Help Bring a Philippine Community Out of Poverty

After twelve months of activities funded in large part by a grant from the TripAdvisor Charitable Foundation, we, the Gawad Kalinga Boston team, would like to provide our donors with a detailed report of our activities. Our report is divided into three sections, one for each area of focus: home building, community health and social business.

Home building:

• Identified a community of 78 families (GK Ark of Noah) residing in temporary shelters within the town of Bocaue, Bulacan Province, in the Philippines. The community has been an organized GK community for the past 9 years before GK USA-Boston emerged as a sponsor for the community through the TripAdvisor-GlobalGiving grant.
• Built 20 homes for 20 families at the GK Ark of Noah community, with a promise to complete funding all 78 homes in 3 years.

Community health:

• Funded a more robust 2016 community health internship program
• Provided a more closely-monitored curriculum for two 2 University of Massachusetts Medical School community health interns by providing stipends for US-based and local faculty and coordinators, a big resource boost from 2015;
• Enabled cooperation across different disciplines and stakeholders within the Community and Global Health spectrum:
• A local child psychologist with expertise in community mental health was tapped to conduct a Children & Families community wellbeing workshop and provide mentorship in this area to the interns;
• Formed a partnership with on-the-ground community health experts (CIVIKA), who utilized their network to identify local clinics willing to provide additional nursing assistance for the health clinics and immunization programs implemented through the internship program, and also helped design the updated curriculum and provide academic monitoring for the two interns during their 6-week internship;
• Enabled partnerships with local government units and non-government organizations at the town level and at the national level (Department of Agriculture, local Congressman, local mayor) that led to the following benefits:
• Donations of seeds as well as planting and crop consultation for the urban garden project
• The promise to construct a community kitchen from the town “mayor” (“Barangay Captain”) for residents to cook and share the proceeds of the urban garden project.
• Awarded 2 Bachelor of Science in Nursing scholars who will ensure continuity of community health nutrition program, and monitoring of results of the urban garden initiative;
• Implemented 2015 internship project of distributing emergency readiness kits to 100 families in two GK communities;
• Cost savings due to efficiencies were used to build a children’s library for TWO Gawad Kalinga communities, with 500 books donated by a 3rd-party non-profit group who partnered with GK’s Boston chapter.

Social business:

• Provided funds to create awareness around the social enterprise and development intiaitives:
• Funded 3 awareness events: social business roadshow, the GK5K run and the GK Boston basketball tournament
• Funded the production of a fundraising video explaining the mission to build homes for GK Ark of Noah
• Enabled GK USA to pilot the social enterprise and development internship program
• Sponsored the first social business intern who stayed at the GK Ark of Noah community for a week, and who was asked to create a video of her experience for prospective interns

We look forward to funding continued activity for the 2016-2017 funding cycle and intend to grow our activities to other Gawad Kalinga villages in the Philippines.

Links:

• Join us on September 17 for the "Heroes Build" at GK Ark of Noah