Key Reasons

• Dominican children face significant barriers to success: widespread poverty, child labor, limited education and health care access, and added obstacles for children with disabilities.

• Sponsorship has proven, measurable impact. Sponsored children achieve higher graduation rates, earn higher adult incomes, and enjoy a more positive outlook on life.

• Sponsorship benefits ripple outward, often improving conditions for a child's whole family and community.

• The Pedro Martinez Foundation offers a proven path to help. Founded by Dominican-born Hall of Famer, Pedro Martinez who overcame similar hardships, it has served over 100,000 children through education, health, and sports programs.

• Sponsoring a child is simple and direct: your monthly gift provides food, education, and health care, with regular updates on your sponsored child’s progress.

The Challenges Dominican Children Face

The Dominican Republic is known for white-sand beaches, merengue, and a passion for baseball. But behind that postcard image, many Dominican children face systemic pitfalls that drastically limit what their futures can look like.

Poverty and Barriers to Essential Resources

In the Dominican Republic, poverty continues to affect many families, even after two decades of national economic growth. Limited access to secondary and higher education, infrastructure, health care, and stable jobs creates ongoing barriers for households. In low-income communities, family members often begin working at a young age just to help cover the cost of food, clothing, and utility bills, leaving little room for anything else.

How Sponsorships Open Doors to a Better Future

Sponsorship works, and there’s real data to prove it. Education is the linchpin. The World Bank found that staying in school is one of the most determining factors in a Dominican child's future. Yet nearly half of students face bullying at the highest rate in Latin America and the Caribbean, pushing many to drop out. Sponsorship programs exist to remove exactly these kinds of barriers by providing resources and a support network to grade school students.

The long-term outcomes in lower-income nations as a whole are striking. A major academic study tracking more than 10,000 formerly sponsored children across six countries found that international sponsorship increased monthly income in adulthood, largely by boosting participation in the labor market, and also produced modest gains in adult housing quality. 

In the Dominican Republic, as in other countries with similar challenges, sponsorships increase the likelihood that children will complete secondary school (the equivalent of high school in the US). Those who do typically earn over 30% more than those who drop out. 

Many child sponsorship organizations also report that sponsored youth experience higher levels of happiness, optimism, and hope than non-sponsored peers — support that reaches beyond academics. And because successful young people become positive role models and are better able to help those they care about, a sponsored child's entire family and neighborhood can benefit too.

Why the Pedro Martinez Foundation Is an Excellent Choice

Few organizations understand these challenges as personally as the Pedro Martinez Foundation. Today, Pedro Martinez is known as a Baseball Hall of Famer and three-time Cy Young winner. But he began life as the fifth of six children growing up in a poor suburb of Santo Domingo, in a house with dirt floors and a tin roof, teaching himself to pitch with rolled-up socks because his family couldn't afford real baseballs.

Pedro has used his success to give back to the community that raised him. A donated piece of land grew into a full community center in Manoguayabo, offering youth support through education, health and sports programs. To date, the Pedro Martinez Foundation has served over 100,000 children through more than 60 programs, from academic tutoring to pediatric care. The organization now has plans to offer even more through its planned education and sports campus.

How To Get Started

Deciding to sponsor a child through the foundation is simple. You're matched with a real child — like Sara, who dreams of becoming a volleyball teacher, or Luis, who loves math and baseball. Your monthly gift allows you to support a child in need by helping to provide nourishing food, education, and school supplies, even medical and dental care, depending on the tier you choose. In return, you receive regular updates and a genuine connection with a child whose life you're helping shape.

The children on the foundation's sponsorship page are still waiting for someone to say yes. Given everything we know about what steady support can do — better schooling, better health, and an expanded sense of what's possible — sponsoring a child through the Pedro Martinez Foundation is one of the most meaningful ways to turn that research into a real difference in one child's life.

Sponsor a Child With the Pedro Martinez Foundation

At the Pedro Martinez Foundation, our mission is to support struggling youth with education, health, and sports programs so they can thrive in life and make a healthy contribution to society. We have many services under these three programs, which allow us to holistically impact the youth we serve and provide them with the resources and tools to have a bright future. 

Our child sponsorship program serves children in the Dominican Republic by equipping them to stay healthy and successfully complete a grade school education. We offer three different levels of sponsorship opportunities. Simply choose a child to sponsor, then select a sponsorship package at checkout.

Learn more about our program participants and sign up to sponsor a child in need today!