The following is a conversation between Anne Lynam Goddard, President and CEO of ChildFund International, and Denver Frederick, Host of The Business of Giving on AM 970 The Answer WNYM in New York City.
Denver: Today worldwide, 570 million children live in extreme poverty. ChildFund International helps many of these children to have the capacity to improve their lives and the opportunity to bring lasting change to their communities. What an awful lot has to go into making that happen – from generating the needed revenues, to the actual work on the ground. And here to explain it all to us, it’s a pleasure to have Anne Lynam Goddard, the President and CEO of ChildFund International.
Good evening, and welcome to The Business of Giving!
Anne: Good evening, Denver. Very happy to be here.
Denver: ChildFund International, as it would ultimately become, started in 1938 in China. What was going on there that led to its formation?
Anne: The world has changed a lot since those days. Back then, China had just come out of the second Sino-Japanese war, and the condition for children was terrible. It was on the news a lot in the US, and China had lost.
Our founder, Calvitt Clarke, he was coming home on a train, and he ran into a friend. They started talking about the terrible images that they had seen on the news about children in China. His friend challenged him. He said, “You’ve started nonprofits for other purposes. I think you should do something to start and help children in China. I think Americans would care about that.” And he did.
Denver: Wow. And then, where did it go from there?
Anne: We were in China until 1950, and some people called “the Communists” came in then and asked us to leave. So, we moved out, moved to Hong Kong at that point, and started up orphanages. Back then, in the early days of ChildFund, we worked in orphanages. We spread throughout Asia within the ‘50s. We moved to a lot of countries. We were in South Korea, other countries in Asia, and that was kind of our hub. And then, over the years, we now work all over the world.
Denver: You’re in like 30 countries, or whatever the case might be.
Anne: Correct.
Children now define it (poverty) in ways of not having goods, but also being deprived, excluded, and vulnerable. So that concept of deprivation, exclusion, and vulnerability really frame how we work, how we identify the kids we work with, and how we work with them.
Denver: Before we get into what the organization does, let’s discuss some of the challenges that young people face today. Children – you’ve done a lot of research around this and listen deeply to what they had to say, and you recognized that the experience of poverty for a child is different than it is for an adult. What are some of those differences?
Anne: We did a deep study a few years ago, several years ago now, listening to kids in all countries that we work in. And as adults might define poverty as not having things, children don’t. It’s part of that, but they also see issues regarding being vulnerable in different ways. That could be because of their gender, or they’re a minority in the country, or their religious background in the country, that they’re more vulnerable to economic things, environmental issues, et cetera; and they’re excluded – that they don’t get to be part of something that gives them opportunity.
So children now define it in ways of not having goods, but also being deprived, excluded, and vulnerable. So that concept of deprivation, exclusion, and vulnerability really frame how we work, how we identify the kids we work with, and how we work with them.
Denver: So, it’s social and emotional?
Anne: Yes. Very much so, and kind of political, too, because of not having power. Children have no power, but sometimes the minority group that they’re in have no power either.
…you can’t just solve the problem of one child, you have to look at their greater ecosystem that they live in because it’s not just the deprivation, it’s the exclusion and vulnerability that’s often influenced by powers outside of them.
Denver: Picking up on that, how does that inform the way you work with these children and direct your services towards them?
Anne: Overall, our framework is, our goal is to help kids grow up to be healthy, educated, capable, skilled – meanings skills – and safe. So that’s the overarching framework. But because of the issues of exclusion and vulnerability, it’s not just the child we’re looking at. We’re looking at working towards having families and communities support children. We’re looking at the regional and national governments. They work in supporting children, having laws and policies that will protect and promote the worth and rights of children. We’re looking globally that the world is prioritizing children in need.
So you can’t just solve the problem of one child; you have to look at their greater ecosystem that they live in because it’s not just the deprivation, it’s the exclusion and vulnerability that’s often influenced by powers outside of them.
Denver: All those wrap-arounds really are so important.
Another big issue, and you just alluded to it, is violence and neglect. Now, about 36% of the global population is children. How many of them experience it?
Anne: It’s estimated a billion children a year, a billion children a year – I’m going to repeat that because that’s a huge number – experience some kind of violence every year. When we realized that, that’s when we really started ramping up our programs on protection and ending violence against children.
We saw that the great advances ChildFund and many other organizations have made in helping kids live healthier lives and getting kids into school, into quality education, all those advances are being undermined by the violence in kids’ lives. If parents are violent in the home, that’s going to affect the health and welfare of a child. If teachers themselves or other things, actors in the school, are having an environment where kids feel bullied or abused in some way, the kids aren’t going to go to school even if the schools are there.
So, we really have enhanced in the last couple years our efforts in really coming up, really focusing on the issue of ending extreme violence against these kids. From those two examples I gave you, but all the way to looking at things of child labor, early child marriage, child trafficking, all those outside influences are influencing kids and their lives.
Denver: So, there’s a difference, too, I would imagine in the kinds of violence that boys experience as compared to girls.
Anne: Boys – it’s often issues of labor, child labor. It could also be issues of being recruited into armed conflict, though that happens to girls, too. Girls – it’s a lot of sexual harassment, sexual abuse at an early age. So, they’re both exposed to violence, and so we have to address both of those issues separately, but most importantly, to address them because as I said, they’re undermining the ability of kids to grow up to be healthy, educated, and contributing adults in their communities
Play is the work of a child.
Denver: Despite what you just said about the ecosystem and all the work you do there, you are really a people-centered organization and focus on the child at the center of it. And you have broken that down into three age groups. So, let’s talk about each, starting with 0-5. What’s your work there?
Anne: Our focus there is very much on the health of very young children, but also on what we call “responsive parenting.” The parent is the most important person in a child’s life, particularly in those early years. And the example I gave earlier about violence in the home, we’re working very much on a model that’s teaching parents how to be parents for their children, how to develop – so much has come out in recent years about the development of the brain in those first five years, but particularly the first three years – so how can a parent help stimulate that brain development through play with children and through interaction with children?
Denver: Talking to them.
Anne: We just signed a great agreement with the Lego Foundation that’s going to advance that work now in Central America. They’re very much interested in play and how it impacts the child and the growth and development of a child. I like to say: Play is the work of a child. So, in those early five years, we’re trying to get play happening with parents to really stimulate the growth of a child.
Denver: That’s great. The CEO of the Lego Foundation is going to be on the show later this month.
Anne: He’s a wonderful guy. I just met him. Really nice guy.
Denver: I hope he is. We’ll find out.
The next cohort are children between the ages of 6 and 14. What’s your primary objective there?
Anne: Education. Those are the years that kids should be in school. For years, ChildFund and many other organizations worked on access to education. There were schools there, and kids could get there, and that’s still a problem in some places we work in, but a much bigger issue is the quality of what’s happening in the classroom and that the school itself is what we call a “child-friendly place” so the kids will want to come to the school. So, a lot of focus on education.
Denver: And finally, you seek to see that youth are skilled and involved in that 15- to 24-year-old range. How do you go about that?
Anne: So that’s a lot of the soft skills we call the “preparing kids for life”: leadership skills; sexual reproductive health education for those kids; helping kids become leaders in their communities. So we do a lot of different things helping them, if they’re capable, to go on to higher education as well. A lot of our children in our programs actually go into technical schools or universities, et cetera. But to have those soft skills and the confidence that they can achieve their dreams in life.
When they go there, they realize that they’re helping that one child, but even more so, they’re helping other children in the community because the programs that are run, many children participate in. If you’re helping improve the education quality in a classroom, you can’t just focus on one child. The teacher is benefiting; their improved skills are benefiting all the kids in the classroom.
Denver: Anne, a central form of philanthropy that ChildFund relies upon to support these programs is child sponsorship. How does that work?
Anne: It’s a wonderful way to support the development of a child. We match a child in need that’s enrolled in our country’s programs to a sponsor who wants to help them. They establish a one-to-one relationship. They’re free to write back and forth, and we facilitate that. The sponsor then contributes a certain amount of money per month for that child. And those funds are then pooled at the community level to run the programs that the children participate in. Most sponsors – and we welcome sponsors any time to come visit our programs overseas, and many do because Americans are now traveling so much more – they might be on vacation someplace; they’ll contact us in advance, and they can meet the child.
When they go there, they realize that they’re helping that one child, but even more so, they’re helping other children in the community because the programs that are run, many children participate in. If you’re helping improve the education quality in a classroom, you can’t just focus on one child. The teacher is benefiting; their improved skills are benefiting all the kids in the classroom.
There’s a one-to-one relationship. Some sponsors send additional financial gifts to the child, which just goes to the child and is not shared. But the basic sponsorship amount they give each year, each month, is pooled to run the programs that children participate in.
There was evidence that supported the fact that what sponsorship does, in addition to getting the child in the school, sponsorship– because of that relationship of one person here who wanted to help that person over there, the child has a dream and has a goal to accomplish more in life.
Denver: In addition to providing the resources to make all this happen, what else do you think is at the heart of this…the importance of this kind of relationship through child sponsorship?
Anne: I would say two things. One is studies have been done that have compared, for example, child sponsorship programs to, say, cash incentives and other programs like cash incentives for children to go to school.
So, they looked at the cost and benefit of both of those. In both cases, you get kids staying longer in education, and does one has a better impact on the other? Sponsorship–there was evidence that supported the fact that what sponsorship does, in addition to getting the child in the school, sponsorship–because of that relationship of one person here who wanted to help that person over there, the child has a dream and has a goal to accomplish more in life. So, it’s that caring part of someone helping them. It lifts their aspirations of what they want to do in life, and it allows them, first, to have the dreams, and then helps them to achieve them. So that’s one thing that really, I think, distinguishes that sponsorship.
But the other thing I like to talk about is a bigger benefit right now for the world. There’s a connection now going on between one child and one sponsor, and now, all of a sudden, those two people from two different countries who’ll maybe never have a chance to see each other, though some sponsors do, all of a sudden care about someone in another country, like a personal relationship. I feel like sponsorship is building little threads of peace around the world, that the other is no longer a stranger; the other from another country is no longer a stranger, and that goes both ways. I think in today’s world, that is so important.
Denver: We do need some of that, some kind of attachment to something. It’s a long-distance mentor-mentee relationship in a lot of respects. How do you go out and market these child sponsorships, promote them? And what does your typical donor look like?
Anne: We acquire new supporters in many ways. One is through our website. But a big part of what we’re doing now is through music concerts. We’ve established relationships with different groups, different bands, and they go on tour, and they learn about ChildFund. Some of them come over and visit our programs in our countries, and they make an appeal during their performance. We have volunteers in the back of the room, and people go back and learn more about our programs. They can pick an individual child. There’ll be a package there with the story about the child, and they decide then and there, and they sign up to be a sponsor.
We do a lot of programs, music performances, that are very family-oriented. I’ve gone to see some of them myself, so you’ll see parents and kids in the audience. So, it really connects with the family, that this family can help this kid in another country.
Denver: Who have you seen? Give me an example of a band or two. Not that I would know.
Anne: The Newsboys. They’re a big band that we work with. We had our Beatles wannabe band a couple years ago, and they were pretty good, too.
Denver: That’s cool.
A key aspect of your model is to work with local partners in those 30 countries. What do you look for in a partner? What are your expectations of them? What are their expectations of you?
Anne: The main thing we look for is that they, like us, have passion and commitment to making things better for their kids in their community, and they want to do some work with us, in partnership with us, to make that happen. And that they’re registered as a local organization so they’re governed by local and national law. Very much grassroots organizations.
Parents are often on the board of those organizations; that they have systems – and we help them develop them, too – but have systems to both be able to deliver programs for kids, but also be able to administer the funding, report on the funding. Be able to facilitate the letter-writing back and forth between the child and the sponsor.
And so, we’re not direct implementers. We’re really, in some ways, a donor to the local partner, the local community-based organization. We feel this is a better way to do it because it’s building capacity in the country, their sustainability. Some of them are very strong, and they get funding from other places as well, which brings additional resources to help the kids in their community.
Denver: Do you have any operations here in the United States?
Anne: Yes, we do. Thank you for asking. We’ve been working in Mississippi for a while in a low-income, African-American community. Our program there is really on youth and youth leadership. We have a great local partner there. There are a lot of activities going on to develop the leadership capacity of these children.
A great example that we worked with… we collaborated with a partner there a couple years ago. We have an advocacy day in DC once a year the last several years, and we brought the youth from Mississippi up. This was a learning experience for them. Sometimes, some of them had never been outside their state before. We brought them up to DC. We educated them on some of the issues that are facing children worldwide, and they advocated on those issues. But they also brought their own issue to the table, which was funding for after-school programs. It was a great opportunity for them to really look at, learn about democracy, but also learn that they can be leaders in their community, impacting issues bigger than themselves.
Denver: That’s great. Advocacy has become more important to ChildFund over the years, and you have advocacy initiatives, not just here in this country, but around the world. Correct?
Anne: Yes, because we’re trying to get environments for children that are conducive for them to grow up to be healthy and educate, right? So, for example, I was in Sri Lanka about a year ago where the children there are very concerned about issues of bullying in the classroom. So, we educated them about the issue. They took it and ran with it. We brought in youth from around the country, and they had an advocacy day. When senior government officials came to hear from the children, they came out with their own 10-point plan of how they thought things could be improved in the classroom for them. And the government minister sat the whole program right next to me and listened to the kids. It was great.
Denver: Fantastic. It sure is.
The importance of measuring impact, both as a means of getting better, and also trying to show the efficacy of your approach to funders has never been more important. How do you go about doing that?
Anne: We have really focused on the last eight years about improving our monitoring and evaluation system, both to measure what’s happening today, but the longer-term impact on kids. So we can produce yearly reports about how our children are doing in our programs. And are they in school? Are they having health problems, et cetera? But, more importantly, to your point, impact takes a longer time to develop.
And now, every other year, we pull together all the data, our impact data, to see: what’s the impact on children and produce that in a report – it’s on our website, it’s also given to our donors. – and we try to share what’s gone well, what hasn’t gone so well. We put out the best data that we have to prove to support both, and we tried very much to take it as a learning opportunity for us that nothing is ever perfect, and we have to constantly improve. So, what can we learn from the data?
Denver: And you try to be as transparent as you possibly can about it because then people trust you that you’re not hiding anything. In addition to child sponsorship, what are your other sources of revenue, and maybe some of your corporate partners?
Anne: In addition to sponsors, we have major donors that support our work. Sometimes they’re our former sponsors, but sometimes they’re not actually. It’s hard to turn a sponsor into a major donor. We give a million-dollar experience for $35 a month as a sponsor. It’s interesting. But we have a nice base of people who are really committed to certain programs, certain activities, and we have our major gifts team for that.
We’ve also diversified into grants, both from the US government, multilateral institutions, other governments around the world, but also corporate partners. Procter & Gamble is a great partner with us.
Denver: Around water?
Anne: Around water. I was going to say their interest is in water.
As I said, we just signed a great agreement with the Lego Foundation, focusing on responsive parenting and bringing play into the work.
So, we have a variety of partnerships in different ways. We have a wonderful partnership with Simply Southern… really wonderful woman and her husband who run the company.
Denver: They’re an apparel company, right?
Anne: Yes. Through their own personal experiences from the past, they’re very committed to children’s issues in developing countries around the world. They give us a wonderful unrestricted gift every year, which I’m extremely grateful for, and it really allows us to do great things with kids
Denver: That’s great. You also do some work with Caterpillar Foundation in Indonesia, I believe
Anne: Yes. Caterpillar has been a great partner. We started working with them in India. Now, we’re working with them in Indonesia. They’ve been a great partner to work with
I think it’s hard to ask a CEO what the culture of an organization is. I think it’s best to ask the employees what it is. When I hear what they say, they say it’s a place that has a lot of passionate people in it that are really committed to doing something, making life better for kids, and will go the extra mile to make that happen, and that makes me really proud.
Denver: Describe the workplace culture at ChildFund International, the aspects of it that you think are truly exceptional, and maybe one or two things that you’re working on
Anne: I think we are a very humble organization. I think you feel that in the culture of the organization. We’re also, I would say— informal. We have some very formal systems in terms of how we plan, and obviously our finance systems and all that, but within an informal culture.
We’re very much an organization – I think this would make sense – that embraces diversity. We don’t even think of that as a separate initiative. We have about a thousand employees around the world, and 99.9%…well, most are nationals of their country. And if you work in 24 different countries, you’re going to have a big influx of… you’re going to have a big diverse workforce.
We also are embracing more… we’re being concerned about our environment and concerned about the stress of employees’ life. So, we’re taking much more working virtuallyl as part of our culture. So, we have people, a lot of people working from home or working for different cultures.
I think it’s hard to ask a CEO what the culture of an organization is. I think it’s best to ask the employees what it is. When I hear what they say, they say it’s a place that has a lot of passionate people in it that are really committed to doing something, making life better for kids, and will go the extra mile to make that happen, and that makes me really proud.
What I like to say to new employees when they come on, I say that I hope during their lifespan of their career, I hope it turns out that ChildFund turns out to be the peak of their career, that they really feel like they have the opportunity to deliver the best of what they could do.
I think it’s an organization that welcomes you into your leadership space and says, “Here. Take it. Run with it. You don’t have to fight for your space.” We welcome people in and say, “We need you. We’re leanly stacked up. We need every person and what their job is, so here, take it and run with it. We will help you be successful.”
Denver: Are there any special challenges you find in leading a legacy organization? You’re over 80 years old, so how do you remain nimble and cutting-edge and all those other things?
Anne: I like to say the organization is over 80 years old, not me, just to make that perfectly clear.
Denver: Get those pronouns correct.
Anne: I think it’s very hard. I think it’s much easier – this is my opinion – to start an organization from scratch than to look at an 80-year-old organization and change it.
Organization is a living, breathing thing. You can’t make it something that it isn’t. You have to kind of nurture it along to the next phase.
Denver: I would agree.
Anne: And so, we do have a lot of legacy things. Some legacy things are good and for good purpose, but some we need to change. So, we really embrace in our current strategy the issue of innovation. So, we’ve attacked it in a lot of different ways. We put in an Innovation Fund to look at new products and new services that we could be offering our supporters and the kids we work with.
We’ve done a great staff engagement program called “magic” that brings meaning and autonomy into the workforce and gives people space, because the biggest thing that stops autonomy is people feel they don’t have the support internally to try something new. So that’s what we’re trying to do: give that space. But it’s really hard to change a culture. Organization is a living, breathing thing. You can’t make it something that it isn’t. You have to kind of nurture it along to the next phase. That’s my experience.
Denver: I think your experience is right on the money. Let me close with this, Anne, ChildFund touches the lives of millions of children every year. Tell us a story of one.
Anne: I think if you want to see the impact of ChildFund, you talk about the child that was in our program years ago and where they are today.
I was in Kenya a few years ago, a place that I know well. I was a Peace Corps volunteer there many years ago. I’m driving down the road with our Kenyan staff, and all of a sudden, we got pulled over by the police. I’m thinking “I know that we weren’t breaking any law,” so I was thinking: “What is this man trying to do?” And so, the policeman and the driver were having this conversation in Swahili, and I’m understanding a little bit because I remember the language. And all of a sudden, the driver jumps out of the car, and he and the policeman start hugging each other. I said, “This is not your normal traffic stop.”
It turns out the policeman, he was a sponsored child in our program many years ago. He saw the name of our organization on the outside of our vehicle. He didn’t stop to give us a ticket; he stopped to thank us. He said he was a very poor kid growing up. He never would have finished school if it wasn’t for his sponsors and the support of a sponsor. He remembered the name of his sponsored family that supported him from the US. Afterwards, he sent me a photo of him and his wife and two little kids. And in that photo, it encapsulated what ChildFund is all about: ending poverty in a generation. And with him, we did it.
Denver: That will get you up every morning, won’t it? Well, Anne Lynam Goddard, the President and CEO of ChildFund International, thanks so much for being here this evening. Where can listeners learn more about sponsoring a child and more about the work that you do?
Anne: On our website childfund.org. Please come and learn more about the contribution you can make to make the world a better place for kids.
Denver: Well, thanks, Anne. It was a real pleasure to have you on the show.
Anne: Thank You, Denver.
Denver: I’ll be back with more of The Business of Giving right after this.
The Business of Giving can be heard every Sunday evening between 6:00 p.m. and 7:00 p.m. Eastern on AM 970 The Answer in New York and on iHeartRadio. You can follow us @bizofgive on Twitter, @bizofgive on Instagram and at www.facebook.com/businessofgiving.