Felicia Hung-Atienza: Force to reckon with

The finance world will always remember her as one formidable force who orchestrated in 2001 the first-ever management buyout of a Merrill Lynch office.

This time, Felicia Hung-Atienza is again making another breakthrough when she founded Chinese International School Manila last year in McKinley Hill, Fort Bonifacio in Taguig City. The CISM is the first international school where East meets West in a unique K-12 curriculum that is coupled with an immersion in the Mandarin Chinese and English language.

“Back in mid-2004, I started scouting around for a school for my son, Jose, who was almost two years old; I was likewise pregnant with my second daughter, Eliana. I held the twin belief that a good education is the best gift I can give my children and that Mandarin, with over a billion speakers, is the language of now and tomorrow. Considering that the local Chinese are one of the largest minorities in the country, I was baffled why there was no international school that taught Mandarin from the pre-kinder level onwards. The urge to create a school for my children became a passionate calling,” says Felicia, who considers her husband Kim and their two children her greatest achievement and blessing in life.

Though academic excellence remains to be at the cornerstone of the school program, Felicia says the school (which she co-founded with her talented partner-educator Lulu Que Sian) makes it a point to address the emotional, physical, social and artistic well-being of the students. 

“At what other school would you have Margie Holmes give the children a chat about puberty and have Michael Williams as the head of the CISM Drama Club?  The curriculum is enriched through exposure to intercultural and interracial awareness, community and service, environmental and ecological consciousness,” says Felicia, who graduated cum laude from Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, major in Finance and Multinational Management. Each classroom at CISM, says Felicia, takes care of a pet; the animals range from a bearded dragon, blue-tongued skink, ball python to leopard geckos. CISM children are not afraid of reptiles! Also, they have a very active recycling program and it has a school-wide goal to adopt a Philippine Eagle.

Though she has ceased to play a day-to-day role in Philippine Equity Partners (formerly Merrill Lynch) since 2002, Felicia remains to be an independent director of the equity’s board. The management lessons she continues to learn from PEP are the same lessons she applies to CISM.

From being a high-caliber finance figure to a prime mover in educating young minds, Felicia proves more and more that she is a force to reckon with.