UNILAB Foundation continues to harness the brightest and most civic-minded youth to solve grassroots health problems of the country—one community at a time.
This is the impetus behind Ideas Positive, a nationwide, youth-oriented development program that just wrapped up its fifth run last week.
In the start-up community, fledgling businesses are fostered by “business incubator programs,” training and development programs usually sponsored by large corporations to help smaller but very promising technology-based businesses to scale up, given that their business model is good enough.
Working much like a business incubator, through Ideas Positive, Unilab Foundation has been tapping the best Filipino minds but are directing innovation toward community development, specifically on solutions for health issues.
Ideas Positive is a rigorous competition to transform the best ideas of its youth participants to real outcomes, aided by seed funding amounting to P100,000 per team.
“We’re not lacking in ideas, but in executional capabilities. That’s why we are rewarding their ability to execute [through this program]. The problem of malnutrition, for example, has always been there and the same solutions have been suggested but what we’re focusing on is the effectiveness of the implementation,” said Rhodora Palomar Fresnedi, executive director of Unilab Foundation, in an interview at the Ideas Positive Awarding Night on August 14.
The rigorous competition has been expanded to include not just university students but also to community youth groups. Participants must be 15 to 25 years old.
To select the cream of the crop, teams undergo screening process that includes a paper screening, a live screening, a boot camp and a six-month implementation period in a particular community. Unilab Foundation audits the projects after the implementation period, and chooses the qualifying teams. The Ideas Positive competition culminates in an annual awarding night to recognize the finalists and the winning team. “It has moved from mere ideas to outcomes. The process now involves a workshop, and we’ve moved from just implementing a project to instituting behavior change in the community,” said Fresnedi, on the evolution of the program since its inception. Despite the intense process, Ideas Positive focuses on simple interventions but done in a big way, putting emphasis on the ease of replicating the proposed health solution.
Winning entry this year was Project “Washed Up Can-asujan” of the six-member team from the Rotaract Club of Metro Cebu, CIT University Chapter emerged as the victor.
The group, named Team Blueprint, aimed for better water access for Tagaytay Elementary and Can-asujan National High School in Can-asujan in Carcar City in Cebu, through a simple intervention: Creating a water tank from recyclable PET bottles. The team was able to decrease the incidence of skin-related diseases from 67 percent of the baseline population—502 students—to 14 percent. Those afflicted with diarrhoeal infection went down from 51 percent to 5 percent. The team reported 0 cases of parasitism after the six-month implementation period, from 26 percent before.