The Social Change Challenge
THE SOCIAL CHANGE CHALLENGE
PR: PURSUING REFORMS
Keynote Address, 16th National Public Relations Congress
September 10, 2009 Manila Hotel
by Bienvenido F. Nebres, S.J.
President, Ateneo de Manila University
First of all, warmest congratulations to the Public Relations Society of the Philippines as you hold your 16th National Public Relations Congress. Greetings to Butch Raquel, President of PRSP, Barbie Atienza, Chairman of the 16th National Public Relations Congress, the Past Presidents and Officers of the PRSP and other members of the Organizing Committee for the Congress. Thank you for you kind invitation for me to address you on this important topic.
In January of this year, as part of our 150th anniversary celebration, our Sesquicentennial, we had a symposium with Presidents of partner universities around the world on the theme of “Universities on the Frontiers of Change.” In my opening address, I spoke about our own journey in search of how we could really contribute to social reform, to nation-building. The themes of our Sesquicentennial have been Celebrating Excellence, Deepening Spirituality and Building the Nation. I spoke in my address on our search for what really builds the nation.
I traced the growth in understanding of social change and social reform at Ateneo de Manila:
- In our first 100years, our understanding was that we could contribute to social change by educating good leaders. The words used then was Sapientia et Eloquentia – giving them solid learning and eloquence, the ability to express and communicate well. Together with solid virtues. This was the goal of most universities. If you looked at the vision-mission of Harvard, Yale, and Princeton in the early 20th century, it would be to educate learned and virtuous young men, eventually young women, who would be leaders of their nation. So, the belief was that social change would come if we had learned and good leaders. In some ways, this is still our dominant belief – we keep looking for leaders who will bring about social change.
In the early 1970s, our Jesuit Superior General Fr. Pedro Arrupe challenged us to go further in his famous speech “Men and Women for Others”. He said:
Today our prime educational objective must be to form men-and-women- for-others; men and women who will live not for themselves but for God and his Christ – for the God-man who lived and died for all the world; men and women who cannot even conceive of love of God which does not include love for the least of their neighbors; men and women completely convinced that love of God which does not issue in justice for others is a farce.
Thus in the 1970s, when I was Dean of Ateneo College, we started conscientization, immersion and exposure programs. We developed programs to work with and organize farmers, urban poor, workers. Our theory of social change then was that change would come if, on the one hand, we created organization and capability below among the poor and, on the other hand, conscientization and responsiveness from the top, from leaders.
In the late 1980s, early 1990s, we went further and began to speak of “Professionals for others” – challenging our students to ask how their professional expertise can contribute to creating a better life for the poor. Our law students now have to do a thesis and they are asked to show how the law can really benefit the poor and marginalized. Our business students are asked in their senior paper to do the same. More to the point for Public Relations Professionals, we ask our students in their senior communications thesis to show both expertise in communications and how their expertise will contribute to social reform and social change.
But as we entered the 1990s, we were faced with the fact that, while our neighbors in East and Southeast Asia, had made great progress in overcoming poverty, the social landscape of the Philippines had not really changed. Poverty remains as entrenched as before. There is a book about the Philippines by an American Southeast Asian specialist, David Timberman, whose title keeps coming back to me. The title is “A Changeless Land” and it comes from a passage in F. Sionil Jose’s, “My Brother, my Executioner”. The book asks: “How could a nation that has gone through so many changes actually have changed so little?” and “Does a mechanism exist to enable peaceful and positive change in the future?” We have had so many elections, martial law, two EDSAs, many changes, but really little change. A Jesuit visitor from Chile told me the other day that he was here 25 years ago to look into housing for the poor in Tondo. He visited Tondo again and he said sadly, “It has not changed.”
Thus, in articulating our vision/mission in 1994, we realized that contributing to “Closing the Poverty Gap” had to become an explicit institutional goal of the Ateneo. It could not be just a consequence of educating good leaders. We had to ask how we, as an institution, were contributing to closing the poverty gap.
We began to understand better what Gunnar Myrdal meant by “soft states.” That at the heart of the unchanging landscape of poverty were weak or soft political, social and economic institutions. We decided that, beyond forming individuals, we had to engage key social institutions. Educating leaders and professionals for others continues to be important, but they will only create effective change if they transform key social institutions.
Let me illustrate this by two stories. One local, one foreign.
In early 2005 after Typhoon Yoyong, Ateneo went to Gabaldon, Nueva Ecija to work with Gawad Kalinga in building homes for those displaced by the landslides. We chose Gabaldon, because our Loyola Mountaineers had been climbing there for over 20 years and had a special affection for Gabaldon. In that work, we met two lady mayors, Mayor Sonia Lorenzo of San Isidro and Mayor Baby Congco of Cabiao. We started working with them on improving their schools with the Ateneo Center for Educational Development, health programs through our Leaders for Health Program, building homes for the poor with Gawad Kalinga. Our School of Government now delivers a Masters in Public Management for several towns in Nueva Ecija.
The story is mainly about Mayor Sonia Lorenzo. She started focusing her efforts on delivering basic services, esp. improving her elementary and high schools, public health by providing PhilHealth for nearly everyone, building homes for the poor with Gawad Kalinga. To achieve this she engaged many partners, local government agencies like the DSWD and the DOH, the private sector. She told us how this work brought about change. “Dati alas 5 lang n.u., nakapila na ang mga tao sa bahay, dala dala ang receta, dahil mayroong maysakit sa pamilya.” Now they no longer line up at her house. They know there is a system with Philhealth and the system works. She has transformed a key institution of health. Similarly with her schools.
In 2007, when she ran for re-election, she decided there would be no miting de avance, no big billboards, etc. She and her leaders would just go around the barangays and engage the people about the basic services program. Her leaders said, “Matatalo tayo.” But she kept faith and in the 2007 elections she won by a landslide.
Beyond that, the town annual income rose from just a couple of million pesos to about 16 million. They moved from a 4th class municipality to a 2nd class. When I asked her how that came about, she said that she learned that if you take care of people’s needs in education and health, they can save, make their businesses and livelihood profitable and be able to pay their taxes.
Lesson in Social Change. The leader transformed key social institutions, which responded to basic needs of people. In turn, the people responded and changed because they saw hope for a better future for themselves and their children. The mayor’s institutional changes were key enablers – enablers for the people to take responsibility for their own lives and for change.
During the Gawad Kalinga Boston summit last June, Mayor Sonia told her story to a room full of CEOs and University leaders at Harvard University and she received a standing ovation. I guess that would be a PR practitioner’s dream – to project a Mayor who had a standing ovation before key leaders at Harvard University .
The second story is from China . I work a lot in mathematics and mathematics education. In a mathematics education conference in Shanghai a few years ago, a good friend, Frederick Leung, gave a paper with the intriguing title: “In books, there are Golden Halls, in books, there are Fair Maidens.” He said this was a song they used to chant as children while skipping their way to school. What did it mean? It told them that by studying hard, some day they may live in a palace and marry a maiden of high standing. What led to this nursery song?
In China, a couple of thousand years ago, an emperor set up a system for choosing civil servants by a meritocracy, not influence or pull. He set up the Imperial Examinations and success in these examinations, heavily in Chinese classics and mathematics, determined future career. I remember being awed visiting the Great Hall in Beijing in 1985, where year after year, the roster of successful examinees was announced.
This allowed even the poorest villagers to have their children aspire to high posts. It changed Chinese culture so that even the poorest villager believed that with hard work and study, his son could one day rise to the top. In the period of a thousand years or so, it has led to something we know very well: the Chinese value for education and hard work as the way to success. I guess the Emperor also had a good PR consultant, since the song “In books, there are Golden Halls, in books there are fair maidens” continues to be sung over a thousand years later.
There is also a story I often tell. Dr. Miren Intal, a social psychologist at Ateneo, told me of an eminent American psychologist who studied countries that came out of poverty. What he did was to look at the stories which children read 30 or more years before the take-off. He wanted to understand what shaped the vision and imagination of the leaders who led the take-off. He theorized that he could find it in the stories they read as children. He found that invariably these stories were stories of courage, of overcoming adversity, of fulfilling hope of a better future. I have been telling this to Jesuit grade schools and high schools and we have a project now at Ateneo de Manila to create such children’s stories. This is led by Christine Bellen, the author of “Batang Rizal.”
You as public relations specialists are, in many ways, dream weavers. The challenge is whether we connect the fulfillment of these dreams to suwerte (winning lotto or something else) or to hard work. Societies where institutions work to fulfill dreams of those who work hard for them are the ones that succeed in social change.
So where does this bring us in terms of what brings about social reform and social change. It does need leadership, whether it is Mayor Sonia Lorenzo or a Chinese Emperor. But it also needs to engage the community and the people and eventually bring about transformation among them. What engages them and transforms them? The leadership instituting reforms that bring about concrete results that show them that with their cooperation and hard work, they can get out of poverty and have hope for a better future. In China , it was that study and hard work would lead to success in the Imperial Examinations and high office. In San Isidro , it was that health and education services would allow them to provide better for their families and have higher aspirations for their children.
Let me move then to how we have been trying to translate this approach of bringing about social change. The first is in improving public education. Just the other day I gave a report of the Presidential Task Force on Education to the President and Cabinet. We face very deep problems in public education. Less than 70% of pupils entering Grade 1 finish grade 6. That translates to over 800,000 children every year who never finish elementary school. The academic scores especially in high school only average around 40%. What future can there be in our knowledge intensive world for someone who has not even finished elementary school?
But it is possible to change. After several years of doing teacher training, training of principals and so forth, the traditional role of universities in education, we decided to work with a group of very poor elementary schools and do whatever was needed to improve them. We started with four very large and very poor elementary schools in a very poor area near us, Payatas, which is the garbage dumpsite for Quezon City .
I often illustrate this work through the example of one school, Lupang Pangako, which is right beside the dumpsite. We started working with Lupang Pangako in 2002. There is a very powerful video of the situation there in 2003, in the television program of Mike Enriquez, “Imbestigador.” In that video you see a large warehouse, divided into about 9 classrooms, each with over 80 pupils. Very noisy, leaking roofs, etc. The school had 3 sessions a day, 6 to 10 am, 10 to 2 am, 2 to 6 pm to accommodate 3,800 students. They were number 97 out of 98 schools in Quezon City .
Through the leadership of the principal and our help in bringing the community together to set goals, do strategic planning and commit to reform, the situation has completely changed in 2008. They now have new schoolbuildings, courtesy of Mayor Belmonte, only two sessions a day, a morning and afternoon session. Class size is 50 students. Most important is that their academic performance improved so much, that from rank 97 in 2003, they were rank 4 in 2008.
What was the process followed in bringing about this change? In 1994 Ateneo de Manila did a study for the DepEd to answer the question: “What differentiates a high-performing elementary school from a low-performing one, given the same socio-economic conditions?” We did a very large statistical study. Two variables emerged: the leadership of principal and the support of community. In Lupang Pangako, we had a very good principal. We worked with him to engage the community. In their strategic planning, when we got to what goals they would set for the next 3 years, he said, “We will be in the top 20 (from 97) in 3 years.” Pinagtawanan siya. But in 2 years they were number 19 and now they are in the top 10.
Why do I cite public elementary and high school education as a key area of social reform and social change? Why not fiscal policy or foreign direct investments or other economic policies? In the Philippines , we usually focus on economic and fiscal policy or politics as key to change. But a Nobel-Prize Economist, Amartya Sen, has said that in his 30 years of study of countries that have come out of poverty and carried out successful social reform and social change, the key areas these countries focused on and transformed were basic education and basic health. He explains why these are more fundamental. You can look at poverty, he says, as a lack of resources. Kulang sa pera, kulang sa oportunidad. So you focus on economic variables. But, he says, there is a deeper poverty, the poverty of capability. Kulang sa kakayahan. Education and health are the keys to building capability. One can probably understand this best negatively. You can go to a person or a community and offer money or the opportunity for a job. Pero, kung walang pinag-aralan o may TB, they will not be able to take the opportunity. Key to social change out of poverty is to build the capability of our people and this comes through basic education and public health. Of course, we saw this verified in practice in San Isidro.
There are other stories I could tell you. We have young graduates of our business programs creating social enterprises for the poor:
Among the best known are Hapinoy, led by Bam Aquino and Mark Ruiz among others. They are working to create something like a 7-11 chain of sari-sari stores, through branding, strong partnerships with suppliers, fiscal discipline, product management, etc. PRSP might consider working with them on their marketing and branding.
The other is Rags2Riches, where Bam, Mark, Reese Fernandez and other young people work with poor women of Payatas, who used to make just a peso or so, from rugs out recycled cloth – to now making from this same recycled cloth, designer bags, etc., and selling them for 500 pesos or more. You might wish to join their next product launch, RIIR ARANAZ fall-holiday launch at Powerplant on Sept 28, 6 pm.
What makes these socially transforming ventures for the poor succeed is the ability of these young leaders to create opportunity – access to markets, selection of products, – and also to engage the poor community to transform themselves (product quality, discipline, etc.)
So where do PR professionals come in. All social change and social transformation needs good communications. Communications with the key players, principal with teachers, with students, with parents; with key supporters, with the mayor, the DepEd. For Hapinoy, communications with the sari-sari store owners, with the suppliers, with the markets.
I invite you to look around and choose some of the movements for change:
- Work with public education
- With public health
- With Gawad Kalinga
- With social enterprise, like HAPINOY or Rags2Riches
They all have important communication needs.
If you are invited to do PR work for the candidates for the coming elections, contribute to shaping a platform that focuses on policies and actions that will bring about social change: basic services like education and health, livelihood, etc. Get the candidate to really engage the community.
May I ask you in particular to invite them to spend time with an elementary school or two. Let me tell you what you will discover when you do so.
A few Christmases ago, we were asked by one of the schools we work with in Payatas if we could provide Christmas food packs for the 400 poorest families in the school. We prepared food packs worth just 100 pesos. When I joined to distribute the food packs, I was stunned when the teacher said that it would last a family of 5, 3 days. They only eat once a day. I actually felt rather guilty about how little it was we were giving. Still, one mother came up to me and said, “Sana bigyan kayo ng Diyos ng mahabang buhay, para marami pa ang inyong matutulungan.”
As we worked more closely with the schools and delved into the reasons for absences, we found that so many of them had terrible toothaches, because of bad teeth.
We talked to the children who were non-readers and considered hopeless by the teachers. We found out that they could not see the blackboard. They needed eyeglasses. We got donations for eyeglasses and you can’t imagine the joy of the children now that they can finally see.
They have only a couple of toilets for thousands of children and so gastro-intestinal illnesses and UTI are frequent among them.
On the other hand, you find that if you engage the mayors, barangay captains, parents, etc., they find that they have a shared dream, which is to provide a better future for their children. I have participated in such meetings in Maguindanao and found that Christians, Muslims, Tirurays all share the same dream for a better future for their children. They say, “We know we ourselves will not be able to get out of poverty. But we will do all we can for our children.” And mayors and barangay captains begin to realize that people will support them, elect them, if they help them fulfill these dreams.
The public elementary school is a place where you learn a lot about your community.
You also learn when you engage the principal, teachers and parents — that they have a shared dream: a better future for their children. It is a very powerful dream. And if you can show them that you will fulfill that dream, they will vote for you.
To end then: Social Change will come
- When we make key social institutions work (like public education, public health, job creation)
- To meet people’s basic needs
- And reward hard work
- And show that even the poorest can dream and achieve their dreams
- If they keep faith, work hard, and persevere.
PRSP, as a society of public relations professionals, can do much to shape our image and culture of social change.
Thank you very much and good morning.
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