Mary Stevenson - Executive Director
Mary Stevenson is the Executive Director of the COAR Peace Mission – the U.S. fundraising and outreach arm of the COAR Children’s Village in Zaragoza, El Salvador. She was a student at Beaumont High School in Cleveland Heights when Sr. Dorothy Kazel, OSU, left to begin her five-year assignment on the Cleveland Diocese’s Latin American Mission Team. Prevented from visiting the mission in the 1980s because of the civil war, including the murder of Sr. Dorothy, Mary first visited COAR in 1990 and experienced the anguish of El Salvador’s civil war through the orphans at COAR. Repeated visits through the years revealed the deep, healing, vital nature of the care, education, and vocational training that COAR gives its children. Won over by COAR, Ms. Stevenson left a business career to become Executive Director in 2004.
Susan Barnish Dinehart - Programs Director
Susan Dinehart, with glasses, is COAR’s Programs Director. Susan holds a Masters degree in Spanish translation and was a volunteer for four years in rural Chalatenango, El Salvador, which allows her to manage our groups of visitors, sponsorship, grant materials, and communication between the Archdiocese of San Salvador, the COAR Children’s Village, and COAR Peace Mission office and our supporters in North America. Since the departure of the Incarnate Word Sisters in 2009 and the changes to El Salvador’s child care laws, this position has become more important than ever. Your donations allow our office to train, guide, and support the professional standards and practices of the staff in El Salvador that runs this crucial ministry of the Archdiocese of San Salvador.
COAR Peace Mission Cleveland Office
The COAR office staff includes a Bookkeeper/Database Manager, sometimes a Sponsorship Coordinator, sometimes an Events Coordinator, and always includes volunteers, who help with the work of shredding, filing, and translating. All of us sign a donor privacy pledge. We keep the staff small and mostly part-time to keep the maximum amount of your donations going to the COAR children.