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Vision
Empowered
communities engaged with other stakeholders in working towards sustainable
development.
As a
learning center, we enhance capacities of COs, POs,
and other development organizations by creating and nurturing
innovative, culturally-sensitive and empowering community processes in
partnership with other stakeholders.
Goals
1.
To expand and nurture the critical mass of committed and high caliber COs and PO leaders
2. Crafting of
people’s agenda as integral part of CO
training - enhance CO methodology
by incorporating in the IBCO the advancement of the
people’s agenda for good governance
3. To build and
replicate model of NGO leadership formation
CO models in (urban housing, child labor, tri-people peace) and development
approaches dispute resolution as tools for social transformation
4. Promote
participatory technologies towards
influencing policy making governance, strengthening grassroots initiatives
5. To strengthen
financial organizational capability towards
sustainability.
The CO Multiversity
A
Vision, A Place, A People
Over
a quarter century has passed since a band of newly trained community
organizers pioneered a different kind of organizing on the Tondo
Foreshore. Issue-based CO, as it has become known, enabled poor people to
deal with powerful groups, not as meek
subordinates but as equals in decision-making. With support from
COs affiliated with the Philippine Ecumenical Council on Community
Organization (PECCO), the Zone One Tondo Organization (ZOTO) showed that,
although initially poor and powerless, organized people could overcome
traditional barriers to participation and gain access to resources and
power. In the process they could exact
a greater degree of transparency
and accountability from government and business elites.
Despite
constant surveillance and harassment by Marcos forces, COs expanded in the
1970s from Tondo to Metro Manila, Infanta, Naga, Legaspi, Cebu, Bukidnon,
Davao and other sites. When the EDSA
uprising greatly enlarged the political
space for organizing, thousands of new NGOs seized the opportunity.
Today, COs of every stripe and political shade directly or indirectly
trace their roots to PECCO as the first group of NGO community organizers,
and recognize ZOTO as the pioneering People’s
Organization that emerged from this historic partnership.
ZOTO’s
members were ordinary men and women –
cargadores at the piers, food vendors, hairdressers, barbers,
carpenters, scavengers, dressmakers, tailors, waitresses, clerks,
teachers, and small entrepreneurs. Their
rural counterparts were tenants, small cultivators, agricultural
wage earners, non-farm workers and fisherfolk. The common
experience of achieving victories through community
organizing strengthened
their resolve to overcome societal constraints
on their innate wisdom, dynamism and interests. A renewed
self-confidence and effectiveness in bargaining with government or
landlords gained them access to decision-making and enabled them to begin
counteracting the inequitable
situations that had kept them poor and powerless. The many strong
People’s Organizations today attest to community organizing as a
significant force for social change and as a methodology that can
transform ordinary people into extraordinary protagonists for a just and
humane development.
How
does the Community Organizers Multiversity fit into all this ?
In 30 years of country-wide organizing since ZOTO’s founding, CO heirs of the PECCO-COPE tradition have dreamed of a place which would be theirs – a place where they belonged, a place where they could build up their skills and capacities. After years of intensive grassroots organizing, they wanted to be better at their work by expanding their knowledge, interacting with all kinds of people, debating and arguing with friends and critics but also savoring moments of tranquility and quiet reflection. In this CO haven, they would identify and address their needs. They could seek a more sophisticated understanding of organizing and conflict resolution, or reach out to academic institutions and specialized NGOs to comprehend better the complexities of agrarian reform, environmental management, ancestral domain claims, micro-finance, local governance, gender analysis or child protection.
The
CO university, as the dream was initially
called, would also enable COs to master technologies, like computers and
web sites,
accounting and bookkeeping, proposal writing, documentation,
video-making, or GPS mapping. It
would allow a focus on the well- being of body and mind, not only as
concerns worth pursuing in themselves but also important for preventing
“burnout”. Advocacy and
networking would likewise flourish in the context of this organizational
innovation.
Further,
COs wanted to tell their
stories of people empowerment
over the years and the role in it of community organizing.
Documentation and analysis were important, both for training
programs as well as for analyzing CO/PO case studies in their own right.
Do these accounts show the CO process as capable of generating a
concerted social movement toward a sustainable human development paradigm
? To answer this question,
the COs sought to enlist the aid of social scientists and
communications professionals in collaborating with POs and NGOs in writing
and video workshops. Spinning
off training materials in Pilipino and regional languages comprised an
important part of that process.
But first things first. The
most crucial need had to be addressed at the outset—intensifying
issue-based organizing. Thus,
CO-TRAIN was created. Even as
it achieved its intensive
training goals, the clamor
for a CO university persisted. By
then veteran COs had discovered that the term “university”
was misleading. The
general public took it to mean a conventional academic higher education
institution with an established faculty and formal curriculum supervised
by the Department of Education, Culture and Sports (DECS).
COs, on the other hand, stressed the alternative concept of linked
learning centers. These
represented a state of mind as much as they did places at
which COs could pursue
their interests. Hence they
could realize their learning needs and revel in diversity and multiple
partnerships with NGOs and
POs throughout the Philippines, all the while drawing on built-in activist
and academic strengths. And
so, 1997 saw the birth of the Community Organizers Multiversity.
In turning a dream into reality,
the CO Multiversity relies greatly on our closest NGO allies –
COPE (Community Organization of the Philippines Enterprise),
a direct descendant of PECCO, and Urban Poor Associates (UPA),
whose activities similarly trace back to Tondo Foreshore days.
Other key partners have emerged in areas of the country where
issue-based COs and their successors have continued organizing people for
power, often without funding support. Yet the very nature of the CO Multiversity demands new
partnerships as well, drawn from NGOs, POs and even government and
business entities engaging in all kinds of organizing and interested in
Multiversity partnerships for people’s development.
While
we pinpoint the early 1970s as the era of CO emergence in the Philippines,
we recognize that we are standing on the shoulders of giants who came long
before -- men like Ka Kiko Baltazar, who fought for peasant rights during
the Huk period, and Macli-ing
Dulag, who died resisting government dams along the Chico River that
threatened Kalinga homes, culture and land.
Struggling beside them were the unnamed,
militant women collectives and the youth who contributed
immeasurably to their collective success.
All have set us solidly on the path toward justice, equity and
solidarity.
The
CO Multiversity stands ready to carry out its mission in long-established
ways as well as through new forms of service to community organizers, NGOs
and POs throughout the
Philippines. In addressing
this mandate, it will need
the collaboration and good will of all
civil society stakeholders. Its
time has come.
-
Introduction to CO Multiversity Annual Report 1997-1998
Mary Racelis
January 31, 1999