Miloš Kroulík's Profile

While in the WV office, Bornstein focused part of her research on the child sponsorship project, which is the largest funding component of World Vision's work.More than once she was able to observe sponsors that showed up with great hope to meet their sponsored child, only to be disappointed when WV employees were unable to locate the child.This pointed to the intense logistical support needed to maintain an individual child sponsorship program that is meant to induce direct personal relationships.When asked why WV maintains such an overhead heavy program, the response given explained that the project literally represented the personal intimate relationship Christians can have with Jesus, and therefore was vital to the mission.From Bornstein's vantage point she found an ironic contradiction."The personal relationships of child sponsorship built through correspondence, existed alongside the impersonality of the monetary exchange of child sponsorship" (p. 73).She was able to interview a man who had been sponsored as a child and found that in fact he had felt as though he were a part of another family, accepted, and had also experienced great loss when the sponsorship ended.In other interviews and through observed conversations between families with sponsored children and WV staff, it became clear that sponsorship may also have the negative impact of disrupting existing family relationship, dividing communities and even creating a sense of inferiority among parents that felt undermined by the provisions their children received from sponsors.Bornstein summarized by framing the program of child sponsorship as a "double edged sword," which can have both a negative and positive impact on children, families, and communities.

There is very limited research on these organizations – certainly too
little to allow us to fully assess their roles in spreading western educational
models or in pushing for greater intergovernmental cooperation in the field
of education

In contrast to the period between 1950 and 1990, the second half of the 1990s
has seen a remarkable explosion of international nongovernmental activity in
the field of education, especially around the idea of education for all. The
contextual roots of this explosion can be traced to several factors. Perhaps
foremost among them, the basic assumption upon which many earlier forms of nongovernmental
cooperation in the field of education had been founded – the idea that
education is an entitlement of citizenship, properly provided by a state whose
capacity as service provider was expected to expand – was steadily eroded
by a world-wide economic crisis, as well as by the rise of a new set of ideas
about public policy in Western welfare states.