COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo., Jan. 29, 2008 – Compassion International, a leading Christian child development and sponsorship organization, has received the MySpace Impact Award for Poverty Relief.

The award recognizes members of the MySpace community for the positive impact they’ve had on our culture and how they use MySpace to multiply their reach. Besides Poverty Relief, MySpace recognizes achievement in five other categories: Community-building, Environmentalism, Health and Safety, Social Justice and International Development. MySpace features one category and its winner each month.

“Our ministry is grateful to everyone who helped us win this award,” said Dr. Wess Stafford, president of Compassion International. “Although we are more than 50 years old, we’re not as well known as we’d like to be. But that’s about to change, thanks to the good people at MySpace.”

Compassion will receive $10,000 and featured placement on the MySpace home page for a week and in the MySpace Impact Awards Community for a month. The site has more than 75 million members, who can make nominations and vote for the winners.

“We’re very excited about this win,” said Chris Giovagnoni, web communications specialist at Compassion. “It emphasizes the important role social networking can have in fighting poverty and validates that this is definitely a place we want to engage people. Sites like MySpace and Facebook allow us to connect with people and introduce them to what makes Compassion distinct from other Christian child sponsorship organizations”

Compassion is one of the world’s largest Christian child-development organizations, working with more than 65 denominations, 4,000 indigenous church partners and 900,000 children in Africa, Asia, Central and South America and the Caribbean.

Since 1952, Compassion has touched the lives of more than 1.6 million children and has been recognized for its financial integrity with top ratings and recommendations by several of the nation’s leading not-for-profit “watchdog” organizations.

To visit Compassion’s MySpace page, go to www.myspace.com/compassion. For information on sponsoring a child, visit www.compassion.com or call 800.336.7676, Monday through Friday, 7 a.m. to 5 p.m. MST.

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