Jan Fogel’s relationship with Save the Children started in 1979 and will continue into the future thanks to a gift in her will.

Bridging Worlds Through Sponsorships

Jan Fogel communicates with children in a variety of ways. Now with her legacy gift, she’ll reach many more in the future.

“I have been working with kids in one capacity or another since the age of 12,” Jan says.

She learned sign language at Gallaudet College (now Gallaudet University) in Washington, D.C., and continues to use it in communicating with babies, including when she babysits.

She learned about Save the Children through an ad in Time magazine. It was 1979 and she was teaching English at a preparatory school in Osaka, Japan. Her first sponsored child was a boy living in Israel. She later met him when she lived there and was enrolled in a five-month work study program.

Today she sponsors and eagerly corresponds with two children in Kentucky and another in Haiti. For people who are newcomers to Save the Children, she says, “Try sponsoring a child first. Start identifying with a child and see what it’s like for a kid in that area.”

In addition, Jan has gone one step further by making a lasting impact on children’s lives by including a gift to Save the Children in her will.

In the late 1990s, Jan learned how Save the Children was improving young lives closer to home when she saw child-focused programming in Oxford, Mississippi, and Covington, Tennessee, as part of a sponsor group tour. She met a child she was sponsoring and recalls being welcomed by Covington’s mayor. “It felt like a homecoming,” she says.

Jan enjoyed seeing students engaged in after-school literacy programs and got a feel for rural life when she joined trip participants picking cotton.

Jan’s hobbies include participating in a reading group – mostly fiction – and international travel. A recent trip took her to India, where she toured Delhi, Jaipur, Agra and Varanasi. Traveling solo, she found Delhi forbidding but was particularly intrigued by Varanasi, situated in north India on the banks of the Ganges and known as the spiritual capital of India.

A Washington, D.C., resident since 1981, she recalls volunteering at a Save the Children shop south of Dupont Circle a few years after she moved to the capital. We are grateful that she is looking toward the future by including Save the Children in her estate plan, and we appreciate her support of our mission.

“Although I don’t have kids, I’ve always been drawn to kids. Save the Children is a great organization,” Jan says.

Contact the Planned Giving team at [email protected] for details on how the simple act of including Save the Children in your will or other financial plans can transform children’s lives and futures.