We’re delighted you’re part of our new digital welcome to Compassion. This is new for us and we need your suggestions to help us learn and develop the experience for all our sponsors.

If you have a question or an idea, please contact our team at your.suggestions@compassionuk.org

Gift selection and distribution will vary from community to community according to local circumstances and restrictions:

• Where projects are operating normally, gifts will be purchased in the local community by project staff and distributed at a Christmas party.
• If projects are not operating normally because of local restrictions, parties or celebrations may not be possible. Christmas gifts will be given to children safely and securely – delivered by a staff member or volunteer on visits to children’s homes for example.
• For families facing critical needs, or in communities where home visits are not permitted, Christmas gifts may be delivered directly in cash or by secure money transfer to a child’s caregiver, so that they can decide how best to use the money to provide for their family.

In many communities, especially in countries that continue to be severely impacted by COVID-19 and a rise in the cost of living, it’s likely that staff will prioritise gifts covering critical needs – for example, by selecting gifts like shoes or clothes rather than toys. 

We want to make sure that your gifts really do benefit families and communities in the long-term, which is why we put limits on the amount that can be sent.

Ultimately, we want to enable communities to support themselves, so we don’t want to encourage a culture of dependency on gifts. Also, we don’t want to overwhelm families or single them out for special treatment, which is why we have limits in place.

• Individual Gifts, including birthday gifts between £8 and £80 can be sent to your sponsored child. Sponsors can make two individual gifts per calendar year with a maximum amount of £160 in total.
• Family Gifts between £18 and an annual maximum of £800 can be sent for the family of your sponsored child.
• Project Gifts between £35 and an annual maximum of £3,000 can be sent to the project your child attends
• Graduation Gifts between £8 and £2,250 can be sent during your sponsored child’s final year in the Child Sponsorship Programme.

If you’d like to make a large donation to support the work of Compassion, it’s best to get in touch with us directly and we can suggest how your donation can make the greatest impact. We have a number of interventions, which supplement the work of our sponsorship programme, and could be the ideal way to ensure your gift makes a real and lasting difference.

Sponsored children can move from one Compassion project to another for a number of reasons. Families in poverty are often extremely mobile and a child may move to a new area because a parent is looking for work. Alternatively, sometimes Compassion will need to end a partnership with a church for integrity reasons or because a church no longer needs our help in ministering to children.

When a partnership with a local church ends, Compassion’s field office tries to ensure that as many children as possible are transferred to another project nearby. As Noel Pabiona, country director for the Philippines explains, every effort is made to give each child “a new Compassion home”.

This was the case for the children who were attending Charis Child Development Centre in the Philippines. After nine years of ministering to children, the partnership sadly had to come to an end. This left more than 100 children who were transferred to the nearby Kabalaka Child Development Centre. One of these children was 16-year-old Jhezzo.

Jhezzo is so grateful that she has been able to keep receiving support from the Compassion programme by moving project. She’s thrilled that although she will be given a new child number to reflect the number of her new Compassion project, she can still maintain a relationship with the same sponsor. This consistency has been so reassuring during a time of great change and transition.

“I’m happy to have my sponsor,” Jhezza explains. “She is a big help to me in many ways, including in my spiritual growth. Through sponsorship I can attend camps, special meetings, support groups and Bible studies. Having a sponsor gives opportunities to simple people like me.”

The project workers at Kabalaka Child Development Centre have made every effort to welcome Jhezzo and the other children. They even organised a special service where they sung the hymn “Welcome to the Family” and Reverend Salvador Parpa preached a message explaining ‘We are now one family’.