As we approach the national day of giving thanks, we’d like to share a few of the reasons we’re so thankful for Holt child sponsors and donors. It was hard to narrow it down to such a short list, but here are our top five:
1. You help children stay in the loving care of their families.
Poverty and hunger make people do desperate things, including placing their children in someone else’s care. But as a Holt child sponsor, you prevent children from needlessly growing up apart from their families. You help provide everything a child needs to thrive right where they are, from nourishing food to safe shelter to job skills training for their parents. Your monthly gifts mean that parents never have to make the heartbreaking decision to leave their child at the gates of an orphanage. And a child never has to experience the trauma of separating from their family.
2. You provide nurturing care for children who are separated from their families.
By the time they enter Holt’s child sponsorship program, some children have already separated from their families and are living in orphanages or with foster families. For these children, your monthly gifts help make sure their orphanage has enough caregivers so that every child gets the love and attention they need. Or you make it possible for a child to live with a Holt foster family, giving them the next best thing to a permanent, loving family until they can reunite with their birth family or join a family through adoption.
3. You help reunite children with their birth families.
Every child deserves the chance to grow up with their birth family, in their country of birth. That’s why, before ever considering adoption for a child in an orphanage, Holt social workers always explore the possibility of reuniting them with their birth family. Holt child sponsors and donors make these efforts possible by providing the support and resources social workers need to do the time-intensive work of investigating a child’s background, locating their family and determining if it’s safe and in their best interest to return home.
4. You help children join loving, permanent families through adoption.
For some children, it’s just not possible to reunite with their birth family. Once Holt social workers on the ground have exhausted their efforts to locate a child’s family, or determined that it’s not in the child’s best interest to return home and secured legal relinquishment by their birth family, they begin the process of helping a child join a permanent, loving family through adoption. You support this effort by providing all the care and support children need while they wait — from medical care to nourishing food to safe shelter and nurturing caregivers. You also support the meaningful work of finding the best family for every child — a family equipped to meet their unique needs, and to give them all the love and care they need.
5. You made a commitment to a child, and you kept it even when times grew hard.
The COVID-19 pandemic has placed incredible strain on so many people. In some ways, it has affected people living in poverty the hardest. Around the world, shut-downs have caused families to lose their jobs, making it impossible to pay their rent or feed their children. Some have resorted to the very thing sponsors and donors like you work so hard to prevent — placing their children in orphanages. We know the pandemic has also affected many of you, right here at home. But even in the middle of this global crisis, you have never wavered in your commitment to your sponsored child. You continue to give, every month, so that your sponsored child has everything they need to survive and to stay in the loving care of their family, foster family or caregivers.
So many of you have even given above and beyond your regular monthly sponsorship — to help a child whose family has fallen into crisis because of the pandemic, or to make sure your sponsored child has anything extra they need right now. Emergency food during quarantine measures. Masks and sanitizers to protect them from the virus. Special workbooks or solar lamps to help them do schoolwork at home. And so much more.
We are so thankful for your incredible, selfless heart for children and families in need. You make so many beautiful things possible in their lives, we could never list them all.
