About Us
SHARE supports the empowerment of
historically impoverished and marginalized communities,
as they strive to meet both their most immediate
needs and construct long-term sustainable solutions
to the problems of poverty, underdevelopment
and social injustice.
The communities that we work with
in El Salvador are changing the structures that
keep people poor through an integrated effort
that is reactivating sustainable local economies,
creating viable rural policies that aid subsistence
farmers, and financing projects that provide
for the empowerment of women, development of
leadership and community organizing.
SHARE also has a dynamic Sister Parish and
community program where a relationship of accompaniment
is created with communities in the US and El
Salvador.
SHARE is about systemic change. Our advocacy
program challenges corporate globalization with
sustainable community development alternatives.
This is the reason we have been able to serve
the communities in El Salvador for over twenty
years. We have great local partners, friends,
staff and supporters.
Click here for a fact sheet about El Salvador (Pdf)!
History
SHARE was born in 1981 in
response to a cry for solidarity that came from
thousands that fled from the death squads to
the refugee camps in El Salvador and Honduras,
as well as from the refugees that sought sanctuary
here in the U.S.
Three Pillars
From our inception SHARE has literally
walked with the people of El Salvador in three
important ways. We call them the three pillars
of accompaniment.
- physical, spiritual and moral support
- advocacy support
- financial support via projects
During the war, SHARE literally
walked with our Salvadoran partners. U.S. citizens
traveled to El Salvador to serve as human shields
both in the refugee camps and as organized communities
left the camps and walked home and began to
rebuild in a war zone.
Our advocacy
support came in many forms including educating
and advocating our communities back home in
order to bring an end to the U.S. military support
in El Salvadoran and to end the war.
Projects at that time often meant the financing
of efforts to rebuild communities – homes,
wells, micro-businesses.
Over the years, SHARE’s work has changed
as the challenges facing the communities we
accompany has changed. From the refugee camps,
to the return home, the rebuilding, the Peace
Accords, the struggle for the implementation
of key pieces of those accords, the work to
reactivate sustainable local economies in the
post-war period, the efforts to create viable
rural policies that will allow subsistence farmers
and their families to lead dignified lives .
. . SHARE has been there with physical, moral,
spiritual, advocacy and financial support.
Charity vs. Structural Change
SHARE is not a charity organization. We are
a justice organization. We do not accompany
Salvadoran communities simply because they are
poor. We accompany Salvadoran communities because
they are organized and are forging visionary
solutions for sustainable and justice-based
rural development.
We do not believe that it is our role to enter
communities, size up the problems, define the
solutions and finance those solutions. Quite
the contrary. We believe that it is the people
who are living and suffering the cycles of poverty
must lead the creation of efforts that will
change the structures that keep people poor.
Development Model
Organizing + Empowerment=
Citizen Participation
Citizen Participation + Technical Assistance
= Structural Change
Founded in 1981, SHARE has sent over $8 million
in grants for the reconstruction of war-torn
villages and a variety of grassroots self-help
projects. SHARE's advocacy helped to win $287
million in debt relief for 100,000 peasant farmers
and worked to strengthen civil society's role
in the government's post-Hurricane Mitch National
Plan for Reconstruction and Transformation.
SHARE has engaged thousands of concerned US
citizens in delegations to El Salvador and in
ongoing advocacy since the early eighties. In
an ongoing way, SHARE connects a base of 44
sister parishes and communities in the United
States with urban parishes and rural communities
in El Salvador. SHARE also works with a network
of Salvadoran-Americans, particularly youth,
in several cities across the United States.
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About Us