The group endearingly called The Crazy Company was a mixed team of development workers from various advocacies and persuasions representing distinct strands in the practice of community work over several decades prior to the launching of the "Ilaw ng Buhay" (Light of Life) approach/program/movement in 1978.
In the dominant group in terms of number and level of authority were those who pioneered professional community development work in the country in the 50s. They represented the conventional extension approach which was basically concerned in extending service delivery from the center to the periphery.
The second group was influential in terms of what was called at that time as the "authority of ideas" as against the "authority of command" wielded by the first group. They came mostly from non-PACD fields: education, agriculture, journalism, chemistry, marine biology. Of this group, two were college drop-outs who had just surfaced, either by coercion or by own volition - nobody could tell for sure - from the underground, which emerged in the struggle against the martial law regime.
The third group consisted of former interns from UP Los Banos who decided to join the group after graduation to continue their newly-discovered love affair with the job of being a "fieldworker," a much-coveted term for someone who would go out as a member of a team assigned to a specific municipality in the project area. They came from the human ecology department of the University and counted among them the class valedictorian. Their technical knowledge complemented the fire-and-brimstone approach adopted by the rest of the group in talking about the environment and the need to save Mother Earth.
While the group followed the standard organizational structure with functional divisions and a management hierarchy, an ad hoc unit euphemistically called the Operations Review Center became the marketplace, as it were, in the selling, negotiating and legitimizing opposite ideas that came from the three groups prior to presentation and approval by RPB, the Big Boss, who ran the organization more as a patriarch rather than a democratic leader of a development-oriented organization.
This style worked effectively to get things done based on recommendations from the ORC, but as the organization took on a more formal structure with the founding of the Ilaw International Center in later years, it led to practices which could not possibly sustain the momentum of earlier years towards more innovative approaches to working with local governments and communities.
More on this in the next blog.
In the dominant group in terms of number and level of authority were those who pioneered professional community development work in the country in the 50s. They represented the conventional extension approach which was basically concerned in extending service delivery from the center to the periphery.
The second group was influential in terms of what was called at that time as the "authority of ideas" as against the "authority of command" wielded by the first group. They came mostly from non-PACD fields: education, agriculture, journalism, chemistry, marine biology. Of this group, two were college drop-outs who had just surfaced, either by coercion or by own volition - nobody could tell for sure - from the underground, which emerged in the struggle against the martial law regime.
The third group consisted of former interns from UP Los Banos who decided to join the group after graduation to continue their newly-discovered love affair with the job of being a "fieldworker," a much-coveted term for someone who would go out as a member of a team assigned to a specific municipality in the project area. They came from the human ecology department of the University and counted among them the class valedictorian. Their technical knowledge complemented the fire-and-brimstone approach adopted by the rest of the group in talking about the environment and the need to save Mother Earth.
While the group followed the standard organizational structure with functional divisions and a management hierarchy, an ad hoc unit euphemistically called the Operations Review Center became the marketplace, as it were, in the selling, negotiating and legitimizing opposite ideas that came from the three groups prior to presentation and approval by RPB, the Big Boss, who ran the organization more as a patriarch rather than a democratic leader of a development-oriented organization.
This style worked effectively to get things done based on recommendations from the ORC, but as the organization took on a more formal structure with the founding of the Ilaw International Center in later years, it led to practices which could not possibly sustain the momentum of earlier years towards more innovative approaches to working with local governments and communities.
More on this in the next blog.
No comments:
Post a Comment