Q. I recently received a Facebook friend request from my former sponsored child. Should I accept it?
A. While we can’t prevent a former sponsored child from trying to find and contact their sponsor via Facebook, we do encourage everyone to consider any potential risks that could happen from direct contact.
These risks may not come from your friend, but from other people within your friend’s community who learn about their direct contact with you in the U.S.
Some of these risks could include requests being made to you for ongoing support, or people trying to extort money from your friend or friend’s family because they are in direct contact with someone in the U.S.
For these reasons, CFCA does not facilitate or encourage direct contact between sponsors and their former sponsored friends.
We cherish the friendships that form between sponsored friends and sponsors through our program. Unfortunately, our ability to safely facilitate these friendships is only through the sponsorship program.
Please note: CFCA’s child protection policies do not allow current sponsors to be in unsupervised communication with sponsored friends, including social media such as Facebook.
To protect the privacy of our sponsors and ensure that all communications with sponsored friends are appropriate, our project staffs monitor all correspondence.
Related links:
- What happens when my friend leaves the sponsorship program?
- An explanation of CFCA social media policy
