Sustaining Our Campaigns
This weekend was a rare one for me - no meetings or appointments ( I begged off from one on Saturday morning ), and I had time to be with my small “nuclear family.” Girlie and Ayen traveled with me to Mindoro for an overnight visit to Inay and to celebrate my sister Yen’s birthday; she’s here from Puerto Rico to be with Inay for a month. From Singapore, Yeyi and Minette even joined us by texting welcome news - the scan shows she has identical twin boys!
I am savoring the last few hours of the weekend. Then the week starts with an early Monday morning flight week to Legazpi City in Bicol, and travel by land to Sorsogon. I travel with Oyen Dorotan, a fellow board member on the FPE, the Foundation for Philippine Environment, who sits on the board of Veritas College of Irosin, and who has invited me to speak at their strategic planning workshop.
This weekend seems to be bracketed by education.
Last Thursday and Friday, E-Net Philippines held our biannual general assembly. I gave the President’s Report on Thursday morning, and presided at the first meeting of the newly-elected Board on Friday afternoon. Although I am the president of E-Net, it was Thea Soriano our national coordinator and the staff who took organized the event, so I could shuttle to two other commitments.
Friday morning, I was invited to speak at the national convention of the World Council for Curriculum and Instruction, Philippine chapter. The topic assigned to me was kilometric - Responsible Stewardship for Sustainable Development of Mother Earth: An Education Perspective. I presumed that this was related to the UN Decade of Education for Sustainable Development.
I focused my talk on the concept of “responsible stewardship,” but from the tradition of social justice, since that has been and remains my central concern. From an education perspective, it is important to re-examine our concepts of ownership and stewardship. I shared my early learnings -that the right to use is more important than the right to own, and that the current understanding of ownership as absolute ( the right to use and abuse ) needs to be challenged by the biblical idea of stewardship.
The tradition of social justice has something to offer to the discourse on sustainability, but it also has much to learn. I think the relationship of the two is captured well by Gani Serrano’s formulation, “fairness in a fragile world.”
When I got back to the E-Net assembly, I was told that the whole morning had been taken up by intense discussion about the nomination and election process for the new Board of Directors. I commented that we Filipinos have suffered from a “democracy deficit” even in civil society, so that when there is space for it, a lot of energies are spent in insuring fairness and transparency.
Anyway, the E-Net assembly elected 15 Board of Directors, representing a good mix of old and new members, and there were no protests about the results or the process. The assembly adopted the same 2006 formula - 3 to represent Mindanao, 3 to represent the Visayas, and 4 to represent Luzon and the National Capital Region, and one each for ECCD, Formal Basic Education, Alternative Learning Systems, Gender, and Education Financing.
At our first BOD meeting, we discussed the issue of helping develop the next set of leaders for E-Net. The campaign to achieve Education for All has a 2015 deadline. We must maintain our momentum and insure continuity across leadership changes. I tossed out for consideration the idea of convening an E-Net NCR as a platform for training a second layer of leaders. After all, there are E-Net member organizations in almost all the cities and towns of Metro Manila.
John Maxwell has an aphorism that applies to all campaigns and movements that have goals - dreams with deadlines - that need energies and presences beyond those of the initial leaders: “There is no success without succession.”
At the Thursday meeting of the FPE which I managed to attend ( I missed the Friday meeting ), we discussed the phasing out of FPE funding from two sites. In both cases, the staff were quite confident that the local communities and partner institutions would be able to sustain their commitment to biodiversity conservation. The main reason they gave was the strengthening of indigenous systems of organization and enforcement, gaop and lapat. I probed about the number and quality of leaders in the sites.
In my talk at E-Net, I cited the idea from the Global Campaign for Education, that while we are a network of organizations, we need to identify and support individual EFA advocates. In the next two years, we also want to set up local EFA committees to insure that we have a broader and deeper base of our campaign.
At the start of campaigns, the role of leaders and key advocates is quite prominent. Hence the need to develop successor generations of leaders and advocates. But the sustainability of a campaign is most insured when its issues and its methods become embedded in the culture of the the members and the communities.
That is what we experienced in the community organiziing process among the urban poor. From a tradition of dependence and waiting for outside initiatives, they develop an alternative tradition that takes as SOP and demands consultation and participation. It is an example of Gramsci’s idea that “good sense” should become “common sense.”
Perhaps my theme should be revised to read: “Renewing our spirituality and strategy for justice and sustainability.”
