Turning Dreams into Action
A former real estate developer, Leo Abdella has served since 2001 as Missions Pastor and Director of Outreach Ministries at 20,000-member Christ Fellowship Church in Palm Beach Gardens, FL.
Putting his faith and life-philosophy into action, Leo Abdella has been involved in national and international disaster relief efforts including aid to Kosovo war refugees in 1999, the World Trade Center attacks of 2001, the South Asian Tsunami of 2004 and 2005’s Hurricane Katrina.
While preparing for the next disaster crisis, Leo Abdella remains an “Ambassador of Compassion” in ongoing restoration work in the Gulf States ravaged by Katrina, coastal areas of Sri Lanka devastated by the 2004 tsunami and in the continuing humanitarian crises of Haiti. Leo Abdella works with faith-based, Christ-focused leaders to create businesses in inner-city West Palm Beach as incubators for young entrepreneurs; and he works with church and community leaders in the Lake Okeechobee region of south central Florida to serve the needs of the rural farm labor and migrant communities.
He also coordinates faith-based Mission Trips to better the lives of people as close as Miami and The Bahamas, and as far away as Mexico, Costa Rica and Peru.
At the same time, Leo Abdella believes the church is an integral part of the local, national and international community. He focuses on finding ways for faith-based organizations to partner with businesses and governments to meet needs from the neighborhood level to the global level. Incorporating his 30 years of life skills as a successful businessman, Leo Abdella functions as a bridge-builder — joining faith-based initiatives with the community at large through such organizations as Urban Youth Impact, Impact Leadership Network and the Global Priority project.
“It is our goal to provide the expertise and resources that allow a ‘community’ – however you want to define ‘community’ — to help itself,” says Leo Abdella. “In doing so, we are striving to create replicatable tools and models that can serve as an expandable framework for positive change in other ‘communities’ and, eventually, society as a whole.”
Leo was born in Worchester, Massachusetts and raised in nearby Paxton. He and his wife Candace have been married for 39 years and have two children. They live in Palm Beach County, Florida.
