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Thursday, March 28, 2024

Cristina Liamzon and Edgardo Valenzuela: Empowering OFWs

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As early as her high school days, Cristina Liamzon had been an active youth leader, concerned with social issues that affected her community. This spark was kept aflame even through college during the Martial Law years, and after graduation, as she worked with NGOs in Bangkok. But Liamzon longed to share her skills and passion with her own countrymen. And so, she returned to the Philippines, helping organizations to empower peasant groups dealing with agrarian reform programs.

In 1990, Liamzon left the country again, joining her husband, Edgardo Valenzuela, in Italy. It was in Rome, where she found herself immersed in a community of Filipino migrant workers. Becoming a Pinoy overseas worker herself, she experienced challenges that beset overseas workers from all sides. Primarily working abroad to afford their families a better life, they make many sacrifices – holding several jobs at a time, enduring humiliating situations just to get by, jeopardizing their health, and living with chronic fatigue. Exhausted, their self-esteem diminished, and desperately short on funds, OFWs would resort to borrowing from all available sources, getting themselves deeper and deeper into a lifestyle of debt. 

While the government and other private organizations maintain programs to improve their skills and financial management, these appear to be simple one-off sessions that do not necessarily get to the root of the problem. What the OFWs needed was a change of mindset so that they can break free from the destructive pattern.

This was the impetus for Liamzon and Valenzuela, along with colleague Tony La Viña, to establish the Leadership and Social Entrepreneurship program.

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Valenzuela, who helped to conceptualize the program, serves as one of the resource persons, assisting in the administration of the program particularly in the communications aspect and backstopping the graduation events, and is also responsible for coordinating the alumni councils.

 “This program is about capacity building,” Liamzon explains, “teaching people how to budget, how to save, and instilling a confidence in them to be responsible for themselves and their finances.”

The program consists of 12 full-day sessions held over six months. The sessions which focus on leadership, self-awareness and financial literacy, culminate in exposure to social entrepreneurship, encouraging participants to “explore their potential as change agents in society.” 

Upon graduation, LSE alumni receive continuous peer mentorship through global interaction on social networking sites. Because of this constant active communication, LSE graduates have themselves recruited other migrant workers to join the program. They have also paved the way for the establishment of parallel classes in their own communities in the Philippines “to encourage their family members and friends to become changemakers as well.”

Since it began in Rome in 2008, LSE has grown in four other Italian cities (Naples, Milan, Florence and Turin), and has expanded to Hong Kong, Dubai, Paris, Brussels, The Hague and Macau.

Liamzon attributes the sustainability of LSE to the full involvement and funding from its supporters, a generous team of volunteers, robust partnerships with different government agencies, and a decentralized structure. 

Enthusiastic about the growth of LSE in the coming years, Liamzon says: “We still look towards expanding the program to more cities both inside and outside the Philippines to reach out to more migrants and their families. So far, we are in 12 cities outside the country with around 1,200 graduates and are currently planning to expand in 2016 in other cities in Asia, the Middle East, and hopefully in Canada. In the Philippines, we are in five cities and plan to launch in the next few months new programs or batches in Pototan and Passi City in Iloilo, and Lipa, Batangas. Several others are currently being explored. We are also networking the various alumni and actively seeking ways to engage them more fully in local economic development in their hometowns.”

For more about LSE, visit https://www.facebook.com/Leadership-and-Social-Entrepreneurship-LSE-Program.

Makeup by Clara Pettersen and hair by Jayfren “JJ” Gallego of Creations by Lourd Ramos Salon • Special thanks to Philippine Airlines for helping facilitate the shoot at NAIA Terminal 2

 

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