I was fortunate enough to be born in a “rich country” – Slovakia (http://slovakia.travel/en). My parents supported me from my early age with my sport activities, schools and many other things you can think of. I’m currently thrilled to run my two companies: Localization Guru, an online translation company (https://localizationguru.com) and Storie, an ecommerce platform (http://storie.sk). Besides that, I’m travelling quite a lot also. As I’m getting so much from the life, I started to feel a need to give back to the world somehow.

For months now, I’ve been thinking on how can I sponsor some charity program. But I didn’t know how to choose one and what should be the criteria to decide. I decided to get me more time thinking about it in “background”, so I would shape my thoughts more clearly.

And there was another problem. Sponsoring a charity, in my opinion, should be a longterm process based on the right values so it can last. If you’re like most of people, you probably already know that starting something is easy, but maintaining to continue in the process can be a tough job.

In recent days, I came to an idea to sponsor a child directly. That means, I would pick up an individual child based on his/her profile, so I would create an emotional bond which should help me keep the sponsorship last years. Seeing the child grow and evolve should have helped me feel the real value of the sponsorship and keep me feeling that my money are not lost in one of those huge organisations like Unicef, which spends around 60% of the money on their operations.

But suddently another problem emerged. I came accross some articles on the controversy of “sposor a child directly” approach. According to the blog on BBC News (http://www.bbc.com/news/world-13697855), there was a 2008 study which reports a “anxiety, jealousy and disappointment among those children and families who receive no letters or gifts”.

So I started to dig for more articles on how’s this really affecting the children and families in the community and somewhere along the way I’ve bumped into OneGirl’s blog on “How Child Sponsorship Works and Why We Won’t Do It“ (http://www.onegirl.org.au/challenges/how-child-sponsorship-works-and-why-we-wont-do-it).

I was impressed by the article. In a way, I could relate to the opinion and I started to look more closely on the company.

I’ve read their “WHY” (http://www.onegirl.org.au/why-girls) and I found it very reasonable.

I also looked at the core team of 4 women (http://www.onegirl.org.au/about-us/our-awesome-team) and I really admire what they’ve started. As I’m being a startup guy myself, I could relate to this project even more.

Looking trough their actual activities was just a remaining sign, that I’m in the right place. Their programs “Business brains” (http://www.onegirl.org.au/what-we-do/business-brains) or “Scholarships” (http://www.onegirl.org.au/what-we-do/back-to-school-scholarships) looked very logical so it only concluded my final decision of supporting trough this company.

Now, I’m a proud sponsor of this charity program and I’m very excited to get their updates on how are they doing in the commnunity.

If you also feel the need to give back somehow, don’t hesitate and start today.

Let me know, which charity projects did you choose and why.