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Gifts of Compassion

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Education and Training

Equip 22 students in Indonesia to pursue higher education. Students will receive financial support for tuition and study materials, along with mentoring, spiritual guidance, encouragement and opportunities to develop life skills. Invest in education. Build brighter futures.
Help 57 students in Guatemala learn practical cutting, tailoring and business skills. Through sewing instruction, entrepreneurship opportunities and connection to job placements, youth will gain skills and experience to support future tailoring work. Turn tailoring skills into secure job opportunities.

In today’s world, access to technology and digital literacy skills are essential for educational success and future job opportunities. Your gift helps provide children and youth with the tools they need to thrive in a digital age—like computer labs, devices and training—equipping them with the confidence and knowledge to fulfill their God-given potential.

Education is a catalyst that breaks the cycle of poverty for a child. Educated children are the changemakers, forging brighter futures not just for themselves, but for their families and communities. This gift supports students from primary to post-secondary school, ensuring they have the financial means to pursue their education and achieve their dreams.

Equipping youth with practical skills that open the door to stable employment and economic independence is a powerful catalyst for lasting change. This gift provides essential training in high-demand trades and professions, ensuring participants gain the expertise to build meaningful careers, sustain their future and support their families.

When you give to the Education and Training Fund, you provide children and youth in poverty with access to learning resources, educational opportunities and spiritual education and discipleship, equipping them for futures free from poverty. This includes computers and essential learning materials, tuition for vocational training, college or university, as well as opportunities to grow in faith, character and hope.  
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Income Generation

Help equip 60 caregivers in Uganda for goat farming. Caregivers will learn how to raise and breed goats, develop financial literacy skills for business, participate in savings groups and receive mentorship from experienced goat farmers. Raise goats, grow livelihoods and strengthen families.
Provide 108 caregivers in Rwanda with the training to start or expand their small business. Caregivers will learn financial literacy skills, business management, record-keeping and customer service while participating in peer learning and mentorship. Build small businesses and strengthen livelihoods.

Providing youth and families with the skills and resources needed to secure a stable income and create opportunities is a powerful force for breaking the cycle of poverty. This gift provides essential skills training, financial education and the materials necessary to launch new businesses.

Learning marketable skills can transform the lives of families with limited resources, meeting immediate household needs and opening doors to sustainable income opportunities. This gift empowers caregivers and youth with comprehensive technical and business training in fields such as technology, fashion, food service, the trades and more, equipping them to build a brighter future.

Backyard farms are a sustainable way to fight hunger and generate income. But many families in poverty lack the resources to start one for themselves. Your gift empowers a family by providing resources such as seeds, fertilizer, livestock, tools and education to help them create and sustain their own backyard farm.

When you give to the Income Generation Fund, you provide families living in poverty with resources to earn an income—things like livestock, seeds, skills training and more. This gift keeps giving, as it helps families overcome the desperation that lack of skills, resources and opportunities creates and gives them the stability they need to build a future.
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Moms & Babies

Empowering moms is crucial in breaking the cycle of poverty. With this gift, you provide moms with the training and tools they need to develop new skills and enhance old ones—all so they can confidently secure jobs to help them provide for their families. When equipped and empowered, moms can make better decisions and choices for themselves and their families.

Many new moms and caregivers living in poverty lack the essential items needed to care for a newborn baby. With this gift, you give caregivers the basic supplies they need—items like blankets, soap, lotion and diapers—to ensure their baby is healthy and thriving. This hand-delivered gift from Compassion centre staff helps new caregivers know they are supported, loved and not alone.

The first year of a child’s life is critical. Without proper medical care and growth monitoring, irreversible damage can be done. With this gift, you help ensure that new parents living in poverty have access to essential medical services for their baby in those first critical 12 months.

Proper nutrition is critical for moms and babies living in extreme poverty. With this gift, you provide a mother and her baby with six months’ worth of supplemental food and nutrition, which is vital to ensure that moms and babies not only survive but thrive.

The risks for expectant mothers in poverty are significant. And tragically, maternal mortality rates are unacceptably high in low-resource settings. But with this gift, you provide an expectant mother with the resources she needs to ensure a healthy pregnancy and delivery—such as medical care, regular check-ups, proper nutrition and education.

Did you know that most of the millions of children who die every year do so in their first year of life from preventable causes? When you give to the Moms and Babies Fund, you can change this tragic reality. Your gift provides tangible care and life-saving support for moms and babies living in poverty. This includes prenatal healthcare, checkups, critical medical care, desperately needed food and newborn essentials.
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Water, Sanitation and Hygiene

With fewer than 1 in 10 households in Ghana having piped water at home, help 231 families gain life-changing access to safe, reliable water. A new water treatment facility and water system will provide safe, clean water, along with education on hygiene and sanitation. With clean water within reach, children will spend less time collecting water and more time learning. Give clean water. Empower healthier futures.
Your gift provides a reliable water system for a Compassion centre in Colombia, giving 265 children clean water for meals and daily programs. Preventing waterborne diseases helps children stay healthy, thrive and fully enjoy their learning and play. Give the gift of safe, life-giving water today.  
Water is essential to life. This means that access to clean water is a right that every child should have. With your gift, you ensure children have easy, consistent and safe access to clean water through boreholes, wells, rainwater harvesting systems or water filters. With solutions that fit with each child’s context for maximum impact, this gift helps children not just survive but thrive.

Did you know that more than half of the global population doesn’t have access to safe sanitation facilities? Access to a clean washroom is critical in preventing the spread of deadly infectious diseases like cholera. Your gift helps fund the construction of safe washrooms, giving hundreds of children dignity and protection from disease.

Did you know that hand washing could prevent more than a million unnecessary deaths for children under the age of five each year? It is crucial for children to regularly wash their hands in order to stay healthy. This gift will bring life-saving access to hand washing facilities in the communities of vulnerable children and their families.
Water, sanitation and hygiene are some of our most basic needs, and a lack of access to them can be deadly. With this gift, you ensure that children around the world have clean water to drink, the ability to practice good hygiene and protection from deadly diseases through things such as washrooms, hand washing stations and hygiene education.
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Health & Wellness

Mary, a teenage girl in Ghana, lives with chronic hip pain that limits her mobility and keeps her from pursuing her dreams. Through surgery, comprehensive post-operative medical care and physiotherapy, Mary can regain her strength and return to the activities that will shape her future. Help Mary confidently step into a future free of barriers.
Help identify early health and developmental needs young children in Kenya. Beginning with disability and developmental screening, a children with identified needs can be connected to specialized medical care, rehabilitation, surgeries and assistive technologies, while also providing their caregivers with practical and emotional support. Give children the chance to flourish from the start.

Mental health is crucial for the overall well-being and future success of children and youth, especially those living in poverty. This gift provides counselling, therapy and mental health education to children and youth facing the complexities of poverty. These initiatives reduce stigma and ensure access to necessary professional care, empowering children and youth to overcome challenges and thrive.

Did you know that diseases carried by mosquitos, such as malaria, dengue and Zika, cause millions of deaths every year? These diseases are preventable. Your gift helps to protect vulnerable children from mosquito-borne diseases through mosquito net distribution and preventative education.
A diet lacking protein, fruits and vegetables is all too common for a child living in poverty. This is exacerbated in communities facing acute food insecurity. Your gift helps fight malnutrition in a child’s life by providing supplemental, protein-rich food, vitamins and medical care to help them grow healthy and strong.
When you give to the Health and Wellness Fund, you provide children and their families with the resources to meet their most critical health needs and prevent disease and health complications in the future. This fund covers things such as mosquito nets, dental kits, food for malnourished children, access to medical care and preventative health education for children, youth and families.
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Safety & Stability

Equip 400 families in Guatemala with the skills and resources to grow nutritious food and strengthen their household food production. Through agricultural training in planting, crop management, use of organic fertilizers, and financial management skills, families will learn practical ways to produce more food for their households. Grow food. Strengthen food security.
Your gift improves the housing conditions for 60 families in Rwanda, upgrading shelters and lowering the risk of illness and injury. Homes will be renovated with durable materials, including iron, timber and concrete, to better withstand rainstorms and ensure that children can eat, sleep and grow safely. Give the gift of a safer home today and protect a family’s future.
Local Compassion centres are cornerstones for whole-life transformation—and infrastructure improvements equip our church partners to continue building hope in their communities. Your gift helps to provide upgraded kitchen facilities, collaborative classroom spaces and safe washrooms, surrounding children and youth with supportive environments where their holistic needs are met and where they can grow into their God-given potential.
For families experiencing poverty, the struggle to put food on the table is a daily reality. Families often face acute hunger, some surviving on one small meal a day. Your gift of a food basket or a meal can help relieve food insecurity for a family and provide children with the nutrition they need to lead healthy, flourishing lives. It’s a practical and hope-filled way to care for families facing hunger.

Poverty increases a child’s risk of abuse, trafficking, child marriage, child labour and other forms of exploitation. During times of crisis, these risks only increase. This gift enables Compassion centres to run child protection workshops for caregivers and community members, equipping them to ensure that children are known, loved and protected at home, at school and in the community.

When you give to the Safety and Stability Fund, you provide vital essentials such as housing support, emergency food packs and infrastructure improvements to families and communities in need, often in the face of crises or environmental disasters. This fund also supports caregivers and communities in accessing training such as child protection workshops, ensuring safer communities where children are known, loved and protected.

Where most needed

Give to our Where Most Needed Fund to enable our local church partners to respond to the most pressing needs of children and families living in poverty. Our church partners are uniquely positioned to know the needs of their communities and how to respond. Your gift provides the resources they need to do so.

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Frequently Asked Questions

How does Gifts of Compassion work?

Every gift meets a real need identified by a local church partner who knows their community and the children and families they serve. These gifts provide the support, resources, skills and opportunities children and families need to overcome poverty and thrive now and into the future.

When you give a gift in honour of a loved one, you can download or send an e-card to let them know how their gift is helping children and families around the world.

Read more about Gifts of Compassion

What are the different types of gifts? Why do some gifts have thermometers and others do not?

Gifts of Compassion includes three types of gifts, each offering a different level of specificity: Cause Gifts, Focused Need Gifts and Specific Gifts.

Cause gifts help fund needs within a particular cause, with donations directed to the most pressing needs identified by our local church partners.

Focused Need gifts allow you to support a specific type of need within a particular cause. When you give a Focused Need gift, you are helping to meet some of the common needs of children and families we serve, as identified by our local church partners. Because these needs are so common, your gift could go to any one of our 9,000 local church partners around the world, depending on where the need exists. This helps ensure your gift is given to the right family at the right time.

Specific gifts raise funds for a specific need in a specific community, as identified by one or a small group of our local church partners. These gifts have a goal that shows how much it will cost to fund the entire project or program.

Once a specific gift is fully funded and the need is met in full, we won’t be raising funds for it anymore. Instead, we’ll add new gifts as our local church partners express the needs of their communities, or we’ll invite you to give towards other related gifts. That means not every gift you see in our gift guide will be available forever. So, if you see something you want to give towards, make sure to do it sooner rather than later!

Read more about the types of gifts

Where can I learn about Compassion’s financial integrity?

Financial integrity matters to us. We take your trust seriously and are committed to faithfully stewarding the funds you give.

No less than 80 per cent of funds raised will be used for program activities. No more than 20 per cent will be used for fundraising and administration.

Learn more about our finances

Who is Compassion?

As one of the world's leading child development organizations, Compassion’s mission is to release children from poverty in Jesus’ name. Over the last 70 years, Compassion has advanced the fight against global poverty by partnering with local churches to lift children out of spiritual, economic, social and physical poverty.

Today, Compassion partners with over 9,000 churches in 29 countries to deliver our proven child development program to more than 2 million infants, children and youth. Around the world, children, families and entire communities are being equipped to overcome poverty and thrive now and into the future.

Learn more about Compassion