How Social Innovation is Changing the Filipino Diaspora
This past summer, nine young Filipino diaspora leaders spent eight formative weeks in Manila. Hailing from diverse backgrounds, together they built a unique fellowship* that aims to change the very nature of our relationship with the Philippines.
By Daniel Griffith
Kaya Collaborative’s annual cohort of fellows, chosen mainly from Filipino communities across the US and reaching into countries with large diaspora populations, participated in initiatives for systemic change and social entrepreneurship. By engaging with the Philippines first-hand, each broadened their conception of a nation that, in a way, still serves as homeland for us. These critically-minded individuals have a track record of leadership, harbor a meaningful commitment to their Filipino identity, and above all, cultivate a genuine sense of empathy.
Put them together and the result is an intensive (albeit brief) deep-dive into their ever-evolving role: a summer that catalyzes fellows as change agents eager to transform our Filipino diaspora from communities who care about the Philippines into communities who care effectively.
Shaping a Mindset
“We couldn’t feel comfortable teaching something we at first didn’t even know ourselves.” — 2015 Kaya Co. Fellow
Our work plays through many dimensions and intersections, involving immersion within the Philippines while simultaneously thinking of how to bring the experience back to the fellows’ communities at home. Already, graduates of our first fellowship cohort have found themselves conducting research on Philippine social innovation, assembling workshops on identity politics, and holding discussions on disaster resilience. The avenues of engagement are endless and boundless, attributed to these individuals or communities who find themselves able to put their minds together.
Often, there’s difficulty in finding common threads tied through the issues our fellows explore. The questions can span from the hard politics of properly equipping disaster-prone areas, to the challenge of spearheading K-12 education reform, to the fuzzy concepts of ‘systems change’ and ‘social entrepreneurship’.
At the outset, problem-solving may have little to do with flowcharting your way toward a concrete solution, for there may be none. Rather, it begins at a basic level of intentionality: developing awareness of a context or problem and imbuing your approach with the ideas, resources, and people who matter. Our fellows begin that process within themselves, immersing into diverse environments — from indigenous communities to government offices; from business executive meetings to coffee farms in the mountains — and afterward, they find the common threads, using a critical lens to tie them all together.
Not everyone has the opportunity to come to the Philippines on their own, nor does everyone want to. One question then becomes: How do we affect hearts and minds from here? Once outside of the Philippine context, how do we inspire, educate, mobilize? How do we create a catalyst; transform a mind?
Once outside of the Philippine context, how do we inspire, educate, mobilize? How do we create a catalyst; transform a mind?
Experience tells us that the easiest way to learn a language is to immerse ourselves in a community that speaks it; the easiest way to adapt to an environment is to live within it. If our work is to help ourselves understand the Philippines, we should either travel across the Pacific — or bring the Philippines a little closer to home.
Partner Alongside Change
“People don’t realize they have a story to tell until you ask them.” — 2015 Kaya Co. Fellow
The country has 7,107 islands’ worth of stories, and that’s only scratching the surface. We’re sharing a new narrative through stories never told before, because they are stories still new to the country itself. In such unexplored territory, it’s easy for anyone to find their niche, bringing what may have previously seemed vast or unattainable to a personalized, understandable level.
One incredibly important aspect of the fellowship is our work alongside Filipino changemakers, ensuring truly collaborative outcomes and products. There are a myriad of Filipinos for whom education means more than just graduating to find a well-paying job.
We’re sharing a new narrative through stories never told before, because they are stories still new to the country itself.
The social entrepreneurship scene in the Philippines is burgeoning, replete with co-founders, ideators, and co-workers who are filled with initiative to create something of their own, and the energy to sustain their ideas. More than that, they realize their work is not only a means for subsistence, but meant for meaningful contributions to society. They wish to create a Philippines known for its educational innovation, for its leading agribusiness models, for its strength in governance. We support them toward success, acknowledging and celebrating their work.
“An entrepreneur builds something by working with ideas, by working with the unknown.”
– Rico Gonzalez, xchange
Kaya Collaborative’s partner ventures represent just a handful of the Philippines’ most dedicated changemakers, across a variety of fields and advocacies. We are proud and privileged to count ourselves among their friends and supporters. A few, even since just a year ago, have grown by leaps and bounds.
Bantay.ph
Government in the Philippines has long been associated with corruption and stagnation; not just locally, but regionally and internationally as well. It takes immense courage to fight the tides of Filipinos who passively accept corruption as part of their life. Bantay.ph has done just that, starting at an attainable level: the citizen.
Bantay, meaning ‘watch over’ in Filipino, recruited youth volunteers to visit local government offices while legally monitoring their practices, noting their procedures, and collecting feedback from patrons. The data they’ve come up with has formed the basis of a crowdsourced tool for good governance, which includes compliance rates and transparency scores. This has provided a platform to directly address government units, moving toward a regular, collaborative forum where officials can adopt best practices and shed antiquated practices.
In the meantime, with a grant from USAID, Bantay just finished their nationwide ‘Integrity School’, visiting high schools across the archipelago and conducting workshops where students adopt a very basic concept when it comes to government corruption: it doesn’t have to be this way.
Kalsada Coffee Roasters
In 1909, over a century ago, Filipino coffee beans were available in Seattle’s Pike Place Market, a hub for international trade showcasing novelties from around the globe. After the first wave of mass-produced instant coffee (think Folgers), and a second wave of espresso-based individual drinks (think Starbucks), a third wave of specialty coffee has arrived on the scene, a ‘back to basics’ if you will, where people appreciate coffee for its intricacies and origins.
Kalsada Coffee Roasters has dedicated themselves to sourcing Philippine coffee, working directly with every segment of the value chain, from farmers and producers, to roasters and consumers. Their aim is to bring authentic Filipino coffee in all its glory back to the international scene. When Kalsada began, they only had intermittent contact with a group of farmers in the mountain province of Benguet. Over time, Kalsada consistently showed up to the farms, cultivating trust and credibility with farming communities initially wary of outsiders.
This past season saw the resounding success of a crowdfunding campaign, surpassing their financial goal to build a processing station for the farmers, who do most of the painstaking work by hand. Kalsada is currently expanding their partners to include coffee farmers in the southern island of Mindanao, and they have a team building foundations for international export in Seattle, Washington -where their journey began.
HABI Education Lab
‘Education is power’, some have said, but relatively recently some have begun to realize the importance of participatory learning. ‘Design thinking’, pushed forward by the likes of Stanford’s d.school and IDEO, has become a trend around the world, emphasizing empathy, ideation, and innovation.
HABI Education Lab takes it one step further by contextualizing design for a Filipino audience. Their team is made up of full-time educators, developers, and researchers, who all cultivate a mindset of openness, intentionality, and learning from failure. Starting humbly with visiting workshops, they have expanded to fully-fledged ‘open labs’, which bring together dozens of educators, youth, and anyone interested for intensive orientation and design thinking sessions. HABI’s work has touched hundreds of individuals and inspired even more collaborators, who just can’t go back to the way things were before learning to think outside the box.
“This is the first time I’ve been able to truly call someplace home… What do you do after you discover your home?”
– 2015 Kaya Co. Fellow
We hope these experiences in the Philippines have awakened a passion, not only for our work with changemakers, but for the powerful experience of community immersion.
Common Threads
In Manila, Kaya Co. finds a home — because it’s the inspiring leaders, committed to making a difference in society, who make up the same community of friends who won’t let you leave until you’ve eaten something. It’s the young, stubborn entrepreneurs struggling to tackle problems, who understand what it means to fail together but at the same time grow together. Filipinos everywhere emulate these values, and that’s only the first thread that ties us together. We leave it up to you to discover the next.
