Survival Blues

For more than 40 years, our involvement with NGOs has been guided by the principle and bias of working closely with local governments. We decided on this strategy at a time in the late 1970s when it was not fashionable for NGOs to work with government. In fact, NGOs such as COPE in Cebu and others even if they were not organized by the left, adhered to what they called "No linkage with Government policy." In those days, the surest way to lose credibility was for an NGO to be known as DJANGO, an entity working as close partner of Government.

For our part, we were sandbagged into embracing an approach in close partnership with Government due to the bias imposed by the background of groups represented in the "Ilaw ng Buhay (Light of Life)" program in the late 70s. Those who came from the pioneering Presidential Assistant for Community Development (PACD) had a bias for working with local governments on account of the rationale for the creation of PACD itself, which is to strengthen local government capacities to extend basic services from the center to the periphery.

Those who came to the organization from the various technical disciplines (environment; agriculture; social services; health and education) had a profound respect for the role of technical departments as source of information and expertise vital to community development work.

The few who came from the left and for one reason or another surfaced from the underground to join the NGO (or were ordered to join it by the Military, nobody knows!) had to be part of the partnership approach either as a necessity or were just plain sick and tired of living life on the run.

To the credit of everyone in the organization, from the early days to the present BLDF, what was known informally as the "jawbone approach" (upper jaw - government; lower jaw - community) gained wide acceptance by both government agencies and NGOs. The theory and practice of the this collaborative approach became documented in case studies and other researches and this contributed to getting more support from international donor agencies looking for ways to bring services to the very doorstep of the target family.

I recall doing my dissertation for my Masters degree in management using the collaborative framework as experienced by our NGO from the pilot stage to advocacy and then institutionalization with the setting up of the Ilaw International Center as resource center for the replication of the approach. While the approach became widely accepted, however, this support from the Government and donors did not translate into ensuring the sustainability of our NGO. Our innovations in both the process and the approach to community development have been achieved with great financial sacrifice on the part of those who compose the old Ilaw ng Buhay organization and the present Bohol Local Development Foundation.

The cost of developing, for instance, the pro-poor targeting system and software known as PDMS has been paid for through the sacrifices of those who have remained with our NGO involvement through the past three decades.

We continue to be burdened with survival blues. Here is truly a crossroad - to survive or just perish.

Crossroads

Crossroads are crucial to milestones. You arrive at a point; there are choices and possible options to make and you need to take a pause and decide. We are familiar with this situation although we may not term it as crossroads: the choice of which college degree to pursue; whether to get married or not; to choose where to live; to buy or sell a certain property so we can use the money for something we think as more important and so on.

A day is not complete without being confronted to make a choice, whether major or minor, depending on the possible impact to our life. Some are quite important that choices appear to us as clearly marked crossroads;  all the roads seem equally important in deciding where we want to go.

Some choices are difficult to do especially if it means giving away something that you have sacrificed for and value above so many things in your life.Take our involvement with development work, particularly NGO work. There are always crossroads to take whether to continue it or not and probably, we share this situation with other colleagues who pursue development work in their own NGOs.

In the old days, say almost thirty years ago, it was of course simpler to decide whether to join or form an NGO. You have an innovative idea and the Government is not ready to try it and hence, it allows you to do it largely outside government efforts. Hence, in those days, we used to say that NGOs exist "to take advantage of the opportunities left behind by government efforts." Government is not ready to do something and some people take the initiative to do it - supposed to be temporarily until it is taken over by the Government.

In our case, in the NGOs we were involved in, there was the recognition something could be better done first outside Government with the understanding that the latter would somehow replicate or integrate our outputs in terms of strategies, training and operations methodologies or that there would be sharing of lessons learned. On the part of NGOs and the Government, there was commonality of interests in the quest for more effective means to organize and involve communities in local-level planning and decision-making; on how to generate support from the Church and other influential institutions; on how to increase the outreach of services to remote communities with local volunteers and organizations; or how to institutionalize development objectives in local plans.


In the course of time, however, the rationale for the existence of NGOs seems to have been blurred by the need to survive from day to day; you need to submit proposals to donors year in and year out to get some funding for projects; the involvement with Government deteriorated into something like an employer-employee relationship since the Goverment has become the source of funding for some activities; the NGOs
have lost their creative edge on account of circumstances brought about by dependence on donors and the Government for survival.

From Project Compassion to Ilaw ng Buhay and to BLDF, we have lived through so many crossroads and always we wind up not taking the road least taken by NGOs in similar situations - the choice to just fade away and leave everything to Government and to other civil society institutions the quest for better ways to do development work.

Now we are in this critical juncture again but the choice may not be difficult because most of us are actually in the sunset of our lives. Nature will probably do the choosing for us.



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