For more than 30 years, the Corazones Libres Foundation has provided education and health services to residents of San Jose in San Lucas Sacatepequez. This is the town where the Tillandsias garden of Exportaciones de Productos Guatemaltecos (EXPROGUASA) is located. The company even donated part of its land to build a public school.

For 17 years the company also provided electricity, clean water and daily food for children at that public school and afterwards the school was officially given the Municipality of San Lucas Sacatepequez for its management.

In 1987, two health clinics were opened with the support of Dr. Angel Juarez, who offered services and medical treatments completely free of charge for low income families of Sacatepequez.

These actions were promoted by EXPROGUASA, a company member of AGEXPORT’s Ornamental Plants Commission. At first, the objective was to provide education for the children of workers of the company. Yet, when the company realized of the needs of the village, the company increased the coverage for all rural families of the area.

The Foundation later expanded to Vuelta Grande in Sacatepequez, where it started providing free medical attention to all residents of the community. Years later it saw the need of free education in the community which led to the construction of an elementary school that hosts 100 children and provides daily breakfast and lunch for all students.

As well, the Foundation also built a medical clinic and dental care center inside its facilities to attend people of Vuelta Grande, La Cumbre and Agua Colorada, with free-of-charge consultations on Sunday mornings.

The Corazones Libres Foundation has the mission to empower people of its community through different development projects. The foundation also offers daily literacy classes for adults, cut and confection training, and other professional training on handcrafts, electricity and agriculture techniques after the elementary school classes. This benefits more than 350 families for areas near Antigua Guatemala; said Mrs. Ingrid Juarez Brenner, president and founder of Corazones Libres Foundation.

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, on March 2020 the foundation had to suspend school classes as ordered by the government. We did not want for our children to be left without receiving their daily breakfast and lunch, despite the government’s order to suspend classes. So at the Foundation, we started gathering food supplies to give to the families of our children; said Mrs. Juarez.

Starting in March and until now, Corazones Libres has delivered food supplies on four different occasions, helping 60 different families on each one for a total of 240 families supported with this program.

Our goal is to deliver more food supplies to other families in need. We were happy to get the support from AGEXPORT’s Ornamental Plants Commission, which gave us a monetary donation to purchase the supplies and be able to distribute food to other families of Sacatepequez; said Mrs. Juarez.

The Corazones Libres Founation thanked the donation from AGEXPORT, which allowed them to support 50 new families of the Vuelta Grande village. If you want to support Corazones Libres Foundation (FUNCOLI) either with food donations, medicines or personal hygiene products, please call (502) 5202-1800 or (502) 4586-5424 or write an e-mail to fundacioncorazioneslibres@gmail.com