:: SPSAtoday - Society of Philippines Surgeons in America

CITATION for Gawad Kalinga Community Development Foundation Ramon Magsaysay Award Presentation Ceremonies 31 August 2006, Manila, Philippines.

Asia’s vast cities-of-the-poor are visible proof of a hard fact. Despite decades of economic development programs and foreign aid and the earnest efforts of foundations and NGOs, not to mention the sweet promises of politicians, great millions of people in Asia still live in poverty. In the Philippines, nearly half of the country’s 84 million people are credibly said to live below the poverty line. Forty percent of its urban families occupy what the Asian Development Bank calls "makeshift dwellings in informal settlements." Slums, in other words. Antonio Meloto believes these disheartening facts reveal his country’s failure "to work for the collective good." As executive director of Gawad Kalinga Community Development Foundation, he is changing this.

Born to humble circumstances in Bacolod, Central Philippines, Antonio Meloto attended Ateneo de Manila University on a scholarship and embarked upon a successful career in business. In 1985, an encounter with the Filipino Catholic organization Couples for Christ caused him to reassess his life and priorities. Meloto subsequently joined the organization fulltime and, in 1995, launched a work-with-the-poor ministry in Bagong Silang, a huge squatter relocation site in Metropolitan Manila. He called his ministry Gawad Kalinga, "to give care."
In Bagong Silang, Meloto immersed himself in the lives of slum dwellers. He learned that "a slum environment develops slum behavior." But he also found goodness, even in the hardened gang members he met there. Slum dwellers needed love and spiritual nourishment, it was clear. But they also needed dignity and decent living conditions. It was not enough to pray for them, he decided. "We should do something!"
Meloto decided to build houses. Drawing support and volunteers from Couples for Christ, he began transforming the neediest area of Bagong Silang into a viable neighborhood with safe, sturdy, and attractive homes--the first Gawad Kalinga village. In doing so, he formulated guidelines for later Gawad Kalinga projects. New homes would be allotted only to the poorest families. They could not be sold. And although the beneficiaries would not have to pay for their new homes, they would have to help Gawad Kalinga’s volunteers build them and to abide by neighborhood covenants.

As Bagong Silang Village blossomed, Meloto identified new sites for Gawad Kalinga villages and spread word of the project through Couples for Christ. He solicited donations and volunteers passionately, offering "see-for-yourself" exposures to convince skeptics. Through the ANCOP (Answering the Cry of the Poor) Foundation he brought expatriate Filipinos into Gawad Kalinga’s growing web of partners and supporters. Meanwhile, he introduced health, education, and livelihood components to Gawad Kalinga villages to equip the occupants with skills and resources to rise in life.
As word of Gawad Kalinga’s hopeful project circulated at home and abroad, it tapped into a reservoir of longing. Many Filipinos despaired over their country’s stubborn poverty and yearned to do something about it. They flocked to the movement, convinced by Meloto that their money and efforts could really make a difference. Donations soared and Gawad Kalinga villages began to proliferate throughout the Philippines.

Meloto guided the organization to embrace all comers. "We provide the framework," he says. "We also provide the principles; we also provide the spirit. But anyone can come in." This philosophy led Gawad Kalinga into cooperative projects with corporations, civic organizations, families, schools, and government agencies as well as over three hundred governors and mayors. When typhoons destroyed thousands of homes on Luzon in 2005, for example, Gawad Kalinga joined a dozen government agencies and private organizations to build forty thousand new ones. In Mindanao, Gawad Kalinga-led "Peace Builds," fostered by local mayors and built by Christian, Muslim, and indigenous-Filipino volunteers, resulted in hundreds of new homes for displaced Muslim Filipinos.

It is often said that Tony Meloto is the face of Gawad Kalinga. But the movement he spawned is now much bigger than himself. In truth, Gawad Kalinga has thousands of faces. These are faces of every Filipino ethnicity, faith, and social class--of donors at home and abroad who are providing the money and land for new villages; of volunteers across the Philippines who are joining their families, and friends, and schoolmates, and officemates, and fellow church members to build houses and to provide Gawad Kalinga villages with training and services; of executives, lawyers, doctors, architects, and other professionals. These are also the faces of over two hundred thousand grateful beneficiaries.

Today more than eight hundred fifty Gawad Kalinga villages span the Philippines. Alongside those sponsored by expatriate Filipinos, such as Norway Village, Swiss Village, and North Carolina Village, there are more than one hundred others sponsored by major corporations. And this is just the beginning. Gawad Kalinga is committed to building seven thousand new communities by the year 2010.

Gawad Kalinga neighborhoods typically contain fifty-to-one-hundred brightly painted homes and are conspicuously tidy and clean. There are flowers and plants and pleasant walkways, plus a school, a livelihood center, and a multipurpose hall. Participating families are mentored by a Couples for Christ caretaker team that organizes volunteers to assist in education, health, and livelihood projects. In many, clinics provide routine medical care. Through a self-governing neighborhood association in each village, residents are becoming stewards of their own stable and vibrant communities.

The Good, The Crab, And The Ugly

It is not just the spirit of bayanihan that is well entrenched in Filipinos but also the dreaded crab mentality. I believe that these are two ends of one spectrum, the celebratory practice of helping one another and the pulling down of those who succeed by those who fear being left behind. Both are so much a part of the Filipino that he is like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

The recognition of bayanihan as the highest expression of Filipino behavior drove Gawad Kalinga to adopt it as its premier community value. Banking on the awesome power of a deep-seated Filipino spirit, Gawad Kalinga braved the odds and embarked on a vision and mission of dismantling poverty, corruption and violence. Introducing the movement as a simple program of community development, Gawad Kalinga focused on returning dignity as a birthright of the poor by re-engineering his physical and social environment.

When Tony Meloto and a few of his young wards in the Couples For Christ (CFC) community ventured into the largest relocation site of the Philippines called Bagong Silang in Caloocan City, there was no grand plan to initiate a movement called Gawad Kalinga. There was, however, a grand spirit that invited them to cross the line of fear and reach out to young troubled gang members there. The success of CFC in transforming young lives among teenagers in the CFC community emboldened Tony to penetrate one of the most dangerous urban jungles of Metro Manila.

Staging youth camps which mixed young CFC members and gang members of Bagong Silang, Tony was able to witness instant changes on both sides. It took great faith in their mission and trust in their leader to motivate CFC youth to go to Bagong Silang and mingle with gang members over a weekend of immersion. They must have inwardly cringed with trepidation when they saw the types and amounts of weaponry that the Bagong Silang gang members temporarily surrendered before joining the youth camps. But they believed, and believed strongly enough to conquer fear and begin the process of building relationships with strangers from another world.

In that same spirit of healing the divisions between rich and poor, between the peaceful and the troubled, between supported and the neglected, the initial reach out program evolved so naturally to helping not just the affected young gang members but also their families. A decent house was built in place of a demolished shanty, and later more decent and brightly houses were built in clusters as if to develop a new support system – courtesy of generous individuals who provided the first resources to back up a radical experience.

From that first foray into dangerous territory almost 12 years ago, an outreach program has blossomed to the most effective, massive and widely admired community development program and a noble movement for nation building. Gawad Kalinga was awarded the prestigious Ramon Magsaysay Award after two years and more than 600 interviews, and so was its public face and moving spirit – Tony Meloto. After receiving the Ramon Magsaysay Award, Tony Meloto was honored by the 1st Haydee Yorac Award and a stream of several other awards that must have made him the most awarded Filipino within a short period.

More about 1,200 communities and 24,000 homes later, Gawad Kalinga is firmly entrenched as a bearer of hope and a radical approach to nation building. It is blessed by the trust and generosity of the largest local and global corporations operating in the Philippines. It is also recognized, admired and awarded with congressional resolutions thanking Gawad Kalinga for its work as well as active partnerships with governors and mayors.

But by a bizarre twist of fate, Gawad Kalinga's integrity is smeared by a televised remark of a former elder of CFC and now an incorporator of a splinter group who want to set up their own renewal community. His insinuation that Gawad Kalinga may have some problem accounting for the money that it receives to build houses has upset the workers and volunteers of Gawad Kalinga, including corporate partners who have must have done a due diligence check on Gawad Kalinga before giving not just their funds but their corporate name as well.

In the 1st town development summit held by Gawad Kalinga last weekend, Fil-Am Robert Sanchez, CEO of a $500 million IT company, told more than 100 governors and mayors that he is part of a group of successful second generation Fil-Ams who have banded together to advocate for Gawad Kalinga. Before they committed themselves and their resources to Gawad kalinga, they instructed their lawyers to research on Gawad Kalinga and perform due diligence on the organization. In his own words, Robert said, "Gawad Kalinga has no corruption, Gawad Kalinga has no arrogance."

As if to emphasize his trust and admiration of Gawad Kalinga, Robert then told the LGUs in the audience that he would arrange the funding of 100 GK villages within one year's time if 100 governors or mayors would counterpart with land and site development. Notwithstanding the efforts to erode the credibility of Gawad Kalinga by those seen as simply jealous, Robert gave a $5 million pledge and also shared the information that there will be more Fil-Ams committed to build a motherland that they can be proud of, to lift the poor from poverty and provide new hope and opportunities for them.

Perhaps, it was too much to expect that even the most transparent and participatory effort to help the poor and build our nation would find Filipinos inflicted with a crab mentality, eager to pull down the successful so their misery will find company. The bayanihan spirit which fuels the Gawad Kalinga movement is countered by its negative counterpart – the destructive crab mentality.

Fortunately, caring, sacrifice and determination has built for Gawad Kalinga an ocean of goodwill. Partners from business, government, the academe, civic organizations, and the thousands of poor families who have been helped and the millions more who wish for Gawad Kalinga to reach them one day have given their assurances of continued trust. Many of them have offered to help in any way they can. Its fruits bless the labor of love of the tens of thousands who support Gawad Kalinga. Good, after all, may truly be more powerful than evil.

As for the crabs, well, their ugliness can always be transformed. All they need is to be properly steamed to turn from green to red.***

SPSA Facilitates Norfolk Virginia SUMMIT Meeting

April 17, 2007

Open Invitation
to the
FIL-AM LEADERS’ HISTORIC “SUMMIT MEETING”

For All State & National Medical and Civic Leaders in America
Date & Time: Saturday, July 28, 2007 at 2:00 PM
Venue: Marriot Waterside Hotel, Norfolk, Virginia

Dear Fil-Am Physicians and Civic Leaders in America!

Today, we are in the midst of a second wave of miracle, following the 1986 Philippine bloodless revolution! It is actually a gargantuan humanitarian program, blazing the path to true freedom from health and socio-economic bondage in our native land.

This Summit Meeting will apprise you of the breadth and scope of what physician leaders are attempting to do for GK 777 in concert with Taguig, Rizal’s Mayor Sigfred Tinga. It is by using the GK Taguig-Rizal template sponsored by physicians in America, and hopefully by other PMA’s and PMAAA’s and other Civic groups, that Fil-Am expats, tourists and visitors of the Philippines can SEE what unified and collective action can accomplish for Philippine Nation Rebuilding.

With this Priority FOCUS, let us all attend the historic “Summit Meeting” of FilAm Leaders in America sponsored by the SPSA (as facilitator, and with SPSA past president Philip S. Chua, M. D., as Summit Moderator)). Your input during an open FORUM with Mayor Tinga, GK Founder Tony Meloto & Dylan Wilks can provide panoramic insights on what all of us can contribute towards the creation of a NEW Philippines with true freedom and justice for all Filipino people.

Working Together as a People is one giant step towards the fulfillment of our common dream, i.e., To transform the Philippines from a 3rd World Country to a developing and emerging nation in the Far East – the “pearl of the Orient Seas!”

As a true Filipino at heart, you are hereby invited to be a trailblazer in Philippine nation- reconstruction. Work with us and be a pathfinder to peace and freedom. Support our common cause and be counted, so that TOGETHER, we may rewrite Philippine History at its best!

Yours for Philippine Peace & Progress,

Sarie G. Laserna, M.D. and Fe Cacdac, M.D.
SPSA - GK Coordinators

Oscar Laserna, M.D., FACS, FACOG
SPSA – President