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SANIB-SINAG 2 March 14, 1998

2.4 Saniblakas Foundation at Yearend 1997: Enrichment and Formative Experiences [Excerpted from the 1997 Yearend Report on the Growth of SANIBLAKAS ] Prepared by the Management Team Approved by the Board [during the meeting of Dec. 7, 1997; finalized on January 15, 1988]

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THE FIRST HALF-YEAR of formal existence of Saniblakas ng Taongbayan, Inc. brought forth images of a baby being born, taking its first crying breath of life- sustaining air, and later on opening its eyes and smiling at the world. A cute baby, a little bundle of pure joy. In the last four months of 1997, Saniblakas was a toddler taking its first steps, faltering, falling and learning to get up each time. This latter period, which started with the newly-renamed "Saniblakas Foundation" feeling optimistic over initial clarifications of its thrusts and methods, can now be characterized as an enrichment of its formative experiences.

While we have had reason to grow more convinced about the urgent imperative of promoting synergism principles which is what Saniblakas is all about, we have grown much wiser over this same period to realize that this mission is that we have set out to perform is much more difficult, the practical challenges that we have to face more complex, and the need to focus our priorities more urgent, than we had thought before. We now have a rich harvest of lessons to learn well and fast, lessons we have had to pay for dearly in circumstances where we felt frustrated and even harassed.

This report covers the period of September through December 1997. This, taken together with ‘Saniblakas’: A Word Becoming Flesh, our mid-year report, make up our record and assessment for the whole year of 1997. This present document updates, with a certain level of evaluation and analysis, the record of achievements and conditions covered by that earlier one. As an update, it follows the same body outline of the earlier document.

Still, as part of the introduction here, it would be good to recall the sets of challenges we prepared to face as we completed and adopted the mid-year report last August. In the last section of that report, titled "Immediate Challenges and Prospects," the following urgent imperatives are highlighted: (1) meeting the deadlines set on the book projects; (2) performing well in the facilitation services mainly for track record purposes possibly leading to more and better-paying facilitation contracts; (3) getting started on the mega-project to research and propagate "Saniblakas Success Stories"; and (4) institutional stabilization of Saniblakas as a foundation.

We concluded that part on "Challenges and Prospects" by saying that: "actually, all challenges are opportunities to succeed and move forward. As long as we keep to the principle of mobilizing many high-caliber resource persons and synergizing well their capabilities by good management and coordination, these challenges shall have been turned into achievements by the time we write our first yearend report about six months from now."

We were unable to "keep to the principle of mobilizing many high-caliber resource persons and synergizing well their capabilities by good management and coordination," but we had valuable learnings that can enable us to do this well in the near future. The learnings have also helped us assert and project some basics, like (1) focusing our service lines along two levels of priority, and (2) infusing and highlighting as a requirement the element of being happy both in the desired results and in the very processes of our work.

VISION-MISSION DEFINING/REFINING
AND CONCEPT DEVELOPMENT

The document 'Saniblakas’: A Word Becoming Flesh explains the concept of human synergism the Foundation would apply to contemporary Philippine social conditions, and traces the history of its evolution in the praxis of the main initiator.

But neither that document nor the Saniblakas brochure sets forth the Foundation’s vision and mission Months after the adoption of that mid-year report, the executive director (formerly executive secretary) formulated the premises and components of Foundation’s vision and mission, as a practicum output of her ongoing theoretical-practical on-the-job training.

Vision: "Saniblakas Foundation envisions a society which puts premium on individual and collective human empowerment, where people are coming together, supporting and helping one another to accomplish what they want to do with their lives, and where human persons have the proper attitude to apply the same synergism to embrace all living creatures on earth."

Mission: "To help build a truly empowered nation of empowered communities and individuals through individual human development and optimized synergism."

As stated in ‘Saniblakas’: A Word Becoming Flesh, to pursue this mission is to provide services that would help organizations, institutions and individuals achieve or enhance their own empowerment through skills development and optimized synergism.

Learning from our difficult experiences of the past few months, we are starting to refine this services approach (as distinguished from umbrella-organizing or alliance-building approach). We would now delineate among the services: classify as priority activities our own "proactive projects and activities" and relegate to secondary priority level the signing and implementation of service contracts. Our policy guidelines document on signing such contracts declares: "The Saniblakas Mission ... is to be pursued mainly through our own empowerment projects and activities, that would most directly help bring individual and collective empowerment messages and skills to the biggest number of people in the shortest time. Through service contracts we can also help other entities undertake projects and activities that promote individual and collective empowerment according to their own concepts and plans and under their supervision and subject to their evaluation, and these can also help promote and pursue our own mission."

Another refinement of our approach flowing from the vision-mission statement is the new attention on making Saniblakas work happiness-oriented. This can be gleaned from the formulation of the Foundation’s basic messages, to be carried in its education and promotion projects and activities:

"Synergism, the real magnifier of total capability and also of individual capabilities, is available to all of us, to the Filipino people and the human family as a whole. The challenge is to learn its principle and applications in increasing quality and scope, thus uplifting ourselves and making a very significant positive contribution to society, leading to material and non-material prosperity, real broad-based development, and happiness."

"We are great as individual human persons, but we can all become even better as soon as we free ourselves from disempowering beliefs, habits, structures."

"Our organizations are generally potent for empowering their members and serving society along the lines of their respective vision-mission formulations, but these organizations can become even stronger and more effective as soon as synergism principles are made to flow through all their respective internal and external systems."

"We’re great and strong as a people, but we can be greater and stronger if we are able to break free from disempowering beliefs, habits and structures ("Alipinas") and collectively enhance the historically-rooted elements of our greatness as a race ("DakiLahi")."

"Summary: Let us all be happy for our present greatness; be happy for our growing individual and collective capability to uplift ourselves and move forward; be happy for the upliftment and forward movement already achieved; be happy for the growing number of us with increasing levels of willingness and teamwork for further advancing individual human development and collective empowerment."

Still on the matter of approach, we have not started earnest studies on the possibility of Saniblakas Foundation creating a cooperative under its wings or becoming one. The possibility for the latter is remote because we were initially incorporated in January 1997 as a non-stock non-profit entity."

(The full report continues with other major sections like "Institution-Bldg," etc. like the midyear report, the contents of which are all internal to the Foundation's Board of Trustees..)

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