1. How long have you been in your current position with Compassion El Salvador, and what is your job?

Two years. I am a supervisor within the Sponsor Donor Services department.

2. What are the main responsibilities of your position?

I make sure the sponsors have up-to-date information about the children. Not just the letters, but also new cases. I keep the biannual report updated. I make sure that pictures and information are high quality and are sent on time.

3. What is an average day like for you? (more…)

1. How long have you been in your current position with Compassion Honduras, and what is your job?

Seventeen months. I am an auditor.

2. What are the main responsibilities of being an auditor?

Identifying the strengths and weaknesses of the partner church as well as the challenges it faces.

We look for strengths so that these can be used as a support for other churches. We look for weaknesses and challenges so we can suggest solutions and give the appropriate follow-up in order to correct and solve problems in the churches.

In other words, we hope to provide necessary and timely support to the church.

3. What does an average day look like for you? (more…)

Lilliam Sánchez has been married to her husband, Francisco, for six years, and they are pregnant with their first child. She is the youngest of three sisters and one brother.

Lilliam was born in Ciudad Sandino, and she and her family have lived there for many years.

Lilliam is an active member of Betania Baptist Church. She has been at that church for nine years, serving as Sunday school teacher and church secretary. She’s worked for Compassion since 2003 and has been a Partnership Facilitator (PF) since October 2007.

1. What are the main responsibilities of your position?

As a facilitator, I help strengthen the church to reach results in the four areas of our work with children: spiritual, emotional, cognitive and physical.

For example, in the physical area, we want children to choose good health habits and to be healthy, so I try to see if that result is being reached or not, because we don’t want it just to be written in paper.

In the cognitive area, it is not about spending more money on a computer course for the children. It is about the child’s learning and how he or she is using the resources. And so on in each area.

The church partner also gives clear information of how the budget is being used, and facilitators help them in this administrative area.

I want to be clear and let you know that the results aren’t seen from one day to another. It is a process.

I believe my responsibility is to help churches become self-sustaining. I don’t want children to be sponsored the rest of their lives. I want a generation that can support themselves and sponsor other children.

I want churches spiritually and economically strong, to be light in the midst of darkness.

This also is a process. It might not be seen in one, two or five years, but we are putting the foundation down now to make them strong to reach maturity.

2. Describe what an average day is like for you.

I have two facets. One is the work I do at the office and the other, the work I do in the field.

The partnership facilitator’s role has changed and I spend most of the time in the field, supporting directly the partner churches.

Normally, I have one day at the office (Monday) to do the office work, like follow-up funding and reporting. I also coordinate monthly activities and evaluate activities of the previous month in the PF meeting, analyzing achievements and weakness to look for better alternatives.

The other four, five or six days (because sometimes I work Saturday and Sunday, if necessary), I am with the church partner. It is arduous work seeing how the children are doing, how the church is working, and looking for alternatives to do better work. Results aren’t be achieved if I stay at the office.

3. How many churches do you visit a day, and how often do you visit a church? (more…)

The following is an interview with Anuradha Ghoshal, Program Communication Manager with Compassion East India.

1. How long have you been in your current position, and what are your main responsibilities?

I have been in this position for the last three years.

My main responsibility entails supervision of the three core processes for Program Communications: Field Communication, Sponsor Donor Services and Tours and Visits.

Besides that I am responsible for communication with Global Partner Alliance (GPA) staff, mentoring my team, budgeting and working alongside the country management team (CMT).

2. Describe what an average day is like for you.

An average day starts with the corporate devotion. It is followed by attending to my “To Do List” where I address each request, need or assignment based on priority while also following up during a morning briefing on any pending work assigned to my team members.

The later part of the day involves meeting with the Country Director and/or other CMT members for updates, approval or planning.

3. What is the best part of your job, and what is the most challenging part? (more…)

For the past two weeks we’ve published a series of poverty questions for you to consider. We appreciate everyone who submitted comments to the posts, and we extend our congratulations to Judy Tremblay and her enormous brain for answering the most poverty questions correctly and becoming the proud new owner of a brand, spankin’ new magnet.

Yep! A magnet. Can we get get a “Woot! Woot!” for Judy?

Now, without further ado, here is your answer key. (more…)

Wow, you all had a lot of great questions for Sathy! It was hard to pick just 10, so I picked those that hadn’t come up before on this blog and that I know Sathy could offer special insight on.

I’ve never experienced poverty firsthand. My real experience is seeing poverty through Compassion.

Just like my parents did, my wife and I try our best to remind him as often as possible that there are people/kids around the world who lack basic necessities like food, clothing and shelter, which we often take for granted. There were times when he would say that he wants to help those kids.

I guess we just sow the seeds …

2. How many letters and case studies does Compassion process? (Juli Jarvis)

A lot! An average of 54,465 case studies per month, and an average of 282,490 letters per month!

3. What is the process for a child’s case study to be updated? Will we begin receiving yearly case studies soon? If they remain at every two years, will they at least become more detailed and personal? (Alyson and Juli Jarvis)

A case study update for a child is due when the last case study form is between 18 to 24 months old.

The church partners send in the case study form and photographs to the field office, and the field office staff processes them and submits the forms and photographs electronically to our Global Ministry Center in Colorado Springs.

I don’t think we’re ready yet to do yearly updates, but we’ve started discussions on ways to redesign the case study form from an outcome perspective. We don’t have a definite date for that yet. 

4. How does the India office handle letter writing? Does each individual project have its own process? (more…)

Here at Compassion, I get to sit by a really cool guy named Sathy. Sathyaseelan Pannirselvam, that is. (One of my proudest moments was when I found out my last name is longer than his.)

Sathy is a native of Chennai, India, and has worked for Compassion for 10 years. He worked for Compassion India for seven years of those years as a Sponsor Donor Associate in South India, and as the Program Communication Manager in East India.

Then three years ago, he, his lovely wife and son uprooted from India to work in Colorado Springs as our International Sponsor Donor Service Field Specialist. (Job titles here at Compassion are a mouthful, huh?)

Translation: He now works to train our field countries on processes for letters and case studies (those summaries of your sponsored child in the Child Packet). He also works to identify efficient processes for these … Quite a job if you know how many letters and case studies we process!    

So Sathy has a unique perspective to offer us — he’s lived in India and visited Compassion’s child development centers there (and Compassion-assisted centers throughout Asia, in fact), and he’s lived and worked here, on the other side of things. He also knows more about all those letters than most people you’ll meet. An interesting brain to pick.

Leave your questions to Sathy as comments, and I’ll pick 10 of them for him to answer for us.