“Pag-asa”

“How do we feed people, or how do we enable people to feed themselves?”

These were just two of the many questions that struck Guillermo Luz when the Luzon-wide enhanced community quarantine was implemented. As chief resilience officer of the Philippine Disaster Resilience Foundation (PDRF), he is no stranger to disasters. He has experienced countless typhoons, earthquakes, and volcanic eruptions, but never a pandemic of this scale and virulence. This one, no one was prepared for.

“I was more afraid of the coronavirus than the volcano because it is invisible. If we do not monitor it closely, we're going to be hit,” he said.

Instinctively, Bill, as he is known in business circles, kept his eye on the most vulnerable. Despite his own introvert ways (having grown up in a family of nine kids), he has learned through many years as executive director of Makati Business Club and through work he did with Ayala Foundation, that big business can help address a calamity of any origin by working together to help the smallest in the community. But could they scale up quickly to reach so many in need? How would they begin?

The catalyst came through an urgent video call. When the government announced the lockdown in March, Fernando Zobel De Ayala and Jaime Augusto Zobel De Ayala scheduled a Zoom meeting with a small group of people that included Bill. The virtual call gave birth to Project Ugnayan.  

“We agreed that the big problem would be hunger,”

said Bill, recalling the Ayala brothers’ main concern during their meeting. Bill immediately agreed to help mobilize the private sector through Project Ugnayan.

“The initial target was how to raise a billion pesos quickly to reach one million families,” Bill said. 

About 24 hours after that meeting, members of the private sector had pledged the first billion pesos. Bill and PDRF became the secretariat and fund manager for the substantial donation. 

The next challenge was how to reach the poorest communities. “Very quickly, we decided we couldn’t deliver food; it’s too physically challenging to provide food for a million people,” Bill recalled. They thought of using digital cash but immediately scrapped the idea because not everyone has a smartphone. They also considered using debit cards, but not all branches and ATM machines would be open. Handing out cash, on the other hand, would be even more challenging. 

Eventually, they came up with the idea of distributing supermarket vouchers.

“Gift certificates are like money. People can redeem them in the stores and they are easy to distribute, so we thought that would be the way to go,”

Bill said. The team then contacted Fr. Anton Pascual, the head of Caritas Manila. Within that week, Caritas Manila’s network of priests started delivering gift checks to poor communities in Metro Manila, one house at a time. 

"It’s the largest distribution program that has ever been undertaken. I think for years, distributing assistance and relief items has been used but not at this scale, in terms of value and reach,” Bill said.

Project Ugnayan built an infrastructure that benefited not only people in need but also supermarkets, which were adversely affected by the pandemic. The business sector was so impressed by the efficiency and speed of the program that they gave Php 1.7 billion in cash and Php 4 billion worth of in-kind donations.  

Project Ugnayan reached its goals promptly with a clear sense of purpose and mission. The model was so successful that even the government became interested in Project Ugnayan’s method.

“We developed the model that is replicable. The government asked us about it, and we gave our notes on the concept behind it,”

Bill said. 

For Bill, the gift checks were more than just a quick, efficient relief for the poor communities of the Greater Manila Area. They represented pag-asa for millions of Filipinos who were engulfed by fear when the streets were shut down.