Agros Blog

Agros lost a great friend on December 8, 2007.

Don Valencia, board member since 1995, and co-chairman of the board from 2000-2007, died of liver cancer after a 15-month battle that was inspirational to all who knew him.

The possibility of cancer was first discovered during an Agros board retreat at the Valencias’ Whidbey beach home in late September 2006. His casual statement about a persistent pain in his side during dinner the first night of the retreat caught the attention of Larisa Kaukonen, another board member and a physician. She insisted he go to the emergency room immediately, and told him she would go with him. Many tests and several different diagnoses later, the worst was confirmed: metastasized stage-4 cancer of the liver and lungs.

Driving to the Whidbey house in the early afternoon before other board members arrived for that retreat, Don was overcome with the realization that the most important thing in life is to love and be loved. It was a powerful truth that gripped his life and set the course for the next year and three months.

Concurrent with discovering the cancer, he found a new and intimate love for Jesus. New insight from scripture leapt out at him. He shared those insights with friends far and near. Those close to him witnessed a re-making of the man. For the entire 15 months, God was daily chiseling away and shaping Don into an entirely new being.

His love for his wife Heather deepened immeasurably. As with so many men who accomplish so much in life, he was not an easy man to be married to. The cancer opened his eyes to how he had let so many other things cut into his relationship with Heather.

He also saw his two boys, Johnny and Bo, with new eyes. He was eager to spend time with them, to rejoice in their successes, and to teach them the marks of mature manhood. He had long wanted to write a book for his boys that would contain all a father would want to say to his sons. This wish had its unplanned realization in a blog he began to write in October 2006 through a site (donvalencia.com) designed by a close friend from Starbucks days. His blog entries, written and video, described his “dancing on the edge of heaven,” and were filled with remarkable candor and transparency. People who did not even know him were inspired by his entries, written straight from the heart.

For the first three years of his Agros board tenure, Don was an irregular participant. His job as Senior Vice President for Research & Development at Starbucks consumed his time and thinking. In the fall of 1998 he decided to go on a University Presbyterian Church service team trip to an Agros project in Guatemala, thinking he would then resign from the Agros board after the trip. But his encounter with the rural poor both broke and captivated his heart, and he resigned instead a year later from Starbucks, and began to pour his efforts into Agros.

In 2000 he agreed to assume a co-chairman role with me. I cannot say enough about what a great partner he became to me, as we divided up the responsibilities of the chairman’s position. He preferred the “inside” chores of helping our President, Greg Rake, build the organization’s infrastructure, capacity, professionalism and accountability, and gladly left the more “public” aspects of the chairmanship to me. We had complete trust and confidence in one another, and for six years we traveled together and communicated almost daily by phone, email, text message or face-to-face times about Agros and a number of other business, non-profit, and community ventures. Aside from my law firm, there was little I was involved in of any significance that Don was not part of in an integral way.

Before the organization was able to hire a top-flight CFO like Jean Ingebritsen, Don oversaw the design and implementation of budgeting and financial tracking systems that were light years ahead of legacy systems the organization used when its budget hovered around $65,000 per year.

He was always willing to travel on short notice. Our national staff and board members in the various countries with Agros villages came to love and respect “don Don” for his analytical mind and his love for the poor.

What a man - scientist, artist, businessman, follower of Jesus and friend of the poor. He was blessed with a top-flight mind early, and a burning compassion for the poor later. Those of us privileged to know him have been deeply touched by a life well lived, and capped by a magnificent finish.