Amigos de las Americas
| Founder | Guy Bevil Jr. |
|---|---|
| Location |
|
|
Area served
|
Latin America |
|
Volunteers
|
Over 27,000 |
| Mission | Amigos de las Americas inspires and builds young leaders through collaborative community development and immersion in cross-cultural experiences |
|
Formerly called
|
Amigos de Honduras |
Amigos de las Américas (or AMIGOS) is a nonprofit organization based in Houston, Texas with 25 chapters across the USA. The Vision of AMIGOS is "A world where each young person becomes a life-long catalyst for social change." AMIGOS works towards this vision by inspiring and building young leaders through collaborative community development and immersion in cross-cultural experiences.
AMIGOS was founded in 1965 when 29-year-old Guy Bevil Jr., youth pastor at River Oaks Baptist Church in Houston led a team of 181 teenagers and young adults into Honduras to administer polio vaccinations. The group took donations of supplies, recruited 36 doctors, and learned how to give the vaccines by practicing on themselves. Many participants made the 1,500-mile trip by truck in order to ship the supplies into rural Honduras. The first summer in Honduras, volunteers inoculated over half a million people.
Upon their arrival home, Bevil and his group founded Amigos de Honduras, which grew to be Amigos de las Américas within the next year. Over half of the original participants applied to return the next summer. For the following two decades, AMIGOS focused primarily on administering vaccinations.
AMIGOS has expanded to many different countries including Brazil, Costa Rica, Colombia, Ecuador, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Uruguay, The Dominican Republic, Mexico, and Peru, though some countries do not currently have active projects.
Other founders recognized by AMIGOS are H. Kirby Atwood, Sr., Searcy Bracewell, Raymond Cook, Ed Frank, Jr., Carlos R. Hamilton, MD, Victor Huvelle, Mariann and John Marshall, Ed Morris, and Wilson J. Pais.
Amigos de las Américas is a non-religious, non-governmental, non-profit organization based out of Houston, Texas. AMIGOS sends high-school and college age volunteers to countries in Latin America where they live for six to eight weeks with a host family in a small community.
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Wikipedia