Roy Prosterman, founder and Chairman Emeritus of Landesa, passed on February 27, 2025, just a few months short of his 90th birthday.
Roy lived a life of monumental impact. He was a visionary social entrepreneur whose insights, actions, and courage led him to devote his life to empowering the world’s poorest to improve their lives through secure land rights. Indeed, land reforms that Landesa has worked to foster and implement have helped reduce poverty, hunger, and land conflicts for more than 720 million people in scores of countries around the world.
Roy didn’t set out to be a pioneering social sector leader. On the contrary, he started life as a Harvard-educated lawyer with a job at a prominent law firm. That position took him to meet clients in Puerto Rico and Liberia, which in the 1960s were very poor; Liberia did not even have a functioning currency, road system, or telephone service. “This violated my sense of justice and fairness,” Roy later explained. “This just should not be.”
But where many people might bemoan poverty and injustice and then continue with lives of privilege, Roy took action. He left his job to teach law at the University of Washington and while there had a critical insight about land reform, sparked by a law review article brought to him by a student. Roy disagreed strongly with the article’s thesis—that confiscation was an acceptable means of land reform in Latin America—and in 1966 wrote a response in which he quoted figures as diverse as John F. Kennedy, Che Guevara, and Lin Biao while arguing that land reform should be democratic, market-friendly, and include just compensation.
Roy’s article changed the trajectory of his life and arguably the trajectory of the world. He was hired to be the land-law consultant on a study of the land tenure situation in South Vietnam and soon found himself stepping down from a clattering helicopter and entering lush jungle terrain deep in the Mekong delta. Old photos show the young Roy in a hat, sunglasses, and brown hiking shoes, clutching a dogeared notebook as he trudged through rice paddies, spoke to landless farmers, and jotted down the thoughts that would lead to a land-to-the-tiller law in South Vietnam. That law, which was adopted in 1970, helped a million tenant-farmer families become owners of the land they farmed; the New York Times once called it “probably the most ambitious and progressive non-Communist land reform of the 20th century.” This experience—and the insights in that notebook—eventually led to the organization that became Landesa.
Roy founded the Rural Development Institute in 1992 after years of working with governments and other organizations to create pro-poor land policies. The organization, which was renamed Landesa in 2011, was the world’s first NGO designed specifically for partnering with governments to extend land rights to people living in extreme poverty. For two decades, it survived on a shoestring budget of less than $200,000. Roy ran it out of the living room of his modest one-bedroom apartment near the University of Washington. A handful of staff members came to work each day and sat at desks and small tables arranged in the living room; half of the files were kept in the bathtub! And the other half of the files were kept in the kitchen! Yet, lacking even a proper office, he and his small team continuously refined Landesa’s model and created significant impact: as a direct result of their efforts, hundreds of millions of tenant farmers obtained property rights.
Roy wrote books and articles and addressed countless audiences at global forums on poverty and economic security. He won accolades and awards—which is how I first came to know him in 2006, when I was working to oversee the selection process for the Henry R. Kravis Prize for Nonprofit Leadership and the inaugural prize was awarded to Roy. The Kravis Prize was of great importance to Roy. As he later explained, “Our credibility and profile increased, and we invested in development functions. All of this led to various sources of new funding that fueled big efforts to scale.” Landesa’s budget increased considerably and so did the work it was able to undertake. The impact it made securing land rights for the world’s poorest people raised agricultural productivity; improved health, nutrition and even school enrollment in countless communities around the world; and provided a new source of wealth to people living in poverty.
Roy eventually stepped down from active roles at Landesa but remained a major source of admiration and influence in our social sector. When my late colleague Bill Meehan and I wrote our book Engine of Impact: Essentials of Strategic Leadership in the Nonprofit Sector back in 2017, we found ourselves turning to Roy’s work and example repeatedly, in chapters on mission, strategy, insight and courage, scaling and more. All told, his name appears 55 times.
Roy’s impact on the world through Landesa and on the field of social entrepreneurship is nothing short of profound. Roy and Landesa’s accolades–including the Skoll Award for Social Entrepreneurship, Conrad N. Hilton Humanitarian Prize, Global Hero Award, LUI Che Woo Prize and Gleitsman International Activist Award–only scratch the surface in recognizing what he accomplished. May his example inspire countless other leaders and organizations, at this moment when the world’s most vulnerable citizens need and deserve such visionary leadership.