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.