Dr. Wess Stafford is the president and CEO of Compassion International, the world's largest Christian child development organization that releases children from poverty through one-to-one child sponsorship. Stafford first joined Compassion more than 30 years ago and became the president in 1993. Under his leadership, the number of children being served by Compassion has increased exponentially, from 180,000 children in 1993 to more than 1 million children today.
Stafford is an advocate for children around the world living in poverty. Through his daily radio feature Speak Up With Compassion, broadcast on nearly 800 radio outlets in the United States, and his award-winning book, Too Small to Ignore: Why the Least of These Matters Most (WaterBrook Press, 2007), Stafford is challenging people to join Compassion in releasing children from poverty. In a recent opinion-editorial in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Stafford highlighted the detrimental impact of the Global Food Crisis and poverty saying, "The Global Food Crisis continues to silently plunge millions of people deeper into the depths of poverty... It is time we traded in a new currency, the currency of compassion."
Stafford's passion to help children was born of his own childhood experiences growing up in Africa. The son of missionaries, he heard his friends in the Ivory Coast share their hopes and dreams for the future only to watch several of these friends die as victims of poverty.
While he earned degrees from Biola University, Moody Bible Institute and Wheaton College, as well as a Ph.D. from Michigan State, Stafford often says, "Everything I need to know to lead a multinational organization, I learned from the poor while growing up in an African village."
As a student at Moody Bible Institute in the mid-1960s, Stafford spearheaded literacy and recreation programs among inner-city youth in Chicago. Later, he served in Haiti as a representative for six international relief and development agencies (including Compassion) and coordinated more than 50 community development projects. Through these experiences Stafford recognized that poverty is more than a lack of money. He discovered the only way to rescue a child from poverty-allowing them to thrive, not merely survive-is through a holistic combination of physical, economic, educational and spiritual development.
Stafford makes his home with his wife, Donna, near Colorado Springs, Colo. They are the parents of two daughters, Jenny and Katie.
