COAR Peace Mission, Inc #1570

COAR, the Community of Oscar A. Romero, in El Salvador, is a home for 40 abused and abandoned children, rescued from trafficking or dire poverty.  COAR is also a school for 1,000 children, pre-K-12th, often the only safe place in our students’ lives.  Our large campus has a beautiful chapel, sports fields, a clinic, and many other services for our impoverished community.  It is a project of the Archdiocese of San Salvador, supported in the US by the COAR Peace Mission, and all together is known as the “COAR Children’s Village”.

100% of what we receive through the Mission Co-op Plan goes directly to COAR for food, medicine, housemothers, teachers, security guards, psychologists, and other specialists – in short, everything it takes to raise the next generation of healthy, smart, capable, and joyful children for El Salvador’s future.

Our video appeal from 2020, when we were socially distanced from making appeals, still tells our story this year:

COAR is a Catholic institution, in the best way.  It has stability over time.  It harnesses the talents of many to build a community that is greater than the talents of any individual.  We rely on the example, the words and deeds, and sacrifice of St. Romero: “Let us not develop an education that creates in the mind of the student a hope of becoming rich and having the power to dominate.  That does not correspond to the time we live in. Let us form in the heart of the child and the young person the lofty ideal of loving, of preparing oneself to serve and to give oneself to others.”

Founded in 1980, we are the oldest extant organization named for St. Oscar Romero.  COAR began when St. Romero asked members of the Cleveland Latin American Mission (CLAM) Team, serving in El Salvador since 1964, to work with refugees as El Salvador’s civil war escalated beginning in 1977.  After St. Romero was martyred, while saying mass, on March 24, 1980, many of the children in these camps were moved to the safety of COAR, where we have been serving children ever since. 

Our most important ministry is to children separated from family by war (in the 1980s), poverty (1990s-2000s), and violence (since 2010s).  The children, often now teens, live in small groups served by a housemother, psychologists, and social workers.  Their backgrounds have been so abusive, damaging, or disrupted that restoring them to family-based foster care is not (yet) the best course for them.  Many begin school for the first time.  More importantly, they learn to work with others, to live as a family, to begin to build a healed and hopeful life.  All are welcome to stay until they are 18 years old, and longer if they need more years to graduate from high school or college/vocational training.  As they leave, get jobs, form families, and strengthen their communities, your support will live on for generations.  Thank you.

Support the COAR Peace Mission, Inc #1570

You can support the COAR Peace Mission, Inc #1570 through your prayers and monetary donation by making a check payable to THE SOCIETY FOR THE PROPAGATION OF THE FAITH, 3424 Wilshire Blvd 3rd Fl., Los Angeles CA 90010, memo #1570. You may also donate online by clicking the donate button. When making an online donation, reference #1570 in the Memo box. Your donation is tax-deductible as allowed by law.