It can be easy to become blind to the blessings God has given us throughout our lifetime. However, not everyone has access to the same opportunities we do. On any given day, around one billion children around the world are living in poverty. Out of these, thousands of children die every day due to preventable causes such as hunger, thirst or the lack of medical access.
These devastating statistics not only affect developing countries, but they also encompass children who live in our own nation. A quarter of all children in rich countries live in poverty, which affects their physical, mental, spiritual and emotional health. With statistics like these, you might be wondering how you could possibly help. What good can our small amount of money do to help hungry children? You may be surprised by the answer. Hope is available, and it starts with people like you.
In the past 20 years, the number of people living in poverty worldwide has been cut in half, and the rate continues to decline every year. This success is due in large part to people just like you who feel called by the Lord to share their blessings with the poor and give to Catholic child poverty organizations. No matter how much you choose to donate, your gift will have a profound impact on a community’s ongoing physical and spiritual well-being.
What Do They Need?
Children living in poverty lack the physical, emotional and spiritual resources needed to enjoy their lives to the fullest. This poverty threatens their safety, mental health and physical longevity. At Catholic World Mission, we’re dedicated to helping hungry children find nourishment and build self-sufficiency skills by meeting several of their most pressing needs, including:
- Healthy foods: More than 3 million children die every year from malnutrition and various hunger-related diseases, while for others, their parents go hungry while working hard to provide food for their children. Feeding these empty bellies is the first step toward rehabilitation from the effects of poverty.
- Adequate health care: Around 19 million children around the world are currently unvaccinated because proper medical care is unavailable in their country. Likewise, 2 million kids die every year from entirely preventable diseases — either because health care isn’t available in their community or due to a lack of funds to pay for treatment. We believe it is our God-given responsibility to end this suffering through medical volunteering and facility-building.
- Education: A lack of education leads to a continuous cycle of generational poverty. Our educational programs tackle this challenge head-on. By giving work to teachers and encouraging students to become doctors, teachers, dentists, business professionals and more, we can rebuild the community’s economy and give its people hope for a better future.
- Safe drinking water and sanitization: Clean drinking water and sanitization are fundamental human rights, and it can be hard to imagine anyone lacking such a simple need. In many third-world countries, children must bathe, drink and wash their hands from unclean surface water, which can be contaminated with waste. These conditions kill more than a million people every year. By constructing washrooms, drilling wells, investing in rainwater harvesting systems and providing hygiene items like soap, we can protect the health of millions of children.
- Spiritual fulfillment: A lack of basic human needs can leave children feeling alone and unloved. Many have never heard the good news of Jesus, which is why we bring the loving message of Christ to everyone we help, and we back up this message by acting as the hands and feet of Jesus by meeting children’s physical needs, as well.
How You Can Help
You can take several steps toward helping Catholic charities offer hope and restoration to impoverished children. We invite you to:
- Pray: One of the most significant ways you can partner with us is through prayer. Ask God to bless our efforts to bring material goods and spiritual healing to children around the world.
- Sponsor a child: No feeling compares to sponsoring a child in need. Through your ongoing giving, you can provide education, food, clean water, health care and other basic human needs to a child.
- Educate others: As people who have our basic needs met every day, it can be easy to forget that not everyone has access to the same resources. Talk to your friends, family and social media followers about child hunger and the importance of giving to a Catholic child poverty organization.
- Give: At Catholic World Mission, we’re uniquely positioned to meet children’s spiritual needs as well as their physical ones. Your gifts can help children around the world break free from poverty and hear the message of the Gospel — perhaps for the first time.
We encourage you to prayerfully consider donating to Catholic World Mission and supporting us in our goal of helping hungry children. We’ll keep you fully informed of how your hard-earned money is being used through our e-blasts and by sending you videos, pictures, testimonials and ongoing progress reports of our projects.
If you’d like to learn more about donating to Catholic charities that feed hungry children in Jesus’ name, feel free to contact us online.
