I was pretty pleased with the look of the theme I had chosen.  The writing was presented in a clean frame.  I had decided not to put a widget panel on the right side.  You may not be aware of this unless you are familiar with WordPress, but you have the ability to create a panel on the right side of the web page where you can put things like Follow Me buttons, a place to register for a newsletter, etc.

I decided not to put anything more on the page to keep the clean design.  And then I got the annual reports about the children that Claudia, my wife, and I sponsor with Compassion and World Vision.  I also received a notice about the number of children who were awaiting child sponsorship, and I wondered how I could help.

And so I decided to mess up my clean design and put information about sponsoring a child in that right widget panel.

Knowing that there are huge numbers of children in poverty pulls at my heartstrings, of course.  But sponsoring a child really does have an impact on the child, their family, and their community.  A professor of economics and international studies at the University of San Francisco, along with a couple of colleagues, did a study to determine if child sponsorship programs like Compassion and World Vision really work.  Among other things, they found that sponsored children were 50% to 80% more likely to finish a university education, 30% to 70% more likely to become community leaders, and 14% to 18% to have salaried employment than a non-sponsored child.  (The range in percents is dependant on the country.)  The researchers also found that the health and welfare of the entire community where a sponsorship program was instituted got better, not just the health and welfare of the sponsored children.

I first became aware of this research when I read an article by the professor who did the research, Dr. Bruce Wydick, in Christianity Today.  You can find his article here: http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2013/june/want-to-change-world-sponsor-child.html.  However, unless you subscribe to Christianity Today you won’t be able to see the entire article.  For a synopsis, you can read “Does Child Sponsorship Work?” on the Compassion site: http://www.compassion.com/does-child-sponsorship-work.htm.

Please explore the opportunity to sponsor a child!  There are other good programs, I’m sure, but I have been impressed with both Compassion and World Vision.