How Does Child Sponsorship Work?
World Vision is organized as a global partnership between:
- Support Offices that raise funds, provide technical support and project line management for international grants;
- National (Field) Offices that execute programs; and
- Regional Offices and the Global Centre that provide overall line management, administrative, logistical, audit/financial, and HR services.
In the field, our Operational Areas include both development and fragile and humanitarian projects. These are the geographic locations where local programming is planned and implemented. Operational Areas have one or multiple sector or theme-focused projects; and if funded by child sponsorship it will also include a Community Engagement and Sponsorship Plan project.
Often the Operational Areas are what is known as a Sponsorship Community (or Area Programme) with a large portion of funds generated through child sponsorship fundraising. But many times, they also include Grants, Gifts-in-Kind and other funding streams or revenue streams like the Gift Catalogue. These other non-sponsorship-funded projects can also operate completely outside the sponsorship umbrella, covering larger geographic areas such as a health zone or school district in accordance with the national office and donor strategic priorities.
It is important to note that in some contexts the sponsorship model is not the most effective or appropriate means of meeting community needs. In those contexts, our program work is focused on evidence-based technical approaches. These approaches are based on industry standards and community/stakeholder engagement and utilize multiple different funding sources as most appropriate.
Our advocacy also expands across all our work. This spans from local-level advocacy interventions to improve social accountability, country-level efforts to change policies, to international initiatives that aim to change the way we approach certain topics such as child labour.
