Ateneo's Citation of Synergeia Foundation Inc under the leadership of Milwida M Guevara
SYNERGEIA FOUNDATION INC UNDER THE LEADERSHIP OF MILWIDA M GUEVARA
Ozanam Award
Synergeia Foundation Inc started as a learning circle for Ford Foundation grantees in 1999. When the Ford Foundation closed its Manila office in 2002, Synergeia evolved into a development organization with a simple dream: to ensure that every Filipino child completes quality basic education. In the Philippines, where an average of only 7 out of 10 children complete grade six (and in marginalized communities, only 3 out of 10), that seemed like an impossible dream.
The organization draws inspiration from the African proverb “It takes an entire village to raise a child.” It believes that educating our youth is too big a responsibility to be left to government alone. It believes that to truly improve education in scale, the entire community must come together. Synergeia acts as coach, catalyst, and broker, engaging and building capacities of local leaders and the entire community—school officials, socio-civic groups, teachers, parents, students, and the business sector—to improve learning, teaching, parenting, and governance. To date, it has partnered with over 300 local governments and impacts about 5 million Filipino children.
Synergeia prides itself in being a listening and learning organization. It does not prescribe what should be done; its programs are determined by the communities themselves. It believes that each community has unique needs—thus, rather than use a one- size-fits-all approach with its projects, it designs a cornerstone process that it applies to partner communities. The resulting programs may vary, but the result is the same—more students are able to read and complete quality basic education.
This cornerstone process has six stages, which begins with informing all stakeholders about the state of basic education in their community using data. The preparatory stages entail listening to their stories, challenges, and aspirations, and consulting them on issues that need to be addressed and strategic options that can be pursued. The entire stage of program creation requires close collaboration with the community. When the programs are implemented, they are monitored and evaluated so they can be progressively improved, strengthened, and sustained—again, with continuing collaboration with community stakeholders.
Synergeia’s strategy of involving the community in the entire process results in the commitment of local government leaders, school officials, teachers, and parents to the programs. It harnesses existing but often overlooked and underutilized government structures such as the local school board as its main avenue to gather key stakeholders. Planning and implementation are collaboratively achieved, with local leaders taking the lead, communities actively participating, and Synergeia serving as facilitators.
The collaboration of Synergeia with one of its most recent partners, the City Government of Valenzuela, has resulted in one of the largest-scale impact programs in a single city or municipality. The city’s education investment plan is a result of several town hall meetings to gather different ideas, views, and opinions from the community in order to craft solutions. This process gave birth to Valenzuela’s Education 360° Investment Program, a holistic, systemic, comprehensive, student-centered program that radically transforms the city’s public education system. The city has successfully adopted in public schools the best practices of local and international private schools. The program does not only focus on hard infrastructure, but also on all the other aspects that affect children’s access to education and their learning performance.
Valenzuela’s program benefits a total of 80,452 elementary school students and 41,102 high school students. Its main components illustrate the multi-pronged and comprehensive involvement of the city’s public, private, and civic groups.
The city developed its own workbooks in Math and English for all elementary students through the Curriculum Build Up component. This significantly lessened the city’s cost while ensuring quality materials and a 1:1 student to workbook ratio.
Upon discovering that 78% of the total elementary student population (44,000) in the city could not read (34,320), a Summer Reading Camp was held for incoming Grades 3 and 6 students who were classified as non-readers or frustrated readers. By the end of the program, there was a dramatic improvement in the reading ability and comprehension of the 15,950 students who attended. For those classified as non-readers, only one remained so among the 2,165 incoming Grade 3 students; non-readers were fully eradicated in the incoming Grade 6 group. There was a big drop in the number of frustrated readers—from 5,870 to 1,364 in the incoming Grade 3 group, and from 7,738 to 1,120 in the incoming Grade 6 group. From students who could barely decipher English words, most of them could read four English short stories easily.
The Nanay-Teacher Parenting Camp is another innovative component dreamt up by the entire community. The city partnered with USAID and Synergeia to come up with the country’s first parenting camp. Fifty-five thousand (55,000) parents of students from 39 public elementary schools were reoriented on the importance of parent engagement in the learning life of their children.
The Teaching Camp, also conducted by the city in partnership with USAID and Synergeia, is an intensive training program which aims to sharpen the teachers’ teaching strategy and mastery of content.
What is truly innovative about Synergeia programs, such as the one with Valenzuela City, is that they are able to reach scale because of substantial commitments from the stakeholders themselves.
The Summer Reading Camp was realized by efforts of Valenzuela public school teachers and Education students from the local university, Pamantasan ng Lungsod ng Valenzuela, who gave up their summer vacation to volunteer as teachers and teaching aides. The Nanay -Teacher program has been sustained, with Parent Teacher Association (PTA) officers trained as mentors and facilitators by Synergeia serving as a support community for other parents struggling to cope with different parenting challenges. Another component, the In- School Feeding Program, is made possible by the local government’s partnership with the Ateneo Center for Educational Development (ACED), and the untiring efforts of parent volunteers who man the central kitchen operations. Every day, parent volunteers wake up before dawn to prepare the ingredients, cook the ACED-prescribed menus, repack thousands of lunchboxes and deliver them to the public schools, feed the children, wash the lunchboxes, and prepare to do everything again the next day.
Valenzuela City’s success undeniably lies in its progressive local leaders, who were willing to listen and make the necessary decisions and efforts to improve the city’s education outcomes. But alongside the local leadership and the community was Synergeia, quietly and steadily facilitating the entire process it had pioneered. The city’s program also benefited from the experiences and learnings of earlier Synergeia mayors, governors, and Department of Education officials who now serve as mentors, generously sharing their experiences and programs, and encouraging new partners to take the lead in their areas. Now, Valenzuela City is paying it forward as its mayor is a staunch Synergeia advocate who actively mentors other local government leaders on how to effectively fundraise for their programs. By gathering partner local leaders to serve as mentors, Synergeia inspires other communities that something can be done, that they can work together to improve the education of their children.
Behind Synergeia’s achievements is its equally inspiring president and chief executive officer,
Dr Milwida Guevara, who has nurtured the organization from the beginning. With her dedication, passion, and resolute focus on strategy and metrics, she has successfully effected the systemic changes Synergeia has dreamt about and has steered the foundation to where it is today. What started out as an impossible dream is now slowly but surely becoming a reality.
For successfully bringing together communities and inspiring them to share a collective dream for their children, and, more important, for convincing them that by working together, they can be the change agents that will make the dream happen, Ateneo de Manila University confers on Synergeia Foundation Inc, under the leadership of Dr Milwida M Guevara, the 2017 Ozanam Award.
