Have you ever heard of ActionAid?

This summer, together with my older daughter, we attended ActionAid Summer Blog Party where kids got a chance to enjoy themselves playing, making crafts and learning about ActionAid work in Myanmar & write letters to children over there while we (bloggers) were eating cakes, drinking coffee and brainstorming leaded by Gemma & Penny on how to help ActionAid to spread the word about their Sponsor A Child campaign.

During the event we got a chance to hear on the film from actor Jimi Mistry about his trip to Rwanda and child sponsorship that changed his life. ActionAid ambassador Alex Graham gave us very inspiring first hand relation from Myanmar where the charity fights the poverty among many other other places in the World. And ActionAid’s digital producer Louise was teaching us about very useful SEO techniques to improve our blog’s visibility online.

I’m usually very sceptical about all kind of charities having quite a bad experience with some of London’s charity shops that give only a tiny percentage of their income to actual cases they are pretending to support. But ActionAid is definitely not one of them. 80% of the donations is actually going abroad to support the communities and just remaining 20% finance charity operations in the UK.

ActionAid apart from helping individual children works closely with local communities to improve their conditions, cope with emergencies, fight the hunger, seek justice for women and education for children… involving them in decision making because who than themselves know better what they really need the most. This way not only those children directly but also later generations will benefit from the help they are getting.

Our children are growing up in a very privileged society where basic things like food, water, health care, education are taken for granted when many kids all over the globe are not so lucky. And while our kids worry about getting new toy for the hamster or newest mobile phone some other kids would be happy to have enough food to eat.  I’m not sure yet how (considering different options) but I would really want to support ActionAid more than only spreading the word about their work…  Helping ActionAid is not only right thing to do but can be also very valuable reality check for our kids who are always unhappy about what they have when their rooms are bursting with stuff they don’t really need…

How to help ActionAid

There are many ways any of us can get involved to support children that suffer poverty. ActionAid is very flexible, you can either sponsor a child, donate monthly to the charity or give once… You can as well campaign or foundrise for them or simply spread the word (Twitter / Facebook / Pinterest). It all depends on your situation and to how much you can commit to. If you decide to sponsor a child with ActionAid you can be sure that the money will be used not only for the child himself but also to improve quality of live for the whole community, you will be updated on changes in his/her life with letters and photographs and if you are a teacher you can choose to sponsor a child as a school involving your class in the whole thing.

If you are eager for more info or different perspective you may want to read stories from wonderful bloggers who attened the ActionAid Summer Blog Party (in alphabetical order):

Debbie from Johnson Babies

Gemma from Hello It’s Gemma

Jennifer from Jenography

Muriel from 40blog Spot – A French Yummy Mummy in London

Penny from Alexander Residence

Pie from Pie and Biscuits

Pru from Perfecting Pru

Sylwia from Sylwia Presley

Tom from Dairy of The Dad

Uju from Babes About Town

All images courtesy of ActionAidUK.

With thanks to Leslie, Louise, Sasi and everyone else in ActionAid UK for organizing the Summer Blog Party and special thanks to Sylwia for convincing me to join her at this event.