship would surge again, as millions of dollars in humanitarian aid was sent to anyone and everyone working in, or singing about, Ethiopia during the famines of the early-to-mid 1980s.

Many of us who grew up with access to a TV may remember long ads that flashed through scenes of shanty towns, dirt roads, dishevelled children, and emaciated infants too exhausted to respond to the flies landing on their faces. These edits are followed by a B- or C-list celebrity exhorting viewers to sponsor a child for as little as $1 a day. Sally Struthers' long partnerships with the Christian Children's Fund (formerly China's Child Fund, now just ChildFund) and Save The Children (which officially discontinued their sponsorship programme in January 2026) come to mind: