Building thriving local economies and revitalizing Andean livelihoods

At 4,000 meters, the 263 Quechua families of the Andean Pastoral Livelihood Initiative (APLI) hold a landscape together with their alpacas, their water, and a way of organizing collective life that is older than any market. Our work strengthens that organizing capacity — and lets everything else follow from it.

The Problem

Three pressures are converging on these highlands. The fiber market is extractive: intermediaries capture most of the value, and families receive prices that no longer justify the labor of producing wool. The bofedales — the high-altitude peatlands that act as the region's natural water infrastructure — are drying and being drained, eroding the hydrological function that pasture, herds, and downstream cities all depend on. And generational succession is breaking: young people watch their parents struggle and choose to leave. It is a rational choice. Without livelihoods worth inheriting, the knowledge that stewards these landscapes leaves with them.

Our Solution: Governance as the Building Block

Everything we do rests on one foundation: community governance. When families organize and make decisions collectively over their shared territory, the rest becomes possible. Strong governance activates the cultural values — Ayni, Minga, Mita — that drive landscape restoration at scale. That restoration becomes the basis for community conservation agreements. Those agreements unlock public finance and price premiums for regeneratively produced fiber. Governance is not one component among many; it is the keystone the whole structure depends on. Restoration follows it. Public finance follows it. Technical assistance follows it.

Community-Led

The families lead. They participate directly in the participatory budgeting processes that direct public finance toward their own watersheds. They write the grazing and natural-resource management plans for their shared land — collectively deciding how to rest, rotate, and recover it. And the Andean principles of reciprocity and communal labor — Ayni, Minga, Mita — are not folklore here; they are the operating system for large-scale restoration. A sense of duty and community service mobilizes hundreds of people to work the land in a way no contractor ever could. We treat that as the most powerful restoration force available, and we build the program around it.

How We Restore

The interventions are low-cost, hands-on, and community-executed. Rotational grazing relieves overgrazing pressure and rebuilds pasture function. "Acupuncture" restoration reconnects peatland hydrology by hand — restoring the water-holding capacity of incised and drying bofedales. Families run their own participatory monitoring, so the data belongs to the people making decisions. And critically, we act as technical partners to communities — helping them formulate and submit the public investment projects that finance peatland and rangeland restoration at watershed scale. We don't deliver restoration to communities; we equip communities to command the public resources that fund it themselves.

Why It Reaches Beyond the Community

Seen systemically, this is natural-infrastructure investment. Functioning bofedales regulate flow, store water through the dry season, and underwrite the security of watersheds that supply cities far downstream — hydrological services worth far more than the cost of restoring them. Regeneratively produced alpaca fiber, meanwhile, is precisely what responsible brands are now seeking to source. The same governance that revitalizes livelihoods produces water security for hundreds of thousands of people and a regenerative product the market demands.

Why It Connects

It is one system, and governance is its root. Organized communities activate cultural values; those values drive restoration; restoration anchors conservation agreements; agreements unlock public finance and fair prices; fair prices make pastoral life worth inheriting again. By placing Quechua governance and knowledge at the center — not as a courtesy, but as the mechanism — we rebuild the ecological and economic foundation of Andean life, and give the next generation a livelihood worth staying for.

Who We Are

APLI — the Andean Pastoral Livelihood Initiative — represents 263 Quechua families stewarding 60,000 alpacas and 6,000 hectares of bofedal in Pitumarca, Cusco. CALOR, a nonprofit, provides the infrastructure across four pathways: landscape stewardship, biocultural governance, multi-stakeholder partnerships, and integrated capital. We don't bring a model to these mountains. We strengthen the one the communities already hold.