The Compassion Experience: A Virtual Exhibit on Global Poverty
Excerpt: Nine year old Elijah Fergenson from Hoover thought “it was amazing.” His younger sister Sara felt sad and wanted to do something. She wanted “to give them stuff to play with-more bibles and some jewelry.”
Aside from making contributors feel good, the question remains: do such efforts have any real impact on global poverty? Dr. Henna Budhwani, deputy director with the University of Alabama at Birmingham’s Global Health Center says thats a hard question and difficult to measure. She cautions, “We do have to be careful because a lot of times these experiences really intrinsically motivate people and they want to go and do good, but international development work and global health work is actually much more complicated.”
Compassion International marketing director Steve Spriggs says the experience works. According to Spriggs, “exit surveys overwhelmingly to the 90th percentile show that our visitors are gaining that extra understanding and are developing better conversations with their children” and, he says, after each tour they are getting new child sponsorships.”
Budhwani encourages people to go through the exhibit, but to do so knowing “that we are not going to solve global poverty and climate change and dirty water and lack of education for young girls and young boys by simply going through an exhibit.”
Ismailimail 