'We're all connected': Susan's giving story

Susan Bush is an avid world traveler, loving grandma and passionate quilter based in Fort Collins, Colorado, who has long sponsored children through ChildFund. In 2023, she had the opportunity to make an even bigger impact in children’s lives in memory of her parents, who inspired her love of charitable giving.

When Susan Bush was a little girl growing up in St. Louis, Missouri, she remembers her parents, Myron James and Patsy Ann Holm, getting a Lutheran magazine in the mail every month. On the back cover, there was always an ad for ChildFund – then Christian Children’s Fund.

“There’d be a picture of a child, and I always wondered about that child,” she says.

Curiosity became excitement the day her mother announced that the family would be sponsoring a child themselves. Her parents had always been involved in charity work, Susan explains, helping build facilities for daycare centers and rehab houses for the homeless through a local Lutheran organization. “I thought it was a wonderful idea,” she says. She distinctly remembers helping her mom fill out the sponsorship form, checking the box to support a child where it was needed most. They soon received information in the mail about a little girl named Kim in Hong Kong.

“We sponsored her for I don’t know how many years,” Susan says. “It was always exciting to get her letters because they were written in Chinese.

“This was the ‘60s, right? So you didn’t know a whole lot. I didn’t know anybody from other countries. It was all kind of strange, to see the Chinese characters written in columns rather than rows.

“I wasn’t much of a letter writer. My dad would sit us down every once in a while and say, ‘Okay, write a letter.’ And me and my brother and my sister would each have to write a letter to her.”

With every letter she wrote Kim and each one she received back, Susan found her understanding of the world expanding – and her heart for others growing along with it. “I kind of had it built into me that you’re supposed to help other people.”

Journey of a lifetime

Those early memories of her parents’ generosity stuck with her. Later, when Susan graduated from college and got her first job, she decided to sponsor a child of her own – Candace, who lived on an American Indian reservation in South Dakota, where ChildFund worked at the time.

Susan supported Candace from the time she was a young child all the way up until her graduation from the program at age 18. Then there was Vicenta from Guatemala, with whom Susan formed a close bond. She even traveled to visit her once.

Susan and her former sponsored child Vicenta in Guatemala.

Over the years, Susan traveled more and more, eager to see the world – including extensive visits to Southeast Asia when she lived in Hong Kong for a time in the ‘90s. Seeing the intense need for resources in different parts of the world only made her more determined to share hers and, as her family’s finances grew, Susan was able to take on more sponsorships.

“I’m still not a great letter writer,” she laughs. Even so, it has been encouraging to learn about the myriad ways in which her support has helped children all over the globe over time. “I think the world would be better off if everybody had food, water, shelter, education and economic opportunity to be able to better themselves,” she says.

Turning grief into impact

Fast forward to the early 2020s. Susan was enjoying retirement with her husband when her parents passed away within a few short years of each other. Reflecting on their lives, she couldn’t help but linger on their legacy of kindness and generosity.

“They left me this chunk of money,” Susan says. “But my husband and I were already well enough off to support ourselves and didn’t really need extra money. I thought, ‘I’ll see what ChildFund can do with the money.’”

Susan gave us a call and spoke to one of our philanthropy advisors. After some detailed discussions on how and where the funds could make the most impact, she settled on two projects that offered a unique opportunity to make a difference in children’s lives: a water project in Honduras and an online safety program in Ecuador.

Bringing clean water to rural Honduras

“I’ve always thought that people should be able to have water and food. Those are the basics,” Susan reiterates. When she learned about Pueblo Nuevo, a small community in rural Honduras whose families had to walk miles to collect water, she knew this was one of the health projects her parents would have wanted to support most.

Susan’s $43,000 gift allowed the community to construct pipes from a natural water source into storage tanks and then to taps at 28 different households, serving 113 people in total. It also trained a Community Water Board to maintain the new water system and help educate the community on the need for using clean, safe water.

The water system represented a turning point for people in the community. According to the mayor of Pueblo Nuevo, “The news that ChildFund had found a donor willing to give us a water system filled us with joy. We have been so motivated to build this system for so long … now we finally can.”

 Children from the Pueblo Nuevo community gather with ChildFund staff to celebrate the unveiling of the new water system in 2023.

Boosting online safety in Ecuador

As technology is increasingly integrated into children’s lives both in school and at home, the danger of them becoming victims of online exploitation and abuse has also increased. These digital safety risks are a universal problem for children today that former generations of parents did not have to grapple with, Susan says. “We didn’t have to worry a whole lot about that when my kids were growing up – the online bullying, the sexual predators online. But I think about my grandkids now, and wow. It’s just a different world.”

Ecuador’s Ministry of Education recognized this but struggled to find the resources to implement a comprehensive digital safety program in schools. Susan’s gift allowed ChildFund to team up with the Ministry of Education to educate communities on the risks children face online. The $50,000 project included the creation of a new website, Eugenia’s Virtual World, to teach children and adults about online safety, as well as the implementation of a new protocol for reporting digital violence, awareness raising activities, teacher training and more. The activities are now taking place in schools countrywide and are expected to reach 1.2 million children and teens each year.

“I knew it would impact huge numbers of children – and adults too, through realizing how they could help their children. And I thought, if this is the first one, perhaps it could be a catalyst for other countries in South and Central America to create similar websites.”

Susan was right. This was ChildFund’s first online safety project funded by a major donor – and it was only the beginning, helping ChildFund secure funding to expand the program even further.

‘The whole world is our community’

What’s next for Susan? When she isn’t gardening, going on long walks, traveling someplace exciting or sewing quilts for Lutheran World Relief and reusable menstrual products for Days for Girls, she’s enjoying time with her husband, daughters and grandchildren.

Susan says it’s her faith that motivates her to support others, especially children. It’s a big part of her life, just as it was for her parents before her.

“That, to me, is the heart of Christianity – to care about others and to help people,” she says. “And it’s not just Christianity. It’s being a compassionate, feeling person concerned about the well-being of others. Of humanity.”

After all, she says, “The whole world is our community. We’re not on little islands all by ourselves. We’re all connected. By helping others, we’re helping the whole world to advance.”