Project Compassion and its use of trained 20-family unit leaders to reach more households in the villages represented a key milestone in the history of community development in the country. The target community itself was seen as a source of extension agents which could expand the outreach of services from poblacionto to the remote villages.
The infusion of new blood in the organization mainly composed of pioneers of community development presented an opportunity to assess this emerging trend and to build on it to further explore the limits of participatory development in the potentially repressive context of a martial law regime. This new blood came from specialized disciplines and other entities, including the academe. The PACD pioneers held their ground initially when their long-held beliefs came suddenly under seige from sectors traditionally non-committal regarding development issues.
The leader, Atty. Ramon P. Binamira, displayed an openness of mind and participated in the intense discussions until each issue was resolved to the satisfaction of all protagonists. He displayed a readiness to accept ideas from outside the pioneering group, a rare trait from his inflexible ways in ordinary meetings. He displayed an uncanny ability to cut through the maze of academic discussions to reveal the bare-bones messages or the gut issues, as he called them. His insistence to test new ideas and settled differences among the three groups by actually going to barangay Pahinga Norte, in Candelaria, Quezon paid off in the end.
The three factions within the group agreed in the end on the following:
First, pertinence is the rule. It is wrong for extension agents and development workers to just barge into the community, herd people to listen to lectures peppered with technical information that nobody understands, and then leave in a hop without indicating what should happen next. Nobody will be allowed to just say, for example, that children should eat malunggay because a gram of its green leaves contains 21,000 units of Vitamin A. Instead, trainers should say children will run the risk of being blind if they are fed malunggay and that they should plant malunggay preferably along the fence or near the kitchen easy picking of leaves before cooking time.
Second,emotions are key to make people listen to developmental messages. We must make people cry or laugh and if we can sing technical inputs on malnutrition, family planning and environmental management, we must do this and be experts in understanding how people feel, the symbols they embrace to build community-ness and the stories passed on from generation to generation to give pride of place and local traditions.
Third, to say that people should participate in development is never enough; communities and people need to get organized to be able to participate meaningfully in local decision-making and to get their share of benefits from development plans, programs and projects. Although organizing by sectors, e.g. farmers, fisherfolks, women, etc. is important, efforts must be exerted to organize as a community, e.g. as puroks or sub-villages, and to use institutional arrangements which have withstood time and external influences, as traditional mutual aid societies, neighborhood associations.
Fourth, child-based issues should be used as much as possible to galvanize support from all sides of the political fence in a culture where the child provides sheer joy to all despite political and religious differences.
The trainer/community organizer must use effective means to win political leaders to the cause of pro-poor development and encourage participation in activities that bring all parties together in such issues as child welfare.
Fifth, it is not enough to train unit leaders and officers of people's organizations in skills to facilitate service delivery, but also in those matters that build community confidence in being able to use local resources and accomplish goals they themselves identify for general welfare.
Sixth, projects are not only means to deliver services, but they can also serve as entry points to build greater partnership between communities and their local governments in their pursuit of common goals.
Having agreed on these key points, the three groups representing diverse viewpoints thus discover their common unity and proceeded to define the "Ilaw ng Buhay" approach to development, clearly a marked evolution of the Project Compassion model into a neighborhood movement with organized communities and committed political leadership at local government level.
That was how it was designed and implemented as an improvement on the old top-down model of community development pioneered in the Philippines in the 50s.
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