Changes to Sponsorship at Blue Dragon Children’s Foundation

Changes to Sponsorship, September 2017

Since 2004, Blue Dragon has offered educational support of individual children as a sponsorship option to our supporters around the world. Our goal has been to enable kids from impoverished rural areas to go to school.

In this time, sponsorship has helped 1,915 kids attend school. Educational sponsorship has proven to be a very effective method of breaking the poverty cycle and giving kids who otherwise wouldn’t be able to study a chance to learn, develop and prosper in life.

Over the years, however, Blue Dragon’s focus has been shifting to children in crisis and trauma rather than general poverty. Increasingly, we’ve been supporting young people who have experienced major trauma, such as slavery, violence, and homelessness and we know that sponsorship on an individual basis is not a suitable way to help these kids.

Many children we work with now are in, or have recently been through, a crisis in their lives and require ongoing psycho-social support as a result. It is clear that involving them in a sponsorship program, which involves sharing their personal stories and asking them to fill in questionnaires and have their photo taken, is not compatible with helping in a time of crisis. Part of our mission is that we will provide exceptional care to children and this is something we must be true to at all times.

This means that we now have far fewer children in Blue Dragon who are suitable to take part in sponsorship. The number of children we support continues to grow, but they are children whose experiences and situation in life prevent them from connecting with sponsors.

Our sponsors are important to us and have played a valuable role in Blue Dragon over the years, so we are not planning to end sponsorship. Instead, we are making some changes over the coming years and we invite you to join us in these developments.

If you sponsor a child now, that will not change until your sponsored child finishes school or leaves the program. We are continuing our support for those children we already sponsor.

While we will not have any new individual children to sponsor, we have developed new ways that sponsors can support children in need.

As always, we appreciate your continued support. None of the work we do would be possible without you. If you have any questions or would like to know more about the new forms of sponsorship, please don’t hesitate to ask.

Thank You!