History
Abara formed as a byproduct of 15 years of work at Ciudad Nueva embedded in a beautiful community of central El Paso on the US-Mexico border.
Ciudad Nueva is a faith-rooted 501(c)3 public charity in central El Paso’s Rio Grande neighborhood striving to cultivate hope and an environment where immigrant youth and families are empowered for a successful future.
Given our strategic location on the border and motivated by the challenges currently facing our region we began to respond to the most pressing needs of our border community, educate about the realities on the ground, and connect resources to where they are needed most.
As the interest and needs continued to increase over the years, we made the strategic decision to incubate a separate initiative in order to focus on the border work without distracting from our neighborhood-based work through Ciudad Nueva.
Today, Abara collaborates with many organizations East-to-West along the U.S.-Mexico border and along the migrant pathways from Central America and globally.
As a 501(c)(3) organization, all donations to Abara Borderland Connections are deductible for federal income, gift, and estate tax purposes to the fullest extent of the law.
Mission
In a polarizing world, Abara inspires connections beyond borders through mutual understanding, education, and meaningful action.
Abara is focused on accomplishing our mission by facilitating 3 Core Areas of Action:
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Border Encounters: Training leaders, faith groups, and national networks through reflection-in-action
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Border Response: Resourcing and connecting migrant shelters on both sides of the Rio Grande
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Abara House: Gathering at Historic Hacienda to listen, lament, celebrate, and engage across divides
Vision
We envision a global beloved community flourishing through justice, peace, healing, and transformation in pursuit of narrative, systems, and personal change.
MEANING OF ABARA
The word Abara means ford in a number of semitic languages, signifying a developing pathway or a natural place where a river is shallow enough to cross.
Fords are natural river crossings, not man-made bridges. As empires come-and-go, we want to remain attentive to the ebb and flow of global migration.
We want to love our neighbors, and yet we often don’t know who our neighbors are, where they have come from, or the stories that they carry. Now is the moment to accompany one another across the rivers of our time.