Planting the SEED of hope for poor but deserving students

We have heard many times over mostly schools asking us for a donation to support an educational program for “poor but deserving” students. 

The label generally means indigent children whose exceptional intellectual abilities are scorched and stunted by an environment lacking basic necessities and opportunities. However, these children are the resilient and hopeful ones who believe they can escape the poverty trap. 

It’s an advocacy I’ve been pursuing for the past years and I’ve already seen varied educational paradigms. The usual approach is to offer scholarships to the top universities. Unfortunately, universities cannot afford to offer thousands of scholarship programs for the millions of poor Filipinos. Hence, it is not scalable and will not create a big impact on society.

Then, there are schools exclusively for poor scholars. But having poor enrollees, these schools are heavily dependent on donations and donors tend to feel that dreaded “donor’s fatigue,” a year or two after their first financial support. The result: schools are understaffed, poorly maintained, and left behind in more ways than one.

Finally, there are technical schools that offer practical, vocational work skills to students so that they are immediately employable after graduation. I worked in that kind of a school set-up before and though I applaud the objectives, I can’t help but notice that most of the students are demotivated simply because they feel boxed and limited. In their own words, they do not want to be a mechanic or a factory worker someday. After all, our society does not think highly of those jobs. 

However, the most important deficiency that all the mentioned academic programs possess is best explained by Gawad Kalinga founder Tony Meloto: “All of these schools want their graduates to work as employees. None of them train students to become employers and entrepreneurs that will create wealth and opportunities in the Philippines.”

This is how he thought of planting a special kind of SEED. SEED stands for School for Entrepreneurial and Experiential Development. At present, it’s a two-year certificate program, but Meloto, along with DepEd, TESDA, and CHED, plans to develop it into a full-blown post-secondary curriculum.

The basic difference is the end goal: the school envisions graduates who will start their own social business and develop this so that it may benefit more people in marginalized places, especially the provinces.

SEED is based inside Enchanted Farm, Brgy. Encanto, Angat, Bulacan. Enchanted Farm is home to Gawad Kalinga’s many social businesses, including Plush and Play (a stuffed toy business staffed by former sewers who lost their jobs due to the closing of a garment factory in Bulacan), Theo/Philo Chocolates and, my personal favorite, Bayani Brew, a beverage drink concocted from the indigenous recipes (tanglad and talbos ng kamote) of mothers from Bulacan. All in all, there are 14 social businesses that are being incubated in the farm and pioneered by successful social entrepreneurs from around the world. 

These same successful entrepreneurs serve as the mentors of the SEED scholars. That means classes are not theoretical. Everything prepares them for the real world. In other words, it is an education that is authentic, practical, and experiential. There are lectures, but these are heavily complemented with “laboratory work” in the farms where students get to experience first-hand how entrepreneurs supervise the harvesting of produce and the processing and value-adding of these raw materials to make them commercially viable products. In the classroom, students are taught accounting, business management, and all the other intellectual aptitudes needed to run a successful entrepreneurial project.

Launched just last Aug. 11, the students are not yet ripe for harvest. But the seeds of hope have already sprouted, judging by how Gabrielle Rabino speaks of her school: “Before, when I was in high school, ang gusto ko lang makapagtapos ng pag-aaral then makapaghanap ng magandang trabaho at matulungan ang pamilya ko. Sabi ng nanay ko mag-saleslady muna ako. Pero dumating na yung SEED sa buhay ko (I want to be a great social entrepreneur someday and I also want to build my own social enterprise that will help my fellow Filipinos and make their lives better).” 

Meloto wants the concept of SEED propagated and he is encouraging all state universities, which have their own vast tracts of land for agricultural use, to replicate the learning experience started at SEED. Likewise, traditional, academic schools should also learn from SEED by emphasizing entrepreneurship in their curriculum and requiring students to come up with entrepreneurial projects in place of a thesis. 

When I visited SEED, I must say that the aura of the school differs from the other schools I once worked for. There is no feeling of students being forced to work in vocational courses they don’t even like. The school is an unrestricted environment for grandiose dreams.

Perhaps that is the school’s secret. Here, students are empowered to dream big. Ana Salamat, a SEED scholar, captured it well in her words, “Ang SEED ay hindi para sa taong mahirap, para ito sa mga may pangarap.”