Our correspondence team receives many gifts from sponsors for their sponsored children that can’t be sent to our country offices. If this happens to your gift, we will contact you to see if you’d like the gift returned or donated to a local Colorado Springs charity, Northern Churches Care.
And to help prevent that from happening to you, which items do you think can be sent to your sponsored child through the mail?
Ok, ok. It was a trick question. None of the items can be sent through the mail. Unfortunately, we receive about 300 items like these each month. Our correspondence team spends about eight hours each week sorting out these undeliverable items.
During the Christmas season, rather than donating the items to Northern Churches Care, the correspondence team gathers all of the items that couldn’t be sent and that weren’t returned to sponsors and makes shoeboxes to donate to Operation Christmas Child.
Last year, they were able to donate over 200 shoeboxes.
You can find a list of items that you CAN send to your child through the mail on compassion.com.
UPDATE: November 30, 2011 – Here’s an idea of the volume of items we receive that can’t be sent and which sponsors choose not to have returned.
