Who We Are

The Fundación Cristo Vive was founded in 1990 as a nonprofit foundation by  Sister Karoline Mayer, a German nun, who has been living and working with the poor in Chile for 30 years.

The basis of our work is the special needs of the people. We thrive on the Christian values of justice, truth and love. There are many people and groups from all social circles contributing to our work regardless of their politic or religious afiliation.
Our most important aims:
  • to bring about that Christ lives in serving the needy and in sharing the bread
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  • to work dedicatedly towards the improvement of the living conditions of the poor and towards the acknowledgement of their natural rights and their dignity
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  • to look for solutions that constitute an incentive for the people towards their personal self-realization and that lead to a change in the social structure. We want to achieve this by establishing pilot-projects for social integration that can also be realized further by other public or private institutions.
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  • to build bridges of solidarity between rich and poor in order to hereby create more justice in our country
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  • as an organization of citizens we want to work jointly with the state in the struggle against the poverty and the misery of many of our fellow citizens
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    We, the workers in the Fundación Cristo Vive, have gotten to know each other over the years of serving and helping the people in the poor neighborhoods. We made this foundation to what it is today to live our inner calling in a vivid and brotherly way. The service for our neighbors or "others" satisfies us and provides us with a sense for our lives. Today we have 200 employees working in the various fields of our work, that are being supported by many volunteers.

    We all have different cultural and social backgrounds, yet do all of us, voluntaries as well as employees and Chileans as well as Germans, feel united by the common social work we commitedly do with the people of the poor neighborhoods.