Yeung at heart

MANILA, Philippines – Changing the world doesn’t always require bulging muscles, quick wit, or an affluent background. All that’s needed is an able body and a gargantuan heart. I learned this from social entrepreneur Melissa Yeung while she was giving an eye-opening talk on “Listening to those you serve” for the Entrepbuff.com web show. As you first meet Melissa, she has the cute charm not of the girl-next-door but the girl-next-door’s younger sister. With her kitten-like demeanor, she told the web-show producers how shy she was talking before the cameras. Yet, as you listen to her, you realize that being on a web show was zilch compared to the challenges she faced before.

It is because Mel Yeung visited at least 10 indigenous tribes around the country for her Ateneo development studies course. During these visits, she lived with these tribes for at most two weeks. She says it’s fun to camp with tribes like the T’Boli, because she wants to help these misunderstood Filipinos earn sustainable livelihood and create an empowered community while keeping their cultural roots intact. Mel adds that because these people lack education, they get duped by rich landowners. For example, a Bukidnon tribe lost their land because they traded it for metal pots. Faced with these issues, Mel’s heart couldn’t let these people down and so, she put up a foundation called Got Heart that teaches both rural and urban poor communities to be sustainable and independent of non-profit organizations.

Let your heart grow

Before Mel Got Heart, her heart first grew and kept on expanding, thanks to her parents, peers, and teachers around her. It first started, she says, when she used to play with the palengke kids and noticed the great divide that she wanted to bridge. In high school, she opened her heart to an orphanage, Concordia Children, by teaching arts and crafts to her 93 new siblings. By spending time with these kids, she learned from them that they needed help beyond learning how to draw and paint. So, she mounted concerts to put up scholarships for them.

As she entered college, Mel joined Gawad Kalinga and helped build homes for families in Payatas. Again, she listened and learned from Payatas youth leaders Jerome Espinosa and Jay Rian Flores that owning a home, although important, was only one step to alleviating poverty. There are still other concerns, such as employment and even addressing the personal relationships within the household.

While lending a hand to GK, Mel also spent time documenting the lives of indigenous tribes from north to south for her class. Her work of defending their ancestral domains made her listen to their rich stories of heritage and customs, because proving their right to the land required establishing that they knew the land area by cultural traits such as burial customs and the specific names of animals and plants.

She says that one of her enlightening moments came from tribal leader Timouy Nanding Mudai from Subanon community in Zamboanga. He taught her that tribal religions were monotheistic since they were only worshipping nature as thanksgiving to the one true diwata. But what she found more insightful was the four laws of the community that guided all their actions. Before acting, she says that a decision must be pro-God, pro-people, and pro-life. She was amazed by this statement since educated people in Manila don’t have the common sense to follow them or at realize these important things. She adds that staying with the tribes was so enriching because of the lessons learned — staying with them meant not having a luxurious comfort room or cellphone signal.

Meeting of the mind and heart

At the end of each project, Mel was always met with the problem of sustainability because her heart could only give so much. The kids of Payatas and the T’bolis would always ask her, “Anong gagawin natin, Ate?” and her honest answer was, “Hindi ko alam.”

In 2007, Mel went back to school to study entrepreneurship at AIM and to properly put up her Got Heart Foundation that would do consultation work for these impoverished communities. She says that her parents were supportive of this decision because “she already proved herself to be too hard-headed and could make this foundation work based on her previous projects.”

The outcome has been such an overabundance of love in various communities that Melissa wishes to give birth to more. Got Heart has helped fishermen in Bataan get their fishing license through seminars with volunteers such as lawyers who taught them the legal rights of municipal water laws. They also held a two-week leadership seminar for rural and urban poor leaders with AIM teachers like Ed Morato. This seminar, funded by their first Got Heart bazaar, featured items from indigenous tribes like Bukidnon organic rice cookies and sarongs from Nueva Ecija.

But her biggest project is Steak Shirts, run by Payatas kids like Jerome, which helps them earn money through shirt printing. Mel is proud of these Payatas boys because they have learned so much from business basics to working on Excel spreadsheets. She can see them fulfill the dream of Got Heart, and that is to make Steak Shirts become financially independent and grow by itself.

Listen to your heart

On a grand level, The Got Heart Foundation is an interesting foundation in this time of apathy because it is bringing the rich to serve the poor through buying their products. At the same time, making the urban poor Payatas kids help rural poor, T’boli communities by their projects that can sustain the provincial ones. Thus, unconsciously bridging the country into one nation within a single beat.

On a personal level, Melissa’s enterprise has taught me what it means to really have heart in this heartless world. It requires listening and understanding. It requires being fully present to the people who you are serving. It is living up to the dictum of never saying no when others do. Most of all, it demands to not be afraid to let your heart lead your life as long as you don’t leave your head too far behind.

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Got Heart Foundation @ http://gotheart.multiply.com

Watch Melissa Yeung’s web show video tomorrow on http://entrepbuff.com at 9 p.m.

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Give me a piece of your heart @ readnow@supreme.ph.