Mitzi Joyce Uy-Chan was 23 when she left her corporate career.
She was with the marketing department of a leading quick-service restaurant, unhappy and contemplative. She longed for her life’s deeper meaning, and pined for its greater purpose. Like most people around the quarter-century mark of their lives, she was caught in crisis.
Uy-Chan went home and stayed there to search for answers, but it was the Bible that eventually found her. She spent the next three years buried in its pages, reading at least one chapter a day. She would then write realizations, life lessons, anything, on a journal.
Her fascination with the power of writing grew. Uy-Chan started to create journals for herself, and then for others. She put up a Facebook page, named “Mori Notes”—Mori is Hebrew for “God teaches”—and sold her creations to family and friends. It was a hit. Just a year after pursuing the idea, in 2012, Uy-Chan registered Mori Notes with the Department of Trade and Industry.
The business’s initial work force included only herself and her househelp. But as the reputation of Mori Notes grew, so did the demand, and Uy-Chan needed help to keep up. “The challenge there was to scale up capacity,” she said in a recent interview.
It was a challenge that, yet again, the Bible helped her overcome. She remembered God’s word to help the oppressed and the less fortunate. Instead of sourcing labor from other groups, Uy-Chan decided to offer livelihood to the marginalized, particularly mother crafters from communities in Quezon City, such as those from Barangay Apolonio Samson.
The decision bore more problems than fruits at first. The products failed to meet the quality standards of Mori Notes’s clients. Each partner-community had their own issues. But Uy-Chan stuck with the mother crafters, who eventually hit their stride.
“Before, Mori could only make a few hundred pieces of items per month. Now, the enterprise can make at least a thousand pieces per month,” Uy-Chan said, adding that their products are now available in giant retail channels, such as National Book Store, Human Nature, House of Praise and OMF.
Uy-Chan is quick to point that the beauty of running a social enterprise lies not only in the opportunities to work on one’s passion or to generate income, but also on the chance to empower others to do the same.
She noted that all of Mori Notes’s mother crafters live under a single household income with husbands whose take-home pay total at a meager average of P400 a day, which is below the minimum wage. Mori Notes provided these mothers the chance to equal or even surpass their husbands’ daily earning in the comfort of their homes.
An equally inspiring story radiate in the Cordilleras, where a member of the Cordilleran indigenous people is helping his community while trying to save the environment at the same time.
Dean Cuanso is a Baguio-Benguet-based online marketing lecturer/social-media marketer by profession, and an advocate of environment protection through recycling and tree planting by calling.
He champions sustainability and has founded Accents and Petals Crafts and Accessories, a social enterprise of a response to the great amount of waste produced by the various use of organic flowers. Cuanso’s group of indigenous peoples from the different provinces of the Cordillera Administrative Region sought to create a more sustainable, eco-friendly alternative, called “forever flowers,” or replicas of floras made from natural raw materials that include wood shavings, soda cans and fossilized leaves, among others.
“It took a while for people to understand that what we are creating are much more than fake flowers,” Cuanso said. “[Our products] are beautifully designed, can last forever and, most important, can make the world a little better.”
When Accents and Petals flowers were first introduced in 2010, Cuanso said that brides, florsits and event coordinators labelled the products as tacky. Their group stayed the course and for the past seven years, they have found success overseas. Accents and Petals have shipped to more than 50 countries, while over 5,000 brides all over the world have walked down the aisle carrying their forever boquets.
Cuanso said their group is not only about creating pretty things. Above anything, they believe in making a difference. “We wanted to make a real and lasting impact on people’s lives by providing meaningful employment for the community and, hopefully, crafting a better life for them, one forever flower at a time.”
In a one-day event happening today, December 13, Uy-Chan, Cuanso and other social entrepreneurs showcase their products in a Christmas bazaar organized by the BPI Foundation, called “Sinag ng Pasko.” The event takes place at the Palm Drive Activity Center in Glorietta 2, Makati City.
Sinag, now on its third year, is one of the flagship programs of BPI Foundation, the social-development arm of the Bank of the Philippine Islands. The foundation was established in 1978 to foster the Filipinos’ ability to partake in a dynamic economic landscape with the creation of programs that bridge people and opportunities like Sinag.
“BPI Foundation works toward improving the social and economic well-being of the Filipino people through education, entrepreneurship and environmental sustainability,” Cara Funk, BPI Foundation communications/project officer, said at the bazaar’s recent launch. “With the first run of Sinag in 2015, we thought of gathering socially relevant enterprises in one bazaar, where the public don’t just get to purchase a product but also help people.”
This year’s edition of Sinag poses to be the most expansive one yet. Many of the participating merchants had undergone the BPI Sinag Accelerate program, which was created to equip social entrepreneurs with the necessary tools to expand and strengthen their impact in community development.
There’s a wide selection of food products in today’s Sinag bazaar, from teas made by a Kiangan community in Tsaa Laya, to 100-percent organic raw wild honey in La Miel Filipina.
Fashion items also come in plenty. Uy-Chua’s Mori Creations (Mori Notes) will be offering pursebooks, dual zip purses and tote bags, along with other items; while Tejo (hand-woven bracelets created by mothers from underprivileged Parañaque City communities) and Angie’s Yakan Cloth (fabrics made by Zamboanga’s Yakan weavers) will be there, as well.
Rounding out the selection are assorted gift items perfect for this season. Cuanso’s Accents and Flowers brings down Christmas flower bouqeuts and fruit wine baskets, to name two of their products.
The Aaron family-run Villa Socorro Farm, maker of banana snacks and engagers of farmer-partners in Pagsanjan, Laguna, by providing them a secured market for their crops, is also part of the bazaar.
Raymund Aaron said that running a social enterprise feels thrice as hard as running a regular business because of the other bottom lines that must be kept in check. “However,” he added, “it feels much more rewarding.”
Aaron expounds that hearing the stories of their partner community members make the rough times worth enduring—stories that range from being able to treat their family to a Jollibee lunch after mass to sending kids to school.
“We as social entrepreneurs must always balance the three elements of ‘people, profit and planet’ in our enterprise to maintain the core of our being,” Aaron said. “A fourth ‘P,’ however, is important to keep everything intact, and that is puso.”
How so? Aaron explained that “having the heart for the greater cause is needed so that, regardless of the challenges, we continue grinding for the sake of the social enterprise and its stakeholders.”