How It Works

Individual philanthropy means each person can help others by sharing their skills or resources. Small amounts of time, energy or Pesos applied in a timely manner can reap great rewards. Money is used as capitol to allow the recipient to learn how to use it to produce more money. Local residents in the Philippines do most of our work as they live and improve their own lives. They live in humble homes and lead good moral lives. Others throughout the world can contribute to the cause by duplicating things we learn about in the Philippines in their own country. Some people are only willing to donate their money and that helps others, who do not have money, to multiply the reward to those who need it.

A beggar in the street is encouraged to use a small P300 ($5.45) contribution as "capitol" to buy mints and candies and resell them to passers by. The beggar, now businessperson, may loose their capitol and return for more Pesos. Questions are asked of the beggar turned businessperson; "What did you learn that will make us believe you will not loose the new capitol?" Failure may be repeated. Lessons are learned. Pride in their lives grows. Do they care about helping their customer have a clean breath? Are they providing a breath mint to help others or were they only trying to earn Pesos? Did they think about how they were extending their individual philanthropy when they help a customer? More than half of the people in the Philippines will never see a paycheck. They will never have a regular income. They must make a living through their wits as entrepreneurs. These people don't understand business and philanthropy principles. When they get a little training and advise they may have a much better chance of making enough profit to support their family.

Motivation, mentality, and morality are the attributes that a good life can be based on. Of course morality is the greatest of these. The unproductive belief of many of the small business people in the Philippines is to find ways to cheat their customer without the customer finding out. For a customer to return they must have trust in you. The customer must know that you will do what you say you will. Morality is learned slowly from childhood and these people can only be helped by those they trust showing them how they can be trusted also. We, the members of this group are completely nonsectarian. Most members are Christian but we work with people of all faiths. We are not a welfare program or an entitlement system. Our goals are to strictly teach self-help and have those we help pass on their wealth of knowledge to family, friends, and neighbors. Education is the key to the process.

A young person may be interested in computers because they know the games that are played on them. Time is spent showing those youth that it can be more fun to program computers than play games. This leads to students taking classes in computer science. Skills that are useful in producing a living have been created. Boredom and desire for entertainment are replaced by a love for a profession.

A farmer raises rice, garlic and vegetables. His family is given 6 chicks, feed and a small amount of equipment. They can use the chickens as personal food or keep some of the hens as stock. We watch and train. The self-education is the key. We make our contribution a worthy investment in changing the farmer and his family to a better life.