Our History

Centro Guadalupano is the outreach ministry for Church of Saint Stephen-Holy Rosary, an urban mission parish with campuses in both the East Phillips and Whittier neighborhoods of south Minneapolis. This diverse neighborhood has always been an immigrant community, first with Irish, German, and Italian settlers, and more recently with immigrants from Spanish speaking countries and refugees from East African and Asian countries. Beginning in the 1990s, the Sinsinawa Dominican sisters serving at Holy Rosary Church recognized the need for culturally competent, accessible human services to meet the needs of a rapidly growing Latino immigrant population. In 2000 they established Centro Guadalupano to better coordinate the educational and human service programs that were created in response to those needs. On a daily basis Centro lives out Church teaching to provide a preferential option for the poor, not only to our predominantly Latino immigrant parishioners, but also to our larger community of refugee neighbors who come from a variety of cultural and religious backgrounds.

 

Centro Guadalupano’s mission is “to be companions on the journey with immigrant families and the economically disadvantaged by providing educational programs and human services.” Our overarching goal is to provide our diverse community members with the tools and resources needed to achieve a higher quality of life and greater self-sufficiency. Providing educational opportunities for the children of our immigrant families through out of school time programming is a key part of fulfilling this goal.