On a Sunday afternoon last month, in the parking lot of Cypress Church, an evangelical Wesleyan congregation just outside Columbus, Ohio, a middle-aged woman exited a semitrailer and began to sob. The truck behind her was wrapped in a banner bearing an image of seven children seated on a wooden bench, their tiny feet dusted from a rust-colored road in an unidentifiable African town. She had just been through the Compassion Experience, an immersive exhibit that purports to show the lives of children “suffering under the crippling weight of poverty”—the creation of Compassion International, a child-sponsorship organization based in Colorado Springs.
A young couple, Sandi and Zach Harrison, stood nearby, watching the woman and holding the hands of their daughters, Madison, age two, and Sydney, age four. Sandi was carrying a card from Vision Trust, another sponsorship organization; she told me that the family had just “adopted” Heidy, a thirteen-year-old girl from Peru, a country described on the card as a place “where alcoholism, domestic violence and child abandonment are common social issues.” The Harrisons moved to join the line of a hundred or so people waiting to enter the exhibit. “Maybe we’ll end up with a collection of children,” Sandi said.
The Compassion Experience had been set up on Cypress Church’s hundred-and-ten-acre campus as part of the church’s Outreach Sunday. I’d arrived curious to see how evangelicals in this swing state are wrestling with the issue of inequality at a moment when it has become a major issue, nationally and globally. The sermon that morning had drawn heavily from the vernacular of the corporate retreat, setting a tone of charity as an extension of individual initiative. Lining the open-air lobby were a dozen folding tables advertising charities that had, among other projects, purchased sewing machines and embroidery equipment for workers in Zambia, and built a safe house for street children in El Salvador. At one table, I met Kim Emch, a former corporate trainer who runs a summer camp that she started almost a decade ago, after learning that more than two thousand children in the nearby suburb of Hilliard were receiving free or reduced lunches in school. (The figure is now nearly four thousand.) Though her camp includes free meals and E.S.L. programs, she told me that she “sees handouts as breaking people,” and spoke excitedly of Donald Trump’s Presidential candidacy.
Compassion International, too, approaches poverty alleviation as an outgrowth of enterprise. The organization began touring the Compassion Experience in 2012, and it currently operates three mobile units in the U.S., featuring five different poor children’s stories. Last year, the exhibits drew nearly two hundred thousand visitors, and they’ve been successful enough that the company is devising five new narratives for their fleet. The units themselves were built by Brewco Marketing Group, an experiential-marketing firm, based in Kentucky, that operates similar exhibits for brands like McDonald’s, Tastykake, and the Scott Paper Company. Tim Glenn, the communications director for Compassion International, wouldn’t tell me how much each semitrailer costs to build and operate. “This is a competitive industry, and I don’t want to disclose anything that gives our competitors an advantage,” he said. But, he added, “It is cheaper than television. We wouldn’t do it if it wasn’t an effective marketing tool and we didn’t get a good R.O.I.”
The industry is indeed competitive, and large. Nine million children receive support through sponsorship programs each year, with one recent study putting the international financial flows to sponsored children at more than three billion dollars annually. Compassion International, which asks for thirty-eight dollars a month for each sponsorship, has about a million and a half sponsored children, and had an annual budget in the 2014 fiscal year of seven hundred and ten million dollars; its biggest competitor, World Vision International, is much larger, with nearly three and a half million sponsored children (at thirty-five dollars each per month) and an annual budget of almost three billion dollars.
Glenn emphasized to me that Compassion International’s overhead is low. Administrative costs in the 2014 fiscal year were a hundred and thirteen million dollars, just more than forty-five million of which was spent on salaries and benefits; according to the organization’s most recent publicly available I.R.S. filing, in 2013 this category included pay packages in the quarter-million-dollar range for several senior executives and of four hundred and twenty thousand dollars for its retiring president.* World Vision also compensates its U.S.-based executive team with six-figure-plus salaries and makes use of slick marketing, though it currently operates only one semitrailer exhibit, a twenty-minute tour that includes scenes of a brothel in Southeast Asia and of the Syrian refugee crisis.
As we waited in line to enter the Compassion Experience, Sandi told me that Cypress Church members have visited sponsored children in other countries, and that she hoped one day to go to Peru to meet Heidy. “I think it would be really neat to establish a relationship,” she said. The Harrisons, like many of the church’s members, live in Hilliard, a Republican stronghold with a median household income of around eighty-five thousand dollars. Zach is a facility manager for a manufacturing company, and Sandi is a physical-therapy assistant. As we waited, I asked them if they often thought about income inequality in the U.S. “Not really,” Zach said. Trying to be more specific, I asked whether he thought C.E.O.s are paid too much. “Those people end up employing thousands, and donate to charitable organizations,” he said. “They generate jobs and keep the economy going. And they typically weren’t handed that money, either.”
Up a small flight of metal stairs, the Harrisons and I entered the first of six rooms in which we would learn, via iPhones equipped with headsets, about Kiwi, a girl living in Bacolod, a city in the Philippines. The chamber was arranged to look like a desolate hospital room, with grimy walls and a small bed draped in dirty white sheets. A child voice actor playing the role of Kiwi told us that she was her parents’ fourth child, that her three older brothers had died, and that her father was an alcoholic. In the next room, the interior of the family’s shack, we learned that her mother might soon depart, because “a rich woman wants her to become her maid overseas.” Before we moved on, the Harrison girls, who weren’t wearing headphones, innocently picked up some empty liquor bottles strewn on the floor, as if in a playhouse.
The tone of the narrative shifted in room three, an open-air market with baskets of fruit and bags of rice. First, Kiwi told us of her extreme hunger: “We can’t afford apples, not even the rotten ones,” she said. We then learned that her father had begun to attend a local church. The next space, a classroom, was the exhibit’s first well-lit area. There, Kiwi informed us that she had been sponsored by an Australian baker. Painted on the room’s cinder-block walls were straight white teeth framed by cartoonish red lips, above dozens of toothbrushes. “It is a strange thing to do, brushing your teeth,” Kiwi said. “I guess we don’t think about such things because we are always thinking about our next meal.”
In the next room, an apartment in Manila with flood-damaged floors, Kiwi described completing high school, then expressed doubt about her future. “Has God blessed me just so I can become a maid on a cruise ship?” she asked. The Australian baker soon came to the rescue, offering to help pay for Kiwi to attend college. In the final room, where textbooks and a bible sat open on a desk, we reached a tidy narrative denouement: Kiwi’s wedding, in an apple orchard, with her sponsor in attendance. “Dad, we get to pick the good apples from the tree,” she said to her father, who had by now overcome his alcoholism. We exited to a display of tiny cards bearing the images of hundreds of children, grouped together geographically, for potential donors to select.
Outside, the Harrison girls began to play on a grassy median. Zach told me that, unlike Compassion International’s commercials, the exhibit’s portrayal of poor people “gives you a better glimpse of what they are dealing with on a daily basis.”* Talk soon turned to what Sandi and Zach said has been an ongoing conversation in their home. “Poverty here,” Sandi began, before Zach finished the thought: “is a lot different than poverty there. Poverty here people think of as being stuck in a one-bedroom apartment and only able to eat macaroni and cheese and bread, whereas that would be a luxurious life style for some of these people in mud huts and flood waters and all of that stuff.”
The Compassion Experience has been carefully scripted to elicit such sympathetic responses. It could also be said to foster the sentiment that individual Americans are better positioned than governments to help poor children. Certainly, walking through the Kiwi exhibit, you get no sense that literacy rates in the Philippines are generally high, that oral care is a half-billion-dollar market, and that the Philippine government counts some eighty-six million of the country’s hundred million people as having health coverage, leaving it not far shy of its goal of universal coverage by 2016. It would be difficult, of course, to convey such complexities in a short marketing pitch, but Compassion International’s emphasis on personal redemption is more than a storytelling device; its model is explicitly focussed on individuals, with money flowing exclusively through local churches to children. (World Vision, by contrast, takes a community-development approach, which can include building wells or conducting maternal-training programs for entire villages.)
Compassion International’s child-poverty narratives are consistent in their emphasis on individual hardship and individual response. The aim, Kurt Birky, a product-management director with the organization, told me, was to align a redemptive Christian arc with the theme of economic industriousness. “Internally, we have a lot of discussion,” he said. “It’s a big puzzle piece, which ones hit you, which ones do a great job telling a story.” Ultimately, the chosen stories highlight sponsor donations but conclude in bootstrapped success: Sameson, an orphan from Ethiopia, runs a woodworking shop with five employees; Yannely, who was born out of wedlock in the Dominican Republic, completes a residency training program and becomes a doctor; Carlos, whose father died of alcoholism, now works as an auditor in Guatemala. Kiwi graduates from college as a physical therapist.
I asked Birky whether this kind of selective, individualized approach to representing global poverty tends to obscure more systemic causes and solutions. “What we are called to do is not in the political realm,” he said. “If we can change the individual, they will change the circumstances. Poverty is not just an economic condition. If we can change how someone sees themselves, even in the toughest situations, to think, ‘I do have some resources,’ that’s actually the secret sauce. We don’t want the poor globally to think the way out of poverty is handouts.”
Standing in the parking lot, Zach Harrison told me that he and Sandi had decided against another sponsorship, figuring that it would be best to see how things go with Heidy first. As we left, I’d seen perhaps ten small cards adorned with written prayers from new sponsors. Compassion International wouldn’t tell me how many people signed up that afternoon, but they did tell me that they’ve added thirty thousand child sponsorships through the exhibits since 2012. The organization is now constructing four new semitrailers to house its new stories. Soon, seven of them will be crisscrossing America’s highways almost nonstop, a perpetual fleet of pathos.
* This post has been updated to clarify that Compassion International’s video ads do not appear on broadcast television, and to correct details regarding its most recent available I.R.S. filing.
