Mary's Ministries, ECDC, and NFL-YET
The Ruiz family began their evangelism through the creation of Mary's Ministries, a lay Catholic organization that runs leadership faith camps, and proselytizes. Mary's Ministries has branches in Linares Chile; Sullana, and Lima, Peru; Cuenca, Ecuador; Hirador, Southern Colombia, Franca, Brazil; Hermosillo, Sonora, Mexico and in the Mexican states of Coahuila and Durango.
The desire for spiritual improvement led to a will to better the lives of people "in the world", which spawned several organizations. The ESPIRITU Community Development Corporation (ECDC), an outgrowth of Mary's Ministries, is a community development association designed to alleviate the suffering that results from the poverty of the barrio. The ECDC helps finance the development of low-income housing and lobbies for commercial development in the South Phoenix area, but its main function is to develop international, principle-based, servant leaders, which is in part accomplished by running the NFL Youth Education Town (NFL-YET), one of Arizona's first and largest charter schools, and its satellite campus in Safford. In Africa, Mary's Ministries has a missionary (Mary house) in Uganda, in East Africa, with 5 missionaries carrying forward Mary's Ministries' mission.
The NFL-YET, formerly called Esperanza Montessori Academy, was enlarged to serve over 600 students after receiving a million-dollar grant from the NFL in 1996.
Read more about this topic: Estela Ruiz
Famous quotes containing the word mary:
“The back meets the front.”
—Hawaiian saying no. 2650, ‘lelo No’Eau, collected, translated, and annotated by Mary Kawena Pukui, Bishop Museum Press, Hawaii (1983)