Compassion International, a leading authority on child sponsorship which releases children from poverty globally, bring its tour, “The Compassion Experience,” to the Kent area Sept. 22-25.
The event will educate visitors about the realities of life in poverty and provide an international experience to visitors who may not ever have the opportunity to travel abroad to a developing country.
The four-day event will be set up in the parking lot of New Beginnings Christian Fellowship, 19300 108th Ave. SE. There, visitors will be invited on a self-guided journey where they will be immersed in the lives and stories of two children living in Ethiopia or the Dominican Republic. Each child’s story starts in hardship but ends in hope.
The experience includes 1,700 square feet of exhibit space, featuring replicas of the homes and environments of these two Compassion beneficiaries. The event is free and family-friendly.
“We built ‘The Compassion Experience’ in order to really bring the developing world to America,” said Mark Hanlon, Compassion International’s senior vice president of global marketing and engagement. “When people think of poverty, they often think of the lack of things, the lack of stuff, the lack of money. Those are all symptoms of poverty. The real issue of poverty is the lack of hope. Through our holistic child development program, Compassion stirs hope in children. And you’ll see that hope come to life at this event.”
The tour is highly interactive, using individual iPods and headsets to offer visitors a sense of what life is like in extremely poverty-stricken areas around the world where the World Bank estimates that 700 million (9.6 percent of the global population) live on less than $1.90 a day (USD). In the areas Compassion serves, nearly one in five children die before the age of five, mostly from preventable causes, and 124 million children worldwide do not attend school, according to the UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS). Tour-goers will have the opportunity to “change the story” of children living in poverty by learning more about the issue, as well as Compassion’s child sponsorship program, which tackles global poverty one child at a time. Compassion currently serves more than 1.8 million children in 25 of the world’s most impoverished countries.
For more information, visit www.CompassionExperience.com, @compassion_exp on Twitter, and facebook.com/CompassionExperience.
About Compassion International
Founded in 1952, Compassion International is a Christian child development organization that works to release children from poverty in Jesus’ name. Compassion revolutionized the fight against global poverty by working exclusively with the Church to lift children out of spiritual, economic, social and physical poverty. Compassion partners with more than 6,700 churches in 25 countries to deliver its holistic child development program to over 1.8 million babies, children and young adults. It is the only child sponsorship program to be validated through independent, empirical research. For more information on the ministry, visit compassion.com or follow them on Twitter at @compassion.
