The story of Agros began in 1984 in Guatemala: in the mountainous Ixil triangle where impoverished families were emerging from hiding to rebuild their lives after a heinous civil war.
A man named Skip Li, a young Chinese lawyer living in Seattle, had felt called several years earlier to go to Guatemala. Hearing a Latino missionary speak of the desperate need for land access among the peasant farmers of Central America, he leaned in. The seeds of Agros, and the vision to reunite impoverished farmers with the land that was their livelihood and birthright, were planted.
Skip traveled to Guatemala in 1982 for the first time, and by 1984 began rebuilding what became the first Agros community in a tiny rural village decimated by war. His dream grew to encompass a plan to offer families a fair opportunity to lift themselves out of poverty through a long-term partnership with local staff specializing in a program of land access, agricultural training, financial empowerment, preventative healthcare, and educational access.
Our vision then, as today, was to repair the network of relationships that enable individuals to live dignified and healthy lives within thriving communities – relationships that poverty, exacerbated by civil war, had severed.
Today, we have helped more than 20,000 individuals build new lives for themselves by facilitating land ownership and providing technical assistance, training, capital loans, and village infrastructure to support the work and vision of community members.
We partner with a variety of national and international development organizations. These alliances, along with the Agros in-country and U.S. staff maintain a strong commitment to the accountability and success of Agros’ villages. Agros’ genuine commitment to providing hope and opportunity to the rural poor through private land reform and stewardship has earned the trust of the communities and families we serve.
To read more about the history of Agros and grasp just a sliver of understanding into the powerful and divine orchestration of the growth and transformation of Agros International, click here to buy Agros founder, Chi-Dooh “Skip” Li’s book Buy This Land.
Nothing short of a miracle!
“Kidnapped at age two, a refugee from the Chinese Communist revolution, a man who had seen the world by the time he was sixteen, Chi-Dooh “Skip” Li had earned his comfortable life in America. But a throwaway comment by a man he had never met shook him awake to a shocking realization – an idea he had pursued into the jungles of Guatemala during the height of a brutal civil war, bringing him face to face with a people whose suffering defied imagination. Buy This Land is the unlikely but inspiring story of how lives were forever changed – all because a Spanish-speaking Chinese lawyer from Seattle once said yes to a crazy idea.”
All proceeds from the sale of Buy This Land go to Agros International.
