Mujeres enVictoria seeks to empower women and knows women are the gateway to healing families, which transform communities.
Mujeres enVictoria (MeV) is a women’s ministry that began in the border cities of Brownsville, Texas, USA and Matamoros, Tamaulipas, Mexico in 2002. The ministry emerged with the support of various local women leaders who sought to create a more ecumenical women’s group outside the traditional walls of their churches and to be willing to address some needs the congregations seemed too slow or unwilling to respond to.
The spaces began with prayer vigils supporting women with unique challenges the church remained silent or judgemental about, e.g. mother’s whose children of various ages had faced various criminal or civil charges, women’s living in domestic violence who’s aggressors were church leaders, and women feeling overwhelmed and disoriented in social systems that separated them from their loved ones for a myriad of reasons. The founding MeV leaders felt a distinct sense of support and belonging within their identity in God and felt the need to create a space to offer what they had found, in the safest way possible.
Prayer vigils became safe spaces where women prayed together, worshiped together, sat together in private safe spaces discussing details and experiences that unknowingly birthed a mutual-peer empowerment model that continues to this day.
Program development at MeV began as women named the helpful resources they discovered. That naming led to women personally bridging connections between local social services and new participant’s needs while collectively inviting speakers and creating weekly seminars to empower these women. MeV women are mostly head’s of households, and are empowered and given tools necessary to first navigate the situations they find themselves in and then create dreams, goals, and visions for how they want to show up in the world.
MeV was birthed on an international border city that has always seen its identity as one regardless of the international agreements between two countries. More recent immigration policies and the most recent deadly pandemic of the COVID-19 virus greatly affected how the ministry work is done but technology has advanced in such a way that the ministry has continued to pivot with the changing times.
​
The particular border where MeV’s primary work began is s renown port of entry for millions of human beings because of its land and sea location which facilitates transportation. This reality creates what many migrant worshiping communities have long named as a migrant faith community. Some current ministry participants and leaders have been there for over 20 years but many more have passed through as life and love moves them elsewhere in the world.
MeV gatherings include a consistent Sunday worship space for women who do not feel safe and comfortable attending established congregations with male leadership or who simply have found spiritual sustenance and acceptance of their various beliefs within the MeV worship space. Aside from Sunday morning worship, MV has yearly women’s retreats, conferences, self-paced studies, group bible studies, support groups, and a small grants and scholarship program.
MeV is an established 501(c)3 as well as a member of a Christian ministry alliance named MOEDIM that provides ministry endorsement to Christian communities of faith with strong education and evangelism components. Through MOEDIM’s Spanish-speaking theological education network, many MeV women seeking a more deep understanding of God, faith, traditions, and theology have attended bible institutes, some completing a masters level theological education.
MeV is run by multi-vocational women who privately fundraise as needs arise and projects emerge. To date, there has never been no paid staff as ministry leadership have organized this as a labor of love. The ministry has begun to grow in a different way as new leadership emerges and technology advances. Consequently, leading the ministry to feel comfortable in beginning formal relationships with outside funders.