SANIB-SINAG  1   February 15, 1998
 1.1    
Sanib-Sinag: 
For a Synergism of Minds
(Introducing Our Foundation’s ‘Friendly-Forum Folio’)
By the Saniblakas Management Team 
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A "COLLECTOR of experiences." This was how a Saniblakas Foundation officer described herself in a recent environment-oriented forum. Of course, everybody is a collector of personal experiences that accumulate as life memories and hopefully wisdom that one would later carry into old age, but this is not what she was talking about. As an active member of the growing "Saniblakas family," she is into collecting experiences and lessons from many people to be shared with and among bigger multitudes, for a synergy of experiences and lessons that would redound to the empowerment of all who are directly and indirectly involved in this process.

        As the Saniblakas leadership tries to pursue the Foundation’s mission "to help build a truly empowered nation of empowered communities and individuals through individual human development and optimized synergism," it needs to learn fast all the lessons on individual human development and optimized synergism both for inspirational and practical purposes. Chances are many of these ideas are already within the present Board of Trustees, each profound insight lodged in the minds of two or three of them or most of the Board members. We all have something profound and valuable to share. But opportunities for their airing and sharing have been very limited. Regular Board meetings are scheduled only twice each year and the few hours in each session have had to be focused on prioritized agenda points.

        Thus the Saniblakas management team saw the need to build thinking and sharing mechanisms aside from meetings. As the team has been collecting articles and clippings on human empowerment and synergism topics, as well as on various aspects of the current conditions and work of the NGOs and POs that form a vital part of the terrain where Saniblakas does its work, it was decided to photocopy these articles and clippings and mail them out to Board members. Saniblakas has its own promo and educational output and these, too, should be sent to the members of the Board. And each response of each member on any item deserves to be shared with all the others. The idea evolved for a Saniblakas forum system, initially in the form only of a frequent folio and later possibly to be reinforced by regular physical gatherings for healthy and enlightening discussions.

        The Saniblakas Foundation cannot expect to comprehend and appreciate the Whole Truth about individual and collective human empowerment and the imperatives for its immediate application to Philippine realities. Even just the discoveries we make going into our EnviroScan have been humbling—we have much to learn about what has already been going on! We may already have seen the broad strokes and outlines but our knowledge and wisdom has to be continuously refined if we are to advance in the pursuit of our mission.

        The distinct experiences and the lessons in the minds of individual Board members, as well as of the other active members of the growing "Saniblakas family," as well as the Foundation’s friends and partners, are distinct bright rays of the Whole Truth, "ang bawat kaisipang makatotohanan ay sinag ng buong liwanag!" We have to gather and forge all these bright rays of thought together in a synergism of the minds to produce an immense magnitude of knowledge and wisdom that the Saniblakas Foundation needs badly and needs immediately for the sake of pursuing our work successfully.

        Sanib-Sinag is an attempt to serve this process. The management team is acting as "editorial board" (that means a lot of encoding, file-copying, pasting up and photocopying clippings, putting on the stamps, etc.) . We are coming out with this maiden folio on the twelfth anniversary of the "EDSA People Power Revolution," in celebration of the historic event in the Filipino people's history of collective and individual empowerment. The introductory portion of the 1997 midyear report, as well as the brief description of "Our Kind of Work," are carried here to refresh the minds of the Board members (and to elicit more responses from them) and to share the basic definitions and concepts with readers outside the Saniblakas leadership.

        We hope the succeeding folios can follow soon. But the bigger hope is that all members of the Board and of the bigger "Saniblakas family" who receive their copies will find quality time of about an hour to read each folio soon after it comes in. A small outlay from the Saniblakas central fund is used to produce and send out the copies of this "maiden issue" of Sanib-Sinag, but succeeding folios will have to be funded by contributions and donations from all of us specifically for this project.

        Still, the more important contributions will be responses and other thoughts and insights (including questions, criticisms and suggestions) that you would share with others through Sanib-Sinag, your friendly forum collecting ideas from experiences.

   
 
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