Enter Gawad Kalinga

I finally met with Gawad Kalinga (GK) today (Wednesday, June 13th). It took a while to find the place, and Karl, his tito, and I got lost a few times. Once we got there we had to wait a few hours for the person we were supposed to meet. But it was totally worth it, and I'm very excited to be working for them.

Gawad Kalinga is a poverty alleviation NGO (non-governmental organization) that helps the poor re-discover their self-worth and dignity through providing shelter, education, and healthcare with the aid of corporate and government sponsors. GK believes that poverty is behavioral, not economic. This is a holistic, psychological approach that makes the organizations different from other NGOs I've encountered. It is also a recipe for real social change in the Philippines. GK is not so much an organization as it is a movement.

The first person we met there was Bai. I want to interview her later, but from brief conversations with her, I learned that, before joining GK, she was a commander of one of the Muslim rebel groups in southern Mindanao. Her father was one of its founders. But after seeing the good work GK was doing in the south, particularly its ability to end fighting between Christian and Muslim families who had been killing each other for generations, she decided to join GK. I'm sure there's more to the story, but I just wanted to offer this tidbit as the tip of the iceberg of dramatic and life-changing stories behind the people who work for GK.

The next person we met was no other than--O'Hagan! O’Hagan was part of my Spring Break group who traveled to the Philippines to work with GK. During that trip, we met with Secretary Alvarez, the Director of Culture and Arts, and speaking with her changed O’Hagan’s life. O’Hagan is very involved with theater at Yale, but she’s also interested in politics, particularly how cultural movements impact national politics, and Secretary Alvarez spoke exactly to that. After our trip, O’Hagan planned to return to the Philippines to work with Secretary Alvarez and Gawad Kalinga. Right now, O’Hagan is still waiting to hear back from Secretary Alvarez, but in the meantime, she’s working for GK on a fledgling program that would bring theater to GK villages. She told me when she was getting her and her cell phone number, and I had tried text messaging her but she had not been responding. Fortunately, she had not been kidnapped; her cell phone just wasn’t working.

After a couple hours of waiting, Karl and I finally met Jaja, who is supervising me. She's very nice and extremely helpful. I explained to her what I want to do for GK: study the organization, evaluate its work, and then write a senior paper on it. She immediately introduced me to the Executive Director of the GK National Office, Tito Luis. The two of them explained to me the programs that GK provides for the poor.

When GK goes into an impoverished community, it offers one program before any others: Kapitbahayan, i.e. Community Association. Before GK builds any houses or provides any services, it wants the community to end any fighting, establish rules its members--also known as beneficiaries--will live by, and come together as one. All the houses and money in the world will be useless if the community cannot cooperate. Its members are building each other's houses and living beside one another as neighbors, but the community needs to realize that it is rising out of poverty together or not at all. More importantly, though, community organization is the first step in giving the poor a sense of ownership, and consequently self-worth and dignity. This is all part of a philosophy called "values formation;" it's not so much the materials and services that GK provides, but an opportunity to change how one thinks and thereby change how one lives. Again, the underlying belief of GK is that poverty is behavioral, not economic.

After community association, GK typically follows up with shelter, the actual house-building part of GK, but there's more to it than that. GK employs a concept of "sweat equity;" members are entitled to a house once they have put in enough hours helping the community, i.e. building someone else's house or teaching the community's children.

The programs that follow depend on the needs of the community. Usually, education is next. More-educated community members have the opportunity to teach schoolchildren for their sweat equity. Other programs that GK offers include healthcare, i.e. providing basic health services, and productivity, i.e. helping beneficiaries develop specialized skills and gain better employment.

There's a lot more to GK's programs, and to the organization itself; like Bai's story, this is just the tip of the iceberg. But there's more to come, and honestly, as of the time of this writing, I'm behind in my blog posts (yikes!) but here some pictures:

The GK top brass: the guy with the white hair is Tito Tony Meloto, founder of GK and a very inspirational figure.


We found O'Hagan!


There's a baby room at the GK office (awww):