When Nancy Vandermeer was 10 years old, her family began to sponsor Lee, a nine-year-old boy living in an orphanage in Korea. Throughout the month, family members dropped change into a green jar and that was how they raised the money for Lee.
As time went by, Nancy's father decided he wanted a "baseball team" of sponsored children. When he had his baseball team, he decided he wanted a "football team" as well. The touching part, Nancy remembers, was that many of the children her father chose had mental and physical disabilities and "never would have been able to play on a real baseball or football team."
About the time they had their "sports teams" completed, the Vandermeers learned about the Living Sponsorship program. "We decided that was the way to go," Nancy explains, "because for $6,000 a sponsorship can go into perpetuity, not just for that one child but for children in the future. So my parents started to convert their sponsored children to Living Sponsorships."
Today, 44 years after Lee was first sponsored, the total number of Compassion children whose lives have been touched by the Vandermeers is close to 200. Fifteen of those are current Living Sponsorships.
"That, to me, is the best legacy," Nancy says. "This will go on long after I'm gone in terms of children being cared for by Compassion. It really is incredible to see the impact. The Lord takes it and multiplies it. It's an investment that's priceless. These people can change their countries -- they can change the world. And I've played a tiny, tiny little part of it."
Perhaps you, like Nancy's family, want to make your sponsored child's future as secure as possible by establishing a Living Sponsorship. Or maybe you are looking for another way to expand your giving beyond sponsorship and extend it beyond your lifetime.
