Improved Order of Red Men and the American Indian Development Program: Fraternal Charity, Child Sponsorship, and the Limits of Institutional Partnership, 1970-1986

 

Improved Order of Red Men and the American Indian Development Program:

Fraternal Charity, Child Sponsorship, and the Limits of Institutional Partnership, 1970–1986

I. Introduction: A Program Born of Conscience

In the early 1970s, the Improved Order of Red Men launched one of the most direct expressions of its long-standing commitment to Native American welfare: a national charitable initiative known as the American Indian Development program, commonly referred to as A.I.D. The program channeled funds from local I.O.R.M. tribes and councils across the United States to Native American children living on reservations, providing direct financial support for education and health care at a time when conditions in many reservation communities were among the most desperate in the country. The program represented the culmination of a century of the I.O.R.M.’s engagement with Native American causes, stretching back to the organization’s support for the Society of American Indians in 1911 and its erection of the Mohawk memorial monument at Charlemont, Massachusetts, in 1932. It would prove, however, to be the I.O.R.M.’s last major institutionalized effort of its kind. By 1986, the program had been discontinued—a casualty not of indifference but of institutional transformation within the charitable organization the I.O.R.M. had chosen as its administrative partner.¹

The story of the American Indian Development program and its relationship with the Save the Children Federation illuminates a tension that has long existed at the heart of charitable giving: the tension between the personal, direct engagement that motivates grassroots donors and the administrative efficiency that large-scale charitable organizations require to manage their operations. For the I.O.R.M., the program worked precisely because it was personal, local, and transparent. When Save the Children changed the terms of that arrangement in pursuit of a more sophisticated model of community development, the fraternal bonds that had sustained the program’s energy at the lodge level dissolved, and the program with them. Understanding why requires a careful examination of both organizations and the world in which they were operating.²

II. The I.O.R.M. and the Native American Cause: A Century of Engagement

To understand the American Indian Development program in its full historical context, it is necessary to appreciate the depth and consistency of the Improved Order of Red Men’s engagement with Native American causes over the century that preceded it. The I.O.R.M. was not an organization that stumbled accidentally into Native American advocacy in the 1970s. Its relationship with Indigenous America was woven into the fabric of its founding identity, and its history of support for Native causes was genuine, if sometimes imperfect in its expression.³

The organization traced its symbolic lineage directly to the Sons of Liberty and the Boston Tea Party of December 16, 1773, when approximately one hundred sixteen men disguised as Mohawk warriors boarded three ships in Boston Harbor and destroyed a cargo of British tea. Had they been identified, they faced hanging for treason or destruction of Crown property. Their survival depended on their disguise, and from that night forward the imagery of the Native American warrior was bound into the I.O.R.M.’s understanding of itself as a patriotic brotherhood. The terminology, ceremonial structures, and symbolic vocabulary of the organization were drawn from an idealized understanding of Native American governance and courage—not as mockery but as homage, and as an expression of the deep admiration that the Order’s founders felt for the democratic traditions of the Iroquois Confederacy and other Indigenous peoples.⁴

That admiration translated into action at several points in the organization’s history. In 1911 and 1912, the I.O.R.M. provided critical organizational support to the Society of American Indians, the first national pan-Indian reform organization, helping to organize its founding conference and first annual meetings and lending the credibility of a large established fraternal body to a nascent Native advocacy movement. In 1932, member tribes and councils across the country erected the Hail to the Sunrise monument on the Mohawk Trail in Charlemont, Massachusetts, a bronze statue of a Mohawk warrior dedicated to the memory of the Mohawk nation and attended at its unveiling by more than two thousand people. In 1974, in what its own records describe as a turning point, the organization eliminated its historically whites-only membership requirement, opening its doors to people of all ethnic backgrounds—including, for the first time, actual Native Americans. It was in this context of expanding openness and renewed commitment that the American Indian Development program was born.⁵

III. The World the Program Entered: Native America in the 1970s

The decade in which the A.I.D. program was launched was among the most turbulent in the history of Native American policy. The conditions that the program sought to address were stark and well documented. Reservation poverty was endemic. Health care on most reservations was inadequate. Educational attainment lagged far behind national averages. Across many reservation communities, the material hardships of daily life were compounded by the lingering wounds of a century of federal assimilation policy.⁶

Into this world, the Improved Order of Red Men launched the American Indian Development program with a simple, direct goal: to provide Native American children with educational support and health care through a system of individual child sponsorship administered in partnership with the Save the Children Federation. The Axelrod encyclopedia’s account, corroborated by the Davis history, records that by 1976 the program had sponsored 212 adoptions of Native American children. Whether these figures refer to formal adoptions or to sponsorship relationships—the terminology of the era was sometimes imprecise—the number speaks to a genuine, sustained commitment by I.O.R.M. local tribes and councils across the country.⁶

IV. How the Program Worked: The Power of the Personal

The administrative mechanism by which the A.I.D. program operated was the individual child sponsorship model, and understanding that model is essential to understanding both why the program succeeded in its early years and why Save the Children’s later changes proved so destructive to it. The Save the Children Federation had been operating domestic child sponsorship programs since 1954, when it expanded its U.S. sponsorships to include scholarships for Native American children on reservations. In its original form, this model was strikingly direct.⁷

Scholars who have examined Save the Children’s domestic programs in the 1960s and early 1970s describe what one historian called the “check-to-child days”: a system in which donations were provided directly to sponsored children or their family members in the form of checks or cash payments designated for specific purposes. A specific child would be identified to a sponsoring donor or organization; that child’s name, photograph, and circumstances would be communicated to the sponsor; and the sponsor’s contribution would flow directly to that child for concrete, designated needs—a new pair of shoes, school supplies, a medical visit. The relationship was tangible, personal, and accountable at every step.⁸

For the I.O.R.M., this model was ideally suited to the culture of a fraternal organization. A local tribe in Pennsylvania, Ohio, or New York could sponsor a specific child on a specific reservation, know that child’s name and circumstances, and feel the direct, human satisfaction of knowing that their lodge’s charitable work was reaching a real person in a real community. The personal connection transformed an abstract charitable contribution into something that lodge members could point to with pride. It made the cause visible, local in spirit if not in geography, and morally legible. The I.O.R.M. had spent more than a century building an identity around respect for Native American traditions and people; sponsoring a specific Native American child made that identity concrete in the most direct way possible.⁹

This quality of direct, personal accountability also addressed something that any responsible donor organization must care about: confidence that funds were being used for their intended purpose. When an I.O.R.M. tribe sponsored a child by name and received confirmation that their contribution had gone toward that child’s school supplies or medical care, there was no ambiguity about where the money had gone or how it had been used. The directness of the transaction was itself a form of accountability—a protection against the concern, entirely reasonable in any charitable context, that funds might be diverted, mismanaged, or diluted by administrative overhead before reaching their intended destination.¹⁰

V. Save the Children’s Transformation: From Sponsorship to Community Development

The Save the Children Federation that the I.O.R.M. partnered with in the early 1970s was, by the mid-1970s, beginning to change fundamentally—and the changes it was making were precisely the kind that would prove incompatible with the I.O.R.M.’s expectations as a donor organization. The transformation was driven by genuine philanthropic reasoning, but its consequences for the A.I.D. program were fatal.¹¹

The pivot began in earnest in 1975, when Save the Children formally adopted what it called the Community-based Integrated Rural Development model, universally known within the organization as C-BIRD. The C-BIRD model represented a philosophical shift away from individual child sponsorship and toward what development professionals increasingly regarded as more effective: broad-based community development programs that addressed the systemic roots of poverty rather than providing direct aid to specific individuals. Under C-BIRD, a sponsored child was no longer primarily a recipient of targeted assistance; instead, the child became a focal point for a wider program of community uplift that might include infrastructure improvements, agricultural development, small business lending, health clinics, and school construction—programs intended to benefit all children in a community, not just those fortunate enough to have been sponsored.¹²

The logic behind C-BIRD was not without merit. Development professionals had long argued that individual child sponsorship, for all its emotional appeal, could be distorting and inequitable: in a community where many children were equally poor, singling out specific children for support while leaving their neighbors untouched created stigma, jealousy, and dependency without addressing the underlying structural causes of poverty. By pooling donations and directing them at community-wide programs, Save the Children argued, the same amount of money could improve the lives of far more children far more sustainably.¹³

This logic, however compelling in the abstract, had a serious practical consequence: it broke the direct, personal, accountable link between donor and child that had been the emotional and moral engine of the sponsorship model. In the words of one critical analysis, Save the Children was creating “a tension between the psychological experience of connection that raised money and the realities of fighting poverty.” The organization continued to market its programs using the language and imagery of individual child sponsorship—in television commercials featuring celebrities like Sally Field, Sally Struthers, Paul Newman, and Joanne Woodward, the message was still the direct one-to-one relationship—but the administrative reality had changed. Donations were being pooled and directed at broad community programs that no individual donor could trace their contribution to.¹⁴

The scale of Save the Children’s growth during this period makes the gap between its marketing and its operations even more striking. Between 1971 and 1986, the organization’s budget grew from six million dollars to sixty-two million dollars—a tenfold increase in fifteen years. At the height of its influence in the mid-1980s, it claimed 126,000 child sponsorships in 43 countries, ranging from Navajo children in the American Southwest to children in Polynesia, sub-Saharan Africa, and South Asia. The Save the Children Federation had become a major international development organization, and the administrative machinery required to manage an organization of that scale was necessarily very different from the direct, personal, community-level operation that had characterized its domestic programs in the check-to-child era.¹⁴

Critics, both internal and external, eventually documented what many donors had long suspected: that Save the Children’s representations about the relationship between individual sponsorships and individual children were, at minimum, misleading. Later investigations found that donors’ contributions were not, in fact, going to the specific children they believed they were supporting but were being pooled with thousands of other donations and spent on general community programs with which no individual donor had any meaningful connection. In one instance reported by the Chicago Tribune in 1998, donors had continued sending monthly payments to a child who had been dead for nearly three years, with no one at the organization correcting the error.¹⁵

VI. The Demise of A.I.D.: Why the Change Was Fatal to the Partnership

When Save the Children imposed its C-BIRD community development model on the American Indian Development program, the consequences for I.O.R.M. participation were swift and decisive. Robert E. Davis, whose history of the organization remains the primary documentary source for the program’s story, records the outcome in plain terms: the method of administering the charity had been changed by the Save the Children Federation, and this caused a loss of interest and participation by the local tribes and councils, ultimately leading to the program’s discontinuation at the 1986 Great Council session.¹⁷

What ended the program was not a change of heart about the Native American cause—the I.O.R.M.’s commitment had been demonstrated consistently over decades—but a change in the mechanism of giving, from the personal and direct to the institutional and pooled.¹⁷

Consider what the shift meant at the level of an individual I.O.R.M. tribe. Before the C-BIRD transition, a lodge in Ohio or Pennsylvania knew the name of the child their dues were supporting. They received photographs and updates. They could report to their membership that Tribe No. 47 was personally responsible for the welfare of a specific child on a specific reservation, and that their monthly contribution was going directly to that child’s education or health care. The cause was tangible, human, and verifiable. Members who might otherwise feel that their fraternal dues were disappearing into abstraction could point to a face and a name and know that their brotherhood was making a real difference in a real life.¹⁸

After the C-BIRD transition, all of that was gone. The lodge’s contribution now flowed into Save the Children’s general development fund, where it was pooled with thousands of other donations and directed at community-wide programs on reservations across the country. There was no named child. There were no photographs. There were no personal updates. The lodge’s money had effectively disappeared into a large institutional budget that no individual member could track, verify, or feel personally connected to. Whatever good the pooled funds were doing in aggregate—and there is no reason to doubt that Save the Children was spending its resources on genuine programs of community benefit—it was good that lodge members could not see, touch, or claim as the product of their own fraternal brotherhood’s effort.¹⁸

And alongside the loss of personal connection came, inevitably, the erosion of confidence in the proper use of funds. This is not a cynical observation; it is a predictable psychological consequence of removing accountability from a charitable relationship. When an I.O.R.M. tribe could see that their money had gone to a specific child for specific purposes, they had no reason to doubt that it was being used appropriately. When that visibility was replaced by institutional opacity—when their contribution vanished into a budget managed by a large national organization that was simultaneously spending sixty-two million dollars a year across forty-three countries—the natural question became: where exactly is our money going? Is it reaching Native American children on reservations, or is it being absorbed by administrative overhead, redirected to overseas programs, or simply lost in the machinery of a large bureaucracy?¹⁹

These concerns were not paranoid. The 1998 Chicago Tribune investigation that found donors sending payments to children who had been dead for years was only the most visible symptom of what happens when a personal model of giving is replaced by institutional management at scale—precisely the gap that had been widening within Save the Children since the mid-1970s.²⁰

The I.O.R.M. had not chosen to partner with Save the Children in order to write checks to a large charity that would then spend them as it saw fit. It had chosen the partnership because it offered direct, personal engagement with Native American children and communities. When that mechanism was replaced by institutional abstraction, the partnership had lost its reason for being.²¹

VII. Legacy and Reflection

The American Indian Development program’s fifteen-year history—from its founding in the early 1970s to its discontinuation at the 1986 Great Council—represents a significant and underappreciated chapter in both the history of the Improved Order of Red Men and the history of charitable engagement with Native American communities. It was the I.O.R.M.’s most sustained institutionalized effort on behalf of Native Americans since the organization’s support for the Society of American Indians in 1911 and 1912, and its demise carries lessons that reach well beyond the circumstances of this particular partnership.²¹

Fraternal organizations operate on a logic of personal accountability that is fundamentally different from institutional development work. For a lodge brother, the meaning of his contribution was inseparable from its directness—from knowing it was going to a named child for a specific purpose. That directness was not merely a fundraising technique; it was the moral substance of the act, what made the giving fraternal rather than merely institutional.²²

Pooled community development programs may well do more aggregate good than direct individual sponsorship—but they do that good at the cost of the personal connection that sustains grassroots donor engagement. For the I.O.R.M., that cost was too high, and the program died not from indifference but from the removal of the very thing that had given it meaning.²²

The story of the American Indian Development program thus stands as a cautionary tale about the limits of institutional partnership in charitable work—and as a testament to the genuine commitment of the Improved Order of Red Men to the Native American causes that had stood at the center of its identity since the night of December 16, 1773, when the Sons of Liberty first wrapped themselves in Mohawk garb on the wharves of Boston Harbor. That commitment outlasted the program. It remains, in the long arc of the organization’s history, one of the most enduring and meaningful expressions of the fraternity’s belief that the principles of liberty and human dignity belong to all people on this continent.¹

 

Notes

^1.  Robert E. Davis, History of the Improved Order of Red Men and Degree of Pocahontas, 1765–1988 (Waco, Texas: Davis Brothers Publishing Co., Inc., 1990), 537.

^2.  Davis, History of the Improved Order of Red Men, 537; Alan Axelrod, International Encyclopedia of Secret Societies and Fraternal Orders (New York: Facts on File, 1997), 114.

^3.  Hazel W. Hertzberg, The Search for an American Indian Identity: Modern Pan-Indian Movements (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1971), 30–35; Todd Leahy and Raymond Wilson, Historical Dictionary of Native American Movements (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield, 2016), 75.

^4.  George W. Lindsay, Charles C. Conley, and Charles H. Litchman, Official History of the Improved Order of Red Men (Boston: Fraternity Publishing Co., 1893), 23–25; Davis, History of the Improved Order of Red Men, 40.

^5.  Davis, History of the Improved Order of Red Men, 200–210; Hertzberg, The Search for an American Indian Identity, 30.

^6.  Axelrod, International Encyclopedia of Secret Societies and Fraternal Orders, 114. Davis confirms the 1974 membership policy change at p. 511.

^7.  Save the Children Federation, Inc., organizational history timeline, savethechildren.org, accessed 2025; Benjamin W. Labaree, The Boston Tea Party (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964), cited for context on SCF founding in Michael Maren, The Road to Hell: The Ravaging Effects of Foreign Aid and International Charity (New York: Free Press, 1997), 143–148.

^8.  Save the Children USA official history, savethechildren.org, accessed 2025; Library of Congress web archive, Save the Children USA, loc.gov/item/lcwaN0011289, accessed 2025.

^9.  Michael Maren, The Road to Hell, 148. Maren refers to this phase of Save the Children’s domestic programs as the “check-to-child days,” citing specific cases of American Indian children receiving direct quarterly payments for school supplies. The scholarly journal article “Child Sponsorship NGOs: Origins, Evolution and Motives for Change” (SciSpace, accessed 2025) reproduces and analyzes this account.

^10.  Save the Children Federation, official history timeline, savethechildren.org; “Child Sponsorship NGOs: Origins, Evolution and Motives for Change,” SciSpace, accessed 2025.

^11.  Davis, History of the Improved Order of Red Men, 537.

^12.  Save the Children official history timeline, “1975: Save the Children scales up our pioneering programs. Our Community-based Integrated Rural Development (C-BIRD) model becomes the standard for overseas development,” savethechildren.org, accessed 2025.

^13.  WARC, “Save the Children Federation: Save the Children Campaign,” warc.com, accessed 2025. This source specifically states that “since the mid-1970s the organization had been moving increasingly into broadly defined community development work” and that “in spite of what the advertisements implied, Save the Children was not in the business of directly sponsoring individuals.”

^14.  WARC, “Save the Children Federation: Save the Children Campaign,” warc.com. The WARC source documents the budget growth from $6 million to $62 million between 1971 and 1986 and the 126,000 sponsorships at peak influence.

^15.  Child sponsorship Wikipedia article, citing GiveWell analysis: “Illusion: through an organization such as Save the Children, your money supports a specific child. Reality: Your sponsorship contributions are not given directly to a child. Instead, your contributions are pooled with those of other sponsors to provide community-based programming for all eligible children in the area.” en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child_sponsorship, accessed 2025.

^16.  The New Humanitarian, “It’s Time to End Aid Agency Child Sponsorship Schemes,” thenewhumanitarian.org, April 20, 2021. “Problems of stigmatization and the divisive impact from only certain children being sponsored in areas where poverty and underprivilege is endemic made other INGOs change their models to one where sponsorship funds are pooled for community projects.”

^17.  Davis, History of the Improved Order of Red Men, 537. Davis’s exact language is: “The method of administering this charity had been changed by the Save the Children Federation. This caused a loss of interest and participation by the local tribes and councils and the demise of the program.”

^18.  Davis, History of the Improved Order of Red Men, 537; Axelrod, International Encyclopedia of Secret Societies and Fraternal Orders, 114.

^19.  Save the Children USA, “Child Sponsorship FAQs,” savethechildren.org, accessed 2025. The organization’s own explanation of its 2020s-era transition away from individual sponsorship closely mirrors the administrative logic it had applied from the mid-1970s onward.

^20.  The New Humanitarian, “It’s Time to End Aid Agency Child Sponsorship Schemes,” April 20, 2021; World Vision analysis in “World Vision Tinkers with Its 70-Year-Old Child Sponsorship Model,” The Conversation, November 19, 2024.

^21.  Davis, History of the Improved Order of Red Men, 537.

^22.  Hertzberg, The Search for an American Indian Identity, 80–95; Leahy and Wilson, Historical Dictionary of Native American Movements, 75.

 

Bibliography

Primary and Organizational Sources

Davis, Robert E. History of the Improved Order of Red Men and Degree of Pocahontas, 1765–1988. Waco, Texas: Davis Brothers Publishing Co., Inc., 1990.

Lindsay, George W., Charles C. Conley, and Charles H. Litchman. Official History of the Improved Order of Red Men. Boston: Fraternity Publishing Co., 1893. Reprint, London: Forgotten Books, 2013.

Save the Children Federation. Official History Timeline. savethechildren.org. Accessed 2025.

Save the Children Federation. “Child Sponsorship FAQs.” savethechildren.org. Accessed 2025.

Save the Children Federation. Web archive, Library of Congress. loc.gov/item/lcwaN0011289. Accessed 2025.

Secondary Sources

Axelrod, Alan. International Encyclopedia of Secret Societies and Fraternal Orders. New York: Facts on File, 1997.

Hertzberg, Hazel W. The Search for an American Indian Identity: Modern Pan-Indian Movements. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1971.

Leahy, Todd, and Raymond Wilson. Historical Dictionary of Native American Movements. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield, 2016.

Maren, Michael. The Road to Hell: The Ravaging Effects of Foreign Aid and International Charity. New York: Free Press, 1997.

Prucha, Francis Paul. The Great Father: The United States Government and the American Indians. 2 vols. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984.

Journal Articles and Online Sources

“Child Sponsorship NGOs: Origins, Evolution and Motives for Change.” SciSpace. scispace.com. Accessed 2025.

“Child Sponsorship.” Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child_sponsorship. Accessed 2025.

The New Humanitarian. “It’s Time to End Aid Agency Child Sponsorship Schemes.” thenewhumanitarian.org. April 20, 2021.

“Save the Children Federation: Save the Children Campaign.” WARC. warc.com. Accessed 2025.

“World Vision Tinkers with Its 70-Year-Old Child Sponsorship Model.” The Conversation. theconversation.com. November 19, 2024.

 

Smoke Signals #8

Dr. Mike Bortner, Historia

Samoset Tribe #22, I.O.R.M.

Vallejo, CA

May 18, 2026