Child sponsorship is often billed as a significant way of improving children’s lives. However, sponsorship is based on narratives that fail to address the role of rich countries in global poverty.
World Vision sponsors could choose a child in the mid-1970s by pasting one of these stamps with their likeness on a mail-in card.
World Vision International archives
No matter who chooses whom, many sponsors of children in need see God as the real driving force when they enter this arrangement with far-away strangers.
Kids in South Sudan await a daily meal from World Vision.
AP Photo/Sam Mednick
Not everyone’s a fan of this fundraising approach. But it does bring the needs of children in developing communities to the attention of many Americans.
Associate Professor of Anthropology and Religion at McGill University; Faculty fellow of the Material Economies of Religion in the Americas project, Yale University