Ayala Foundation at 50 - the Golden Years
By
Vicky P. Garchitorena
50th Anniversary of AyalaFoundation Inc.
March 23, 2011
Thank you so
very much, Jaime, for your very kind words. It is really I who should thank
you, for having given me the opportunity
to work with the foundation. These past
22 years have been the best years of my life, primarily because you, Jaime, and
Fernando have allowed me to spread my
wings and to fly as high as I can, with
your full and unstinting support and
friendship.
I must say that, in addition to the three factors your mentioned—passion, commitment, and partnership—the foundation’s successes have been due in large measure to the inspiring and empowering leadership that the three of you have gifted us with. We have also been blessed with a constant and continuing harvest of foundation executives and staff who have given so generously of themselves. Each one of them and their teams have imbued the foundation with that rare quality of a dynamic institution where each one has found his or her individual passion. I was also fortunate in having met Mrs. McMicking, whose gentle ways, quiet generosity, and graciousness captured my imagination as a role model for us at the foundation.
I almost cannot believe that my journey at the foundation has spanned 22 years, almost half of its existence.
Parang kahapon lamang.
It seems like only yesterday when I met Jaime Augusto and Fernando for breakfast at the coffee shop of the Mandarin Hotel in July 1989. As we talked about their vision for the foundation, it quickly became clear to me that I had found my home.
From my first day at work, our Chairman and Vice Chairmen were deeply involved in charting the course of the foundation. They supported our ideas, innovations and initiatives, not only with funding but, more importantly, with their presence, their interest, their insights, their support, and their encouragement.
Together, we began a journey to transform the foundation into one of the most dynamic, strategic, pioneering development institutions in the country. From a P3 million budget in 1989, it is now at a level of about P300 million a year. From a staff of about 25, we are now at about 140.
The museum at that time was opened to visitors only by appointment. Today it is a gleaming “crown jewel” in Greenbelt, attracting about 100,000 visitors a year and hosting exciting events almost every week, from cutting edge exhibitions in the visual arts to jazz, to lectures on design, Philippine history, and culture. Its collection has been augmented by purchases and loans of exquisite pieces, capped by the stunning gold collection that, experts say, may necessitate a review of our country’s history.
The managers
and staff were then housed in the museum and in the Makati Stock Exchange
Building, but they might as well have lived on either side of the Pacific Ocean
- art and culture on one side and social development on the other. They did not
really know each other and had no idea of what each group was doing. Over the
years, we have developed a strong team of dedicated individuals who respect
each other, and eagerly seek ways of working together to enrich and sustain
each program.
TRANSFORMATION AND EVOLUTION
How did we achieve it?
Our first major decision was to rename the foundation – from Filipinas Foundation to Ayala Foundation. This move positioned the foundation as the concrete expression of the Ayala Group’s corporate social responsibility. At the same time, it allowed the companies to use CSR as a strategic management tool, then a very novel idea and a far cry from the prevailing conservative notion of one’s left hand not knowing what the right hand was doing.
So the first order of the day was to find the best solutions to the social problems that beset the companies. For Ayala Land, it was the need to develop a good relocation program for informal settlers on their properties. The prevailing solutions then were to file ejection cases, which could take forever, or to use the military, which would have been a PR nightmare and did not conform to our values. Together with Ayala Land, we developed the Integrated Community Development Program. Our social workers undertook painstaking social preparation visits with the relocatees, explaining the process and what they could expect. The families were given a small lot with a starter home in a developed property not far from schools, markets, and jobs. In addition, one member of each family was offered skills training that can be parlayed into a job or a loan to set up micro-enterprise. Also, their formal and informal leaders were trained to manage their homeowners’ association, youth club, mother’s circle, and cooperative, so that we leave behind a legacy of an empowered community. The program was then considered a best practice in relocation.
EDUCATION AT ITS CORE
However, we kept true to the initial vision of our founders that education was the key to improving the quality of life of every Filipino and through them, to the full and equitable development of the country.
As the needs
of the country had evolved, we transformed our
programs from voc-tech scholarships
to a number of strategic educational initiatives to improve the quality of
education in our public school system, where 90% of our children and youth are
enrolled. Among them:
CENTEX, which runs two public schools in Tondo and Batangas offering very bright children of very poor families the very best quality education. It was conceived as a laboratory school to determine what interventions can be introduced to the public education system to improve the quality of education. About 1,000 children are enrolled in the two schools at any one time, and our first batch of kindergarten students are entering their third year in college. DepEd Sec Armin Luistro , who recently visited CENTEX Tondo without prior notice to the principal, sent a text message to us saying how impressed he was, “not just by the facilities and programs but most importantly, by the teachers’ competence and dedication. Such a great school needs to be duplicated, perhaps at a lower cost.”
GILAS, a Multisectoral Social Consortium convened by the foundation, together with DepEd, CITC, corporations, business associations and funding agencies to put computer labs with internet access in all our public high schools.
CENTEX, which runs two public schools in Tondo and Batangas offering very bright children of very poor families the very best quality education. It was conceived as a laboratory school to determine what interventions can be introduced to the public education system to improve the quality of education. About 1,000 children are enrolled in the two schools at any one time, and our first batch of kindergarten students are entering their third year in college. DepEd Sec Armin Luistro , who recently visited CENTEX Tondo without prior notice to the principal, sent a text message to us saying how impressed he was, “not just by the facilities and programs but most importantly, by the teachers’ competence and dedication. Such a great school needs to be duplicated, perhaps at a lower cost.”
GILAS, a Multisectoral Social Consortium convened by the foundation, together with DepEd, CITC, corporations, business associations and funding agencies to put computer labs with internet access in all our public high schools.
With funding support from the members of the consortium, legislators, as well as the Filipino diaspora in the US and matching funds from local governments, GILAS has to date connected more than 3,000 public high schools to the internet. It is transforming a whole generation of Filipinos into computer and internet literate adults capable of competing in the workforce, whether here or abroad.
GILAS is arguably the largest private-sector led nationwide program in education which has had a significant impact on the sector it focused on. The government has since announced, first that it will sustain the computer labs with monthly allocations; and lately, that DepEd will finish the program by June this year.
It is also, we believe, a best practice in Public-Private Partnership for Development and an example of how competitors in the business arena can rise above their commercial interests to work together for a national good. In fact, it was cited in the Philippine Government Report on the Millennium Development Goals as a best practice in global partnerships.
Text2Teach is also a technology based delivery system for learning videos on science, math and English for Grades 4, 5, and 6. It is coupled with intensive teacher training to maximize the power of the videos.. With initial funding from Nokia, Globe and other companies, it has improved the NAT scores in about 400 under-resourced elementary schools. I am delighted to announce that we have reached an agreement with Nokia, Pearson Foundation, Globe, and DepEd to bring the project to 850 more schools starting this June.
But even with the success of these educational initiatives , we realize that we cannot be monitoring and sustaining all of them. We have therefore decided to launch a new program called Enabling Education Communities. It is a program to harness the power of multisectoral partnerships at the local level to prioritize the education of our children. An Education Summit is held to get a commitment from: the parents to make sure their children stay in school; the DepEd to deliver good quality education; the local government to offer leadership and resources; and the business community and civil society to support these efforts.
Beyond academic excellence, the Ayala Young Leaders Program was launched 13 years ago to develop values-based servant leaders for the future. It has since become one of the most prestigious youth leadership programs in the country. Its alumni now undertake their own social development programs through their 23 chapters. And, in response to persistent requests from universities to train more student leaders, we have developed a campus based and community based leadership program that follows the format of the annual Ayala Young Leaders Congress.
ENVIRONMENT
ENTREPRENEURSHIP
The most significant and innovative program of the foundation in entrepreneurship is our Technology Business Incubator Program. With funding from the World Bank and through a strong partnership with the University of the Philippines and a large number of researchers, scientists, and venture capitalists, TBI has assisted tech start-ups; run tech boot camps; hosted forums on innovative technologies; and harnessed venture capitalists to invest in struggling technology-based enterprises.
The program has focused attention on an area that before then has been largely ignored – the needs of budding entrepreneurs for practical training and hand-holding in the challenging arena of technology.
DIASPORA PHILANTHROPY
Possibly the best example of the foundation’s ability to blaze new trails is our entry into the realm of diaspora philanthropy. Ayala Foundation USA was started in the year 2000 with the thought that perhaps some of the overseas Filipinos were already in a position to go beyond sustaining their families to giving back to the cities and towns where they grew up.
Despite the huge challenges of practically flying blind in a country as big as the United States, we found highly respected, successful Filipino Americans to serve on our board as well as thousands of FilAms who were just searching for ways of giving back to the country of their birth. Over the past ten years, AFUSA was able to generate about $10.5 million from about 7,000 donors.
Late last year, we successfully turned the foundation over to its natural stakeholders – the Filipino Americans themselves - who now lead the Philippine Development Foundation. Its focus will be on how to create a strong and robust science and technology sector as the impetus for accelerating economic growth and improving our global competitiveness.
MANGYANS ANCESTRAL LAND TITLE
One of the programs we are proudest of is our partnership with the Mangyans of Mindoro through the initiative of Jaime and Bea. Through scholarships, there are now a number of Mangyan college and voc-tech graduates working in the community. But their greatest success is in obtaining their Certificate of Ancestral Domain Title over more than 5,000 hectares of land. The challenge is now to harness the wisdom of the elders together with the modern skills of those who have been formally educated in order to oversee the sustainable development of their ancestral domain.
THE AYALA BRAND
Ayala Foundation’s most successful environmental program is its Solid Waste Management program. It was piloted in a few Ayala-owned buildings with funding from the UNDP to educate building owners, administrators, and workers in the principles of segregation and recycling to reduce the amount of waste that has to go to our landfills. Today, the vast majority of buildings, mall tenants, residential condominiums, and subdivisions in Ayala developments have integrated the principles of SWM into their operations. Hundreds of tons of waste material are recycled into useful products; saving millions of pesos in trucking fees and giving additional income to livelihood groups in the communities around the developments.
ENTREPRENEURSHIP
The most significant and innovative program of the foundation in entrepreneurship is our Technology Business Incubator Program. With funding from the World Bank and through a strong partnership with the University of the Philippines and a large number of researchers, scientists, and venture capitalists, TBI has assisted tech start-ups; run tech boot camps; hosted forums on innovative technologies; and harnessed venture capitalists to invest in struggling technology-based enterprises.
The program has focused attention on an area that before then has been largely ignored – the needs of budding entrepreneurs for practical training and hand-holding in the challenging arena of technology.
DIASPORA PHILANTHROPY
Possibly the best example of the foundation’s ability to blaze new trails is our entry into the realm of diaspora philanthropy. Ayala Foundation USA was started in the year 2000 with the thought that perhaps some of the overseas Filipinos were already in a position to go beyond sustaining their families to giving back to the cities and towns where they grew up.
Despite the huge challenges of practically flying blind in a country as big as the United States, we found highly respected, successful Filipino Americans to serve on our board as well as thousands of FilAms who were just searching for ways of giving back to the country of their birth. Over the past ten years, AFUSA was able to generate about $10.5 million from about 7,000 donors.
Late last year, we successfully turned the foundation over to its natural stakeholders – the Filipino Americans themselves - who now lead the Philippine Development Foundation. Its focus will be on how to create a strong and robust science and technology sector as the impetus for accelerating economic growth and improving our global competitiveness.
MANGYANS ANCESTRAL LAND TITLE
One of the programs we are proudest of is our partnership with the Mangyans of Mindoro through the initiative of Jaime and Bea. Through scholarships, there are now a number of Mangyan college and voc-tech graduates working in the community. But their greatest success is in obtaining their Certificate of Ancestral Domain Title over more than 5,000 hectares of land. The challenge is now to harness the wisdom of the elders together with the modern skills of those who have been formally educated in order to oversee the sustainable development of their ancestral domain.
THE AYALA BRAND
Our
50th anniversary logo includes the three
words - ENVISION, EMPOWER, EXCEL
These words
echo the values that drive the Ayala Brand. Indeed, we at the Foundation are
ever conscious that we too must operate at the same levels of innovation,
excellence and good governance that the Ayala Group has come to be known for.
So Ayala Foundation, under the leadership of our Board of Trustees, has played an important part in:
(1) The launch of the Ayala Group-wide Social Initiatives focused on the three Es of
Education,
Entrepreneurship and the Environment
(2) The mandate given to all the
companies to integrate their corporate social responsibility into the very core
of their operations and to find that sweet spot where the public good especially
for those at the base of the pyramid, is served in a sustainable and profitable
manner;
(3) The commitment to embed the principles of sustainable development
into their business models and to report on this effort through the first- ever
conglomerate-wide Sustainability Report in the country.
On the part of the foundation, and as we look forward to the next 50 years, we are looking at three other words to guide us: STRATEGIC, SCALABLE, SUSTAINABLE. These will be the types of programs that we will focus on:
(4) Strategic programs that make a permanent improvement in the lives of the individuals and communities we seek to serve.
(5) Scalable programs that can be
replicated nationwide to ensure that all Filipinos can benefit from them.
(6) Sustainable programs that will continue beyond us.
THE NEXT 50 YEARS OF AYALA FOUNDATION
As our Chairman has said earlier, these goals can be achieved only by bringing together all the values that have guided us for the past 50 years –
- The passion to serve the poor and underprivileged
- The commitment to find the best solutions to the most complex and difficult social problems that beset them
- The passion to serve the poor and underprivileged
- The commitment to find the best solutions to the most complex and difficult social problems that beset them
- The humility to ask help from others who share with us our vision for our country and our people, so that in strong bonds of partnership, patriotism, and friendship, we can achieve the lofty goals we set for ourselves.
Tonight, we recommit ourselves to those ideals:
-To envision a future that embraces all Filipinos
-To empower our community partners to shape their own future
-To excel in everything we do in the service of the country
and our people
Through strategic, scalable, and sustainable programs that
will live on beyond any one of us in this room tonight.
On behalf of our trustees, officers, and staff, I thank you
from the bottom of my heart for joining us in this celebration of our enduring partnership.
We look forward to working with you all in the next 50 years!
Mabuhay and God bless you all!
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