San Marcos Foundation

San Marcos Foundation (SMF) is a 501(c)3 nonprofit that launches community-led, sustainable  development programs. We are currently focusing our program on the indigenous Mayan population in the highlands of Guatemala, Central America.  We develop models that can be adopted more broadly by other underserved communities in Guatemala, Central America and around the world.

San Marcos La Laguna hosts our pilot programs.  It is a Mayan village of roughly 5,000 indigenous people in the Solola province of Guatemala, on lake Atitlan where close to 40% of families live on less than $2 USD per day. Up to 70% of children in this region experience chronic malnutrition - this is comparable to rates in North Korea in the 1990’s, and higher than the two current highest rates worldwide: Burundi (56%) and Papua New Guinea (50%). Our best known project, ‘One Egg a Day’, or ‘Un Huevo al Día’, is a nutritional outreach program providing each elementary school student one egg a day every morning and better preparing them to learn. In the coming months we will be developing plans and raising funds to launch the community’s first chicken (egg laying) farm, in order to provide eggs for this and future nutrition programs and teach youth programs involving entrepreneurship, agriculture, financial education and empowerment.