As a new school year begins across the nation, students will once again take up their books to learn about the shameful history of the slave trade around the world.

The problem is that the slave trade is far from history. In fact, it is very much the shame of our world today.

Currently, more slaves exist than during the time of slave trade abolitionist William Wilberforce. But unlike in Wilberforce’s day, 80 percent of today’s slaves are women and girls; 50 percent are children.

Earlier this summer, the U.S. State Department came out with its Trafficking in Persons Report for 2011. The report created global concern as nations reacted to their “tier placements.” Most third world countries fell under “Tier 2,” a dubious designation reserved for nations whose governments don’t “fully comply with the Trafficking Victims Protection Act’s (TVPA’s) minimum standards, but are making significant efforts to bring themselves into compliance with those standards.”

The report is no surprise to those of us who work to rid the world of extreme poverty. For instance, in the 26 developing nations where Compassion International serves, 19 were placed in the “Tier 2” category. An additional five nations where Compassion serves were on the “Tier 2 Watch List,” a group of “countries whose governments do not fully comply with the TVPA’s minimum standards, but are making significant efforts to bring themselves into compliance with those standards,” according to the report. Only one of the 26 countries found itself in “Tier 1”—meaning it was fully compliant with the TVPA’s minimum standards.

Read the entire post at FoxNews.com

My Account l Sponsor a Child l Help Babies and Moms l Crisis Updates

It’s all over the news, the Web and social media. The images are showing up everywhere. The statistics are unbelievable, but they’re real and that’s why we keep hearing about it.

I’m talking about the drought in East Africa.

East Africa is currently facing its worst drought in 60 years; high food prices and failed crops have left millions of people at risk.

Dozens of relief organizations have rushed to the scene. They’re hard at work calculating the need, raising funds and bringing in lifesaving aid.

You’ve watched as this crisis has unfolded, you’ve been praying and now you’re ready to respond.

But wait — we have some questions from the audience:

“Where is Compassion?”

“What is Compassion doing amid this crisis?”

“How can I give to Compassion concerning the drought in East Africa?”

Inserting a donation link to our disaster relief fund and asking you to give, right now, is a timely thing to do. But before you click on the link, let me explain how this crisis is affecting our programs.

Our child development centers operate in five countries near the areas affected by the drought:

• Kenya
• Ethiopia
• Rwanda
• Tanzania
• Uganda

We do not work in Somalia, the hardest-hit country. But where we do work, our local church partners are seeing higher food prices due to poor crop yields caused by the drought. And our church partners are experiencing an influx of refugees into the areas they serve.

Because we are a holistic child development organization working through the local church our program model often protects our beneficiaries against the potentially crippling impact of famine and drought.

Our Child Survival, Child Sponsorship, and Leadership Development Programs are each designed to help meet the ongoing needs of the families, children and students we serve. The programs help our beneficiaries become self-sufficient and better able to weather disasters, such as droughts.

However, when a crisis does arise, the local churches where our child development centers are located identify the immediate and specific needs of the children, families and students we serve.

The churches have access, through our programs, to critical assistance, such as disaster relief, clean water, medical assistance, etc.

Our ministry focus is on long-term development of children from their time in the womb until an age where they’re self-sufficient. While we focus on prevention and responding to the needs of our program beneficiaries, we applaud other organizations that do widespread disaster relief.

One of these organizations is the Christian Reformed World Relief Committee (CRWRC), one of our partners in 58:.
In addition to its major drought-response projects already underway in Kenya and Ethiopia, CRWRC is expanding its aid to Somalia.

You can learn more about CRWRC, how they are responding to the drought, and ways you can help at crcna.org.

My Account l Sponsor a Child l Help Babies and Moms l Crisis Updates

What do you think of our blog? Would you say that it’s one of best corporate blogs you read?

I’d like to take the opportunity, of being one of the finalists in the Social Fresh Top Corporate Blog Awards, to talk about how we can serve you better.

• How are we adding value to your relationship with your sponsored child?
• Where are we falling short?
• And what more can we do to make this blog worth your time?

My Account l Sponsor a Child l Help Babies and Moms l Crisis Updates

With our Church 2 Church initiative, churches are trading short-term “love ‘em and leave ‘em” missions for long-term partnerships with each other.

When U.S. pastor Joe Wittwer visited Iglesia Elim in Armenia, El Salvador, he saw the massive needs and wanted to help. He had already formed a close bond with Elim’s husband-and-wife pastoral team, Frank and Paty Ardon.

Despite gang warfare in the neighborhood, the Ardons and their church were partnering with Compassion International to provide weekly care for more than 300 children and their families.

The burgeoning six-day-a-week ministry had forced them to add a separate building on the church grounds. But the mortgage wasn’t cheap. At $500 a month (on a total mortgage of $18,000), the church was struggling to make ends meet.

A group of women helped offset the costs by making tamales and selling them in town for 25 cents apiece, but that netted only about $140 a month. Joe Wittwer’s church, Life Center in Spokane, Washington, wanted to help their new friends in El Salvador, but they weren’t sure how.

In the past, the pattern would have been for Wittwer and his church to swoop in and start paying the monthly mortgage, or just write a check for $18,000 to get rid of the mortgage altogether.

But that kind of “help” often ended up having unintended, negative consequences. The North American partner churches, loaded with money, were cast as the saviors or experts sent to rescue the helpless “junior” partners. While this approach might solve a short-term problem, it rarely produced long-term solutions or fostered healthy relationships.

Now, a “Church to Church” initiative, developed by Compassion International and the Willow Creek Association, is attempting to help churches avoid these past pitfalls by promoting genuine cross-cultural church partnerships.

Read the entire post at LEADERSHIPjournal.net

My Account l Sponsor a Child l Help Babies and Moms l Crisis Updates

The solution for a rebuilt and restored Haiti is proving to be every bit the challenge many predicted. One thing is for certain. The problem is bigger than any one organization, any single government or universal remedy. That doesn’t mean, however, the situation is hopeless. There have already been heroes amid the chaos — heroes that may surprise some.

I once read an article that cited a relief and development organization who said that they couldn’t rely on churches to do the work they needed to do in the third world. They claimed that the needed expertise and skill sets simply weren’t there. It made me scratch my head.

Read the entire post at The Huffington Post

My Account l Sponsor a Child l Help Babies and Moms l Crisis Updates

Here at home, poverty is a single mom in Detroit trying to keep food on the table. In Africa, poverty is a 14-year-old orphaned head-of-household trying to find fresh water for himself and his siblings. The challenge isn’t to choose one over the other. The task is to view two harsh realities through a common lens of compassion and assistance.

Read the entire post at The Huffington Post.

My Account l Sponsor a Child l Help Babies and Moms l Crisis Updates

You’ve heard it mentioned before. In fact, if you’ve been with Compassion long enough, you’ve heard it eight other times already. We have once again received Charity Navigator’s highest rating – four stars – for responsible financial management.

It would be easy to hear this news and say, “Yeah, yeah, they did it again. They and umpteen other charities, right?”

Well, not exactly.

According to the largest independent evaluator of charities in the nation, receiving the four-star rating nine times is “exceptional.” Only 1 percent of charities has received Charity Navigator’s highest rating as many times as we have.

“We take stewardship very seriously – for the sake of the children we serve and the donors who entrust their giving to us. We are deeply honored to again receive this significant recognition.” – Compassion President Dr. Wess Stafford.

My Account l Sponsor a Child l Help Babies and Moms l Crisis Updates

The houseparent had marched me to the school’s dining hall, dragged a metal chair across the concrete floor, and slammed it down in front of my schoolmates. He threw me up on the chair and jammed the candle in my hand.

“Children,” he said, “you cannot serve both God and Satan. Wesley has tried. You cannot burn a candle at both ends without getting burned. Watch what happens when you try.”

Read the entire article at Christianity Today.

After you read the article, come back and let us know what you think. Leave a comment and you’ll be entered to win a copy of Wess’ book, Too Small to Ignore.

We’ll randomly pick a winner on Monday.

My Account l Sponsor a Child l Help Babies and Moms l Crisis Updates

Live performances will occur in Nashville (7:30 p.m. CT) and Los Angeles (9:30 p.m. CT) and both concerts will be streamed live at HelpHaitiLive.com beginning at 7:30 p.m. CT.

The concerts will feature special performances by Big Kenny, Alison Krauss and Union Station featuring Jerry Douglas, Amy Grant, LeeAnn Rimes, Mat Kearney, Jars of Clay, Francis Chan, Rebecca St. James, Matt Wertz, Brandon Heath, Dave Barnes, NEEDTOBREATHE and more.

Viewing online at HelpHaiti.com is free. Tickets for the live performances are priced between $25 and $75 and can be purchased at Ticketmaster.com and all Ticketmaster locations beginning today, as well as through:

• The Ryman box office: 800-745-3000 or ryman.com
• Live Nation for The Wiltern

All net proceeds from this event will support our relief efforts in Haiti. Visit HelpHaitiLive.com to learn more.

My Account l Sponsor a Child l Help Babies and Moms l Crisis Updates

Our church partners continue to search the tent cities daily to locate the rest of the children. In addition, regionally based partnership facilitators continue to search the countryside to find children who may have relocated outside of the city after the quake.

Classes have resumed in nine of the eleven universities where our Leadership Development Program students are enrolled, 62 students are attending class again. However, 26 of our students for various reasons (sickness linked to the earthquake, stress, trauma, formal interdiction from some parents, etc.) have not returned to school.

Our leadership team is proceeding with the repairs of our three-level office building in Port-au-Prince. Repair work is expected to go until the end of July. A local firm is responsible for the repair but an expert from Engineering Ministries International is in the field for the work supervision.

Two psychologists have been hired for a six-month contract to design a plan to help meet the psychological needs of our registered children, siblings, relatives and church staff members.

Our initial objective for addressing the temporary and transitional shelter needs of our beneficiaries was to provide tarps to 4,000 families in the urban areas, and corrugated metal sheets, wood frames and nails to 2,000 families located in the rural areas.

So far, we have distributed 4,237 tarps to complete the tarp distribution activity. Some families were given two tarps based on need. Also, more than 1,300 families received corrugated metal sheets and wood frames in rural areas. Another 700 will be served as soon as possible.

About 8,000 registered children and 7,000 siblings and parents were seen through our mobile medical clinics. Malaria and typhoid tests have been given to patients who also received medicine, if needed, or are referred to the hospital or a health center for follow-up.

As most of our child development centers also have a school where many of the children attend, our plan to provide transitional meeting places until the damaged centers can be rebuilt is providing school equipment to replace some of what has been lost.

The Haitian government has reopened schools and extended the school term by through August. Most of the schools are allowing children to go home at noon because of the extreme heat, to minimize the amount of time the children are kept under the tarps and canopies.

We are processing letters and gifts for all child development centers in Haiti. If you send a gift, please do not specify how it should be used. It is very difficult for our Haiti staff to follow through with the request.

Until further notice we are not conducting any travel to Haiti (e.g., sponsor visits, individual relief efforts, tours, vision trips, etc.).

All of the affected child development centers have resumed activities, meeting under tarps or tin roofs. All of the significantly affected centers are meeting three times a week.

Although the full scope of regular activities is not currently taking place at child development centers and child survival programs significantly affected by the earthquake, affected church partners are continuing to conduct camps to help address the psychological, physical, nutritional, and cognitive needs of our registered children, as well as the mothers and the babies participating in our Child Survival Program (CSP).

In general, our church partners will host these camps until the development centers are rebuilt or activities can be relocated to a safe indoor location.

Camp activities focus on five areas:

• occupational therapy including art, sports and games
• cognitive therapy including earthquake and natural disaster education
• group therapy for children under 8 years old
• individual therapy for children over 8 years old
• immunization against polio, measles, tetanus and hepatitis A

For the CSP camps, two to three Child Survival Programs are grouped together for efficiency, depending on their geographic location.

• Download a PDF listing all the child development centers and child survival programs in Haiti and categorizing each center and program as: not directly affected, moderately affected or significantly affected.
• Was My Sponsored Child Affected by That Crisis? – A blog post that explains our crisis reporting process
• Pictures from Haiti taken by Compassion staff and contractors
• Images showing the approximate location for the earthquake’s epicenter in relation to our child development centers in Haiti
• Heart for Haiti, a group to connect and pray with people who sponsor children in Haiti
• See what is typically inside a disaster relief kit
• Subscribe to country-specific crisis updates, prayer requests and stories for each country where you sponsor a child
• Purchase a Compassion Help Haiti t-shirt

My Account l Sponsor a Child l Help Babies and Moms l Crisis Updates