Children and families who are assisted by Compassion rarely receive cash. Benefits are almost always in the form of goods and services, carefully designed, delivered or purchased according to their needs.
Sponsoring a child helps them to access medical attention and treatment, good nutrition, education, a safe place to play and learn, the opportunity to know how much God loves them, and much more.
Local staff from their community are responsible for managing this process and delivering the program, under the oversight of staff from Compassion's national office in that developing country.
Approximately 80 per cent of donations to Compassion are used for:
- Developing, delivering and supervising the Child Sponsorship Program
- Purchasing goods and services for the direct benefit of the children in our programs
- Informing and updating sponsors and facilitating their personal relationship with their sponsored child
- Educating the community in Australia
Approximately 20 per cent are allocated to cover all administration and fundraising costs in Australia. By using a portion of donations for fundraising costs, we are able to assist even more people with a much wider range of development activities. Direct mail appeals and conference presentations are part of our fundraising costs, and they generate financial responses.
For every dollar spent on fundraising, we receive more than seven times that in return.
One hundred per cent of family, child development centre, graduation, and child gifts (including birthday gifts) are sent through Compassion to the child development centre, where staff members assist the children and/or families to purchase goods that are appropriate and meet their specific needs. Because of the scale of the gift distribution process at Christmas, 90 per cent of funds donated to the Christmas Appeal are pooled to purchase a Christmas gift for each Compassion assisted child and 10 per cent is used for administration and fundraising costs.
We do not use child sponsorship funds for community development activities; these are funded through other initiatives such as Critical Needs.
And your donations to Compassion are tax-deductible (excluding donations to the Bible Fund). Compassion Australia has Deductible Gift Recipient (DGR) status for its Overseas Aid and Development Fund, as listed on the Australian Business Register under our ABN 67 001 692 566.
For more information, please contact us.
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