Most stories about building something meaningful don’t start with a grand plan. They start with a person, a moment, and a choice to keep going.
For Kimberly Haber, that moment came somewhere in Europe, money running low, far from home, and no real reason to stay except that she wasn’t ready to leave. What she figured out in those years abroad, the hard way, became the foundation for Adelante Abroad and a career built on making sure others don’t have to start from scratch the way she did.
Founding Story: When the Hard Way Becomes the Right Way
After graduating from UC Santa Barbara, Kimberly did what many adventurous grads dream of. She packed her bags and headed to Europe with no job lined up, no network, and no real plan beyond the desire to experience the world before settling into “real life.”
Then reality set in.
Money ran low, but the pull to stay ran deeper. So she did what she had to do: find housing and find work. What followed was a 14-month crash course in everything that can go wrong when a young foreigner tries to build a life abroad. Landlords turned her away. Companies hired her and didn’t pay her. Job descriptions changed mid-employment. Navigating a residence visa, then a work visa, in a foreign country felt like solving a puzzle with half the pieces missing and a price tag to match.
It wasn’t until her fourth job, working as a translator for an attorney who took it upon himself to make sure everything was done by the book, that things finally clicked into place.
After about five years living in Spain, Kimberly returned home with stories, hard-won lessons, and eventually a book. That book caught the attention of a leader in the study abroad field who saw something Kimberly already knew: there was a real gap in the market. At the time, there was nothing quite like what would become Adelante Abroad. So she built it.
“Nearly everyone I came into contact with upon returning home, at both a professional and personal level, all they wanted to talk about once they understood I had been living and working abroad, was how that came to be and how could they do it.”
The answer she built was Adelante Abroad: a structured, supportive path so that others could have the experience she did, without the chaos.
The Impact: From Bilbao to Beyond
Kimberly launched Adelante Abroad’s first program in Bilbao, Spain in 2001, drawing directly on the contacts she had made during her years living there. From those early roots, the organization grew steadily and boldly.
Madrid came next. Then Sevilla. Then Barcelona. From Spain, the programs expanded into Latin America: Oaxaca, Mexico; Viña del Mar, Chile; Quito, Ecuador; and Montevideo, Uruguay. And when a faculty member from the University of Arkansas came to Kimberly with a vision for a program in Scotland (a place where Spanish is decidedly not spoken), she said yes to that too.
Each new destination represents the same core commitment: give students the infrastructure, support, and opportunity they need to show up somewhere new and truly thrive.
A Mission That Continues to Drive Forward
More than two decades later, what gets Kimberly going every day is still the same thing that kept her from boarding a plane back to California when things got hard in Spain.
“What drives me each day is still getting people out of their comfort zones, living and learning in cultures besides their own.”
That belief, that discomfort is where growth lives, is woven into everything Adelante Abroad does. It’s not just about securing an internship or finding an apartment. It’s about what happens to a person when they do.
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