FAQ

Children remain in our programs for however long it takes for them to have a safe, stable environment and for their basic needs to be met. This is usually throughout their formative years and can extend until age 18. We work with every child and family in our programs to create a sustainable, long-term plan for the future.

For most of the children in our sponsorship program, we work to help them stay with their birth families. Many children are at risk of separation from their families due to poverty, family illness or other hardships.

With your support, we help stabilize families and prevent children from being placed in orphanages by providing essential necessities, such as school fees, medical care, nutritional assistance, and vocational training for parents. Some families need all of this support, while others need less. Ultimately, we aim to help families achieve self-reliance, which means our on-the-ground social workers meet with each family to create a comprehensive plan for achieving lasting stability.

Each family is different and faces different challenges. However, one strategy we have found that works for all families is helping them gain skills and access resources that will empower them over the long term.

While giving a family money each month may seem like a fast and easy way to help them solve problems related to poverty or illness, it could cause the family to become reliant on our efforts rather than learning, growing, and working toward a stable future — gaining job skills, earning income, etc.-we’ve found that teaching families to provide for themselves is far more empowering and effective in the long term.

Also, because Heart of Love partners with schools, physicians, social welfare centers, and more, we can often offer services at a lower cost than if families sought them independently. We also partner with multiple funding agencies to provide these services.

Our educational partnerships allow more children to receive a better education at a lower cost since multiple sources often fund educational or medical programs. In this way, sponsorship maximizes your gift, helping to serve not only your sponsored child but entire families and communities. In this way, your sponsorship dollars meet not only your sponsored child’s needs but the needs of many children.

Heart of Love will place all the current sponsorship funds we receive into one central fund every month. Monthly sponsorship payments are combined with the payments from other sponsors. The overhead and field support costs are deducted, dividing the balance over the total number of sponsored children. The resulting figure is what will help each child for that month. With the help of our pooling system, every child in our program can count on consistent support. Without a pooling system, sponsored children whose sponsors were late with their support or did not send support would have their sponsorship benefits interrupted. If some sponsors do not provide their support in a given month, we may not have sufficient funds to provide benefits for all the children we support.

In the United States, the IRS has prohibited organizations from receiving donations and passing those funds directly to individuals. Heart of Love can qualify to issue tax-deductible donation receipts to our sponsors by pooling the benefits between all children.