Friends of Casa Bernabé
Legal name: Friends of Casa Bernabé (formerly Friends of Children Everywhere) · EIN 56-2467177
Casa Bernabé is a campus on a mountainside near Guatemala City where children removed from abuse, abandonment or neglect live in eight family units with house-parent couples rather than in dormitories. Around the houses sit a Christ-centred school taking 350 students, most of them from the surrounding community; a medical and dental clinic open to neighbours; Families United, a reunification team of social workers, lawyers and psychologists that visits the children’s biological families; vocational training in baking, carpentry and cosmetology; a transitional living programme for young adults over 18; and Mentor Families, which pairs a Guatemalan Christian family with a child on campus at no cost. The operating entity is Guatemalan — Fundación Protectora del Niño Huérfano (Funproni) — and this US organisation, four employees in Wheaton, Illinois, raises the money, sends missionaries and hosts visiting teams.
Guatemala
We pulled the spending and outcome counts out of the ministry’s audited statements or annual report ourselves and did the division in public.
Your gift
8,314 gifts of $1 cover one year of family-based residential care for one child, US-donor share. Yours is 0.01% of one.
The division
- per year of family-based residential care for one child, US-donor share
- $8,313
Only the spending on this program line is counted. Read the outcome name: this is the American share of a child-year, not the cost of one. The ministry states that roughly 70% of Casa Bernabé’s funding comes through this US entity, about 20% is raised inside Guatemala by Funproni and about 10% arrives in kind, and it publishes no dollar total for the Guatemalan side — so the real cost of a child-year is higher than this figure and we cannot tell you by how much. In the other direction the number over-attributes, because the single line we divided, "Grants to Casa Bernabé", is wired to Funproni to fund the whole campus: a school whose 350 students include 250 children from the surrounding community who do not live there, a clinic open to neighbours, 129 Families United visits to 46 families, vocational classes, and a transition programme for 21 young adults. We chose this line over total program services because total program services also contains $82,556 of room and board for visiting American teams, which is not care for a child. The denominator is the ministry’s own published floor — "over 100 children" — and it is website copy rather than an audited roll.
Other defensible denominators
- $2,375 each, dividing by students enrolled in Casa Bernabé Christian School — Gives about $2,375 per student-year. The right denominator for the school and the wrong one for residential care: 250 of the 350 come from the surrounding community and go home at night, and the grant also funds the houses, the clinic and the reunification team.
What the ministry advertises
“Nestled on a quiet mountainside near Guatemala City, Casa Bernabé provides care and stability for over 100 children who are courageously rebuilding their lives after abuse, abandonment, or neglect.”
“Within each of our eight family units, children have the security of three daily meals, a warm, safe bed at night and the faithful care of loving adults.”
“94% of every dollar spent in the past year went directly to program expenses.”
“Ten new children joined our Casa Bernabé family this year, and two were reintegrated with their biological families.”
“AID SENT TO CASA BERNABE IN GUATEMALA, TO FEED, CLOTHE, EDUCATE AND EVANGELIZE THE CHILDREN LIVING THERE.”
“Tracks the costs and contributions from short-term visiting teams. These funds cover room, board, on-campus project costs for team members and salaries for teams staff. Any surplus may be used to help with general fund expenses during low donation months.”
Why this is the church’s work
The Psalm does not say God builds institutions for the solitary; it says he settles them in a home, and it gives him the title Father of the fatherless. Eight houses with a married couple in each is the nearest thing an agency can build to that sentence. James makes visiting orphans in their affliction the test of whether religion is real. And the Old Testament closes on a promise about hearts — fathers turned toward children and children toward fathers — which is exactly what a reunification team is reaching for when it drives into a dangerous part of Guatemala to sit with a mother who once harmed her own children.
“Father of the fatherless and protector of widows is God in his holy habitation. God settles the solitary in a home; he leads out the prisoners to prosperity.”
Psalm 68:5–6
“Religion that is pure and undefiled before God the Father is this: to visit orphans and widows in their affliction, and to keep oneself unstained from the world.”
James 1:27
“And he will turn the hearts of fathers to their children and the hearts of children to their fathers.”
Malachi 4:6
Doctrinal position we read: Evangelical, ECFA accredited. "We believe that this is part of the Great Commission. Through faith in Jesus Christ and His provision through many supporters, we are doing just that." — ECFA accredited organisation profile
Our reservations
- A hundred children living on one campus is residential care, and residential care is the most contested model in this region. The mitigations here are real and specific — eight family units with house-parent couples rather than dormitories, a staffed reunification team, and Guatemalan mentor families assigned to children on campus — but the direction of travel in 2025 was inward: ten children were admitted and two went home to their biological families. A donor who believes children belong in families should fund the reunification side of this ministry with their eyes open about the balance.
- Two of seven board members are paid by the organisation. A director received $18,000 for five reported hours a week, and the Director of International Operation, who also sits on the board, received $15,600 for thirty hours. The Form 990 counts five of the seven as independent. Both paid directors are also among the four missionaries whose personal support this organisation raises and tracks in a dedicated fund, whose restricted balance of $56,923 is effectively all of the organisation’s restricted net assets. All of it is disclosed; it is still a small board paying two of its own members.
- Short-term teams did the building. Twenty teams and more than three hundred people came in 2025 and the completed projects were a clinic roof, a school office, a new road, a drainage ditch, a water tank, and paint on the school and the girls’ houses. Those are jobs a Guatemalan mason, roofer or painter would be paid to do, and the audit records no value at all for contributed services, so the documents cannot tell you what was displaced. The financial half of the usual critique does not apply here — the teams paid their own way and more, and we have set out the figures below — but the labour question stands unanswered.
- Everything depends on one grantee that publishes nothing. The audit says the organisation’s main program expense is its contribution to Funproni and that the support "represents the vast majority of Funproni’s revenue". Funproni issues no financial statements a donor can read. The dependency runs both ways, and neither side has a fallback.
- Reserves are about seven weeks. Financial assets available within a year are $147,479 against $1,089,104 of annual expenses, and the organisation holds no property or equipment whatsoever — the campus belongs to the Guatemalan entity.
- No statement of faith is published on the ministry’s own site. The Christian identity is carried instead by ECFA accreditation, by a Form 990 that names evangelism as a purpose of the grant, and by the description of house parents as Christian parents. That is more than most, but there is no doctrinal statement to read.
A judgement about the work, not a measurement of its results. We do not score souls.
Why a dollar goes further here
Income per person in Guatemala is about 14× below the United States.
We are deliberately not leaning on the cost base. Guatemala’s income per person is roughly fourteen times below the United States — real, but a long way from Haiti’s forty-four, and this campus sits near Guatemala City rather than in the cheapest part of the country. The leverage here is structural. First, the payroll is Guatemalan: house-parent couples, a school director, a clinic doctor, social workers and psychologists, all employed by the Guatemalan entity, while the US office is four people. Second, the campus is forty years old and paid for — eight houses, a school, a clinic, a bakery, a road and a water tank — so a gift today buys operating costs on top of assets a donor is not being asked to fund again. Third, and unusually, the visiting teams are net contributors rather than a cost: the ministry’s own fund statement shows the Teams Fund taking in $198,451 against $141,990 of expenses, and it says any surplus may go toward general fund shortfalls. The honest summary is that the exchange rate is moderate and the structure is what does the work.
What creates the leverage
- Local workers, not sent staff — The work is done by believers who already live there. No relocation, no expatriate salary, no home-country cost of living to cover.
- Builds something that lasts — The money buys a well, a building or a piece of equipment that keeps delivering for years after the gift.
- Paid staff unlock unpaid hands — A small amount of paid coordination puts a much larger number of unpaid hours to work.
The cost base, country by country
| Country | Income per person | Below United States |
|---|---|---|
| Guatemala | $6,360 | 14× |
GNI per capita, Atlas method, current US dollars · World Bank · read 2026-09-19
This is a cost-of-living ratio, not a measure of how well the ministry spends. It tells you what a local wage or a bag of cement costs, and nothing about whether the work is any good — the rest of this page is for that.
Desk review
12 of 15
- Gospel centrality
- The Christian purpose is in the federal filing, not just the brochure: the Form 990 describes the grant as aid "TO FEED, CLOTHE, EDUCATE AND EVANGELIZE THE CHILDREN LIVING THERE." The ministry is ECFA accredited, calls its work "part of the Great Commission", places children with "loving Christian parents", runs a Christ-centred school, pairs children with Guatemalan Christian mentor families, and puts Luke 12:48 at the head of its finance page. The one gap is that no statement of faith is published on its own site.
- Is the gospel named and central, rather than implied by the ministry’s history?
- Local leadership
- The strongest local leadership of any cause we reviewed in this region, and it is structural rather than stated. The Guatemalan entity, Funproni, holds the legal and operating responsibility, names the General Director of Casa Bernabé, and its board president is the children’s legal representative under Guatemalan law. The directors of Casa Bernabé are Guatemalan and one of them grew up there. The school director, the clinic doctor and all eight house-parent couples are Guatemalan and named. The US body is four employees who raise money and send teams.
- Is the work led and staffed by believers from the place it serves?
- Financial transparency
- For a $1.1 million organisation the disclosure is unusually full: audited statements, the Form 990 with a completed Schedule F correctly reporting the grant as foreign, an impact report, and a published income statement broken out by fund — General, Teams, Designated and Missionary — which almost no ministry does. Marked down because two published figures do not tie to the audit (see below), because the fund statement’s stated period cannot be reconciled with the audited year, and because Funproni, which actually spends the money, publishes nothing.
- Can an outsider find audited statements, a Form 990, and accreditation?
- Evidence of outcomes
- The 2025 counts are dated and the units are defined: 350 students of whom 250 are from the community, 25 individual education plans, 129 Families United visits to 46 families, ten admissions and two reintegrations, 21 young adults in transition of whom nine have special needs, eight family units, three new house-parent couples. Marked down because the resident roll is only ever given as "over 100", because no count is tied to a spending line, and because the clinic publishes no patient numbers at all.
- Does the ministry publish counts of what was delivered, defined clearly enough to check?
- Cost per outcome is computable
- The numerator is an audited single grant line rather than all program spending, which makes the division more meaningful than most in this directory. Marked down because the denominator is the ministry’s own floor rather than a counted roll, and because this US entity funds only about 70% of the cost, so the result is a donor share rather than a price.
- Are both a spending figure and an outcome count published, so cost per outcome can be divided out?
What we have not verified
- How many children actually live at Casa Bernabé. The homepage says "over 100", undated. The 2025 impact report says 100 of the school’s 350 students come from Casa Bernabé, which corroborates the order of magnitude but is not the same measure — it would exclude any resident too young or too old for school. Our cost per child-year moves by roughly $75 for every child added or removed from the count.
- What a child-year actually costs. The ministry states that about 70% of Casa Bernabé’s funding comes through this US entity, about 20% is raised in Guatemala by Funproni and about 10% is in-kind, and it publishes no dollar figure for the Guatemalan 30%. The figure on this page is the American share only.
- The 94% claim does not tie to the audit. Audited program services are $998,898 of $1,089,104 in total expenses — 91.7% — with fundraising at 4.3% and administration at 4.0%, not the 94/3/3 split the impact report prints. Neither the audit nor the published fund statement reproduces 94% by any arithmetic we could find.
- The published fund statement is labelled "Income Statement by Fund for 2025 (1/1/25-12/31/25)", but its opening balance of $191,983 is within $897 of the audited net assets at 30 September 2025, and its totals — $1,253,092 of income and $1,158,044 of expenses — match neither the audited fiscal year ($1,213,403 and $1,089,104) nor the prior one. The two statements cannot both cover the periods they claim, and nothing explains the difference.
- The Casa Bernabé fund breakdown — Family Units 31%, Education 22%, Technical and Multidisciplinary 17%, General Operations 17%, Holistic Health 11% — carries no dollar total, and its own footnote says the figures are the "actual 2026 budget" excluding special projects. It is a budget rather than a result, and it cannot be converted into spending.
- What Funproni does with the money. It is the Guatemalan foundation that legally operates Casa Bernabé and receives $913,905 of the $1,089,104 this organisation spent. The audit says Funproni "regularly provides financial information to the Organization and presents reports at the Organization’s board of directors meetings"; none of that reaches a donor, and no Funproni financial statement is published.
- What the visiting teams’ labour was worth and whose paid work it replaced. The audit states the value of contributed services "was not material and has not been recorded", while more than three hundred volunteers built a road, a clinic roof and a school office and painted two buildings. The single largest physical input of the year does not appear in the financial statements at all.
- The year of formation. The Form 990 states 1982, with Indiana as the state of legal domicile; the audit says the organisation "was formed in 2004" and the ECFA profile agrees; the website says the children’s home began in 1984. The 1982 date is unexplained.
- The volunteer count. The Form 990 reports 200 volunteers for the year ended 30 September 2025; the impact report says "over 300 team members" across twenty teams in 2025. The periods differ and the definitions may too, but nothing reconciles them.
- Why compensation halved. The Form 990 shows salaries and benefits falling from $203,948 to $108,852 year on year, with four employees. Neither document explains it.
- A wording error in the audit report. Its Basis for Opinion paragraph says "We conducted our audit in accordance with accounting principles generally accepted in the United States of America", where the standard language refers to auditing standards. The opinion itself is clean and unmodified. We flag it because the same small firm also prepares the ministry’s Form 990, so there is no second pair of eyes on the numbers.
- Clinic volumes. The 2025 impact report names the clinic’s doctor, nurse, nutritionist, dental student and volunteer orthodontist, and reports a new roof and water tank, but publishes no count of patients, consultations or dental visits.
Accreditation seen
- ECFA accredited
- Candid Platinum Transparency Seal 2026
- Charity Navigator four stars
Displayed by the ministry on its own pages. We have not re-checked each seal with the accrediting body.
Worth knowing
- The family-based side of this ministry is staffed rather than aspirational, and in a region where institutions are the default that is worth naming. Families United made 129 visits from January to October 2025 to 46 families, eleven of them follow-ups with children already reintegrated, with social workers, lawyers and psychologists working alongside the Guatemalan child-welfare authorities. Mentor Families pairs a Guatemalan Christian family with a child or sibling group on campus for monthly visits and meals, with no money attached — a local sponsorship model rather than an American one.
- Showing the other denominator, so you can see the spread: audited program services of $998,898 divided by the same hundred children is $9,989 a child-year. We publish the lower figure because that total includes $82,556 of room and board for visiting American teams, which is not care for a child.
- On the short-term mission critique, the money runs the opposite way here. The published 2025 fund statement shows the Teams Fund taking in $198,451 — $152,622 of team fees, $35,329 of contributions and $10,500 of administration fees and deposits — against $141,990 of expenses, a surplus of $56,461. That surplus is most of the organisation’s $95,048 net income for the year, and the Teams Fund balance grew from $9,256 to $65,717 while the General Fund ran a $3,753 deficit. Of the Teams Fund’s spending, $128,651 went to Guatemala as transfers and room and board. Team fees are booked as program service fee revenue, and the audit treats them as contracts with customers recognised when the trip is taken.
- Scale, so you can place it: total expenses of $1,089,104, four US employees, seven board members, and $90,206 of management and fundraising for the whole year. This is one of the smallest causes in the directory.
- The organisation rebranded in 2025 from Friends of Children Everywhere to Friends of Casa Bernabé. The Form 990 still lists FOCE.ORG as the website and the posted audit and 990 filenames still begin "FCE-", which matters if you are looking for older filings.
Sources
- Homepage
Ministry website · Friends of Casa Bernabé · read 2026-09-19
Source of the "over 100 children" count used as our denominator, and of the eight family units. Neither carries a date.
- Our Vision
Ministry website · Friends of Casa Bernabé · read 2026-09-19
Names Edgar and Sara Salguero as directors of Casa Bernabé and states the intent "to help keep struggling families together".
- Our Finances
Ministry website · Friends of Casa Bernabé · read 2026-09-19
Explains the two-entity structure and the Joint Ministry Agreement, gives the 70% / 20% / 10% funding split, and displays the ECFA, Candid Platinum 2025 and 2026 and Charity Navigator four-star seals.
- Where Friends of Casa Bernabé Giving Goes
Ministry website · Friends of Casa Bernabé · labelled 1 January to 31 December 2025 · read 2026-09-19
The income statement broken out by General, Teams, Designated and Missionary funds. The table is published as an image, so we rendered it and read the figures ourselves. Source of all the Teams Fund numbers and of the four named missionaries.
- How Giving Helps at Casa Bernabé
Ministry website · Friends of Casa Bernabé · read 2026-09-19
The Guatemalan side, described by fund: Family Units, Education, Holistic Health, Technical and Multidisciplinary, General Operations and Special Projects. The percentages are published as an image with no dollar total, and the footnote says they are the actual 2026 budget.
- FY2025 audited financial statements
Audited financial statements · Friends of Casa Bernabé · FY2025 (year ended 30 September 2025) · read 2026-09-19
Audited by Drake Certified Public Accountants, 25 November 2025. Program services $998,898 of $1,089,104, with a line-by-line functional table. Source of the $831,349 grant line we divided, the $913,905 of total support to Funproni, the related-party note and the liquidity figure.
- FY2025 Form 990
IRS Form 990 · Friends of Casa Bernabé · FY2025 (1 October 2024 to 30 September 2025) · read 2026-09-19
Source of the evangelism language in Part III, the board list and compensation in Part VII, the 1982 formation date, the 200-volunteer count, and Schedule F, which reports the grant correctly as foreign assistance to Central America and the Caribbean.
- 2025 Impact Report
Annual report · Friends of Casa Bernabé · 2025 · read 2026-09-19
Source of every outcome count on this page, the 94% claim, the rebranding announcement, and the list of projects the visiting teams completed.
- ECFA accredited organisation profile
Third party · Evangelical Council for Financial Accountability · read 2026-09-19
Accredited, member since 25 March 2010. Carries the ministry’s own description of its seven programmes, including Mentor Families, and the Great Commission statement we quote as its doctrinal position. Its financial figures match the audit exactly.
- Candid nonprofit profile
Third party · Candid · read 2026-09-19
Linked from the ministry’s own finance page, which displays the Platinum seal for both 2025 and 2026.
- IRS filings for Friends of Casa Bernabé, EIN 56-2467177
Third party · ProPublica Nonprofit Explorer · read 2026-09-19
Filed under the former name, Friends of Children Everywhere, for earlier years.