About EPISO / Border Interfaith

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El Paso Interreligious Sponsoring Organization (EPISO) / Border Interfaith is a broad-based community organization located in El Paso, Texas.  Our members are faith and neighborhood institutions who work across religious, racial, ethnic, economic, generational and neighborhood lines for the good of the whole community.

EPISO/Border Interfaith believes that in order for community leaders to be effective, we must be educated and informed citizens.  We engage in public discourse and initiate action guided by that conversation, creating opportunities for ordinary people to make real and dramatic change in the community.  We strive to hold elected officials accountable for their public responsibilities.

Affiliated with the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF), the West/Southwest IAF and the Texas IAF, EPISO/Border Interfaith builds relational power and exercises that power to strengthen our communities and bring about a more just society.  

Teaching & Practicing Democracy

EPISO / Border Interfaith embraces a vision of a vibrant bilingual border community.  We are convinced that El Paso can be a better place to live – with better schools, better jobs, and healthier citizens.

  • We commit as institutional members to work for a community where the schools are excellent, all residents have affordable healthcare, and all people are treated with respect.
  • We hold our elected officials accountable to ensure they protect our natural environment, manage growth carefully, and make basic services available to all.
  • We pledge to identify and train leaders whose web of relationships transcend economic, racial, gender, and religious divisions.

Through building relational power and engaging actively in democratic civic life, our institutions and leaders will transform our border region.  Our motivation comes from the teachings of our diverse faiths and from our fervent belief in liberty and justice for all.


  • Latest from the blog

    Protecting What They Built: With EPISO, Residents Defend Homes and Dignity

    After nearly three years of organizing, EPISO-Border Interfaith leaders from Bauman Rd celebrated a major victory Wednesday: the City of Socorro revised its “Arterial 1” proposal, renouncing its initial plan to build a major road through the heart of their neighborhood. The move would have impacted over 100 families and displaced dozens of longtime residents—many elderly and living on fixed incomes—who had spent decades building their homes.
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    Francis Was a Pope Who Listened to Those on the Margins

    Pope Francis jokes about his bad knee during a 2022 meeting with representatives from the West/Southwest Industrial Areas Foundation. El Paso's Silvia Camacho is third from right. (Photo courtesy of Rabbi John Linder) [Originally published in El Paso Matters] Father Pablo Matta was just a young seminarian when he attended an El Paso Interreligious Sponsoring Organization meeting at Santa Lucia Catholic Church (now St. John Paul II) in 1985. At the meeting, local leaders were gearing up for a big fight – thousands of people in the colonias of El Paso had been sold parcels of land with the promise of utility services – water, sewer and gas – only to learn that they had been swindled by unscrupulous developers. That early meeting turned into a decades-long movement by EPISO/Border Interfaith to bring water and sewerage to tens of thousands of people in communities like Montana Vista, Canutillo, Socorro and Sparks. The efforts of early, brave leaders changed the lives of El Pasoans and added hundreds of millions of dollars to the El Paso economy, much more if the multipliers of new housing, schools and businesses are added to the equation.  The organizing also changed Father Matta and fundamentally shaped the way he pastored to his people. Father Matta has been a leader for more than 40 years with EPISO/Border Interfaith, a grassroots organization dedicated to forming leaders from diverse institutions in the habits of public life. 
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