The office, tucked away in a small side street in Cagayan de Oro City, looks more like a middle-class family residence in any subdivision: steel gate, well-kept garden with trimmed grass, a neat concrete two-story house that seemed newly-repainted. Not your typical NGO office: no cardboard boxes stacked in corners gathering dust, no desks cramped side by side, no clutter. You take your shoes off at the front door and enter barefoot.

Inside, however, a large streamer proudly hanging from the second floor down to the first floor with the letters BMFI and an ethnic drawing leaves no doubt that it is the home of an NGO - a “Mindanao-based and Mindanao-focused NGO”, as its brochure proudly states. BMFI stands for Balay Mindanaw Foundation, Inc., and true to the name, BMFI’s work and its people articulate a sense of fierce pride for Mindanao and a passion for transforming this poorest and most conflict-torn of the country’s regions into a “balay”, a true home for its people – Christians, Muslims and Lumads, the indigenous peoples of Mindanao.

BMFI has a total of 30 staff and volunteers, but only a few of them can be found at the office at any given time. That’s because most of the people are spread out in the areas where BMFI does its work – in Claveria and Gingoog City in Misamis Oriental, in Loreto, Dinagat Island in Surigao del Norte and in Davao del Sur.

As widespread as BMFI’s scope of operations, so are its activities diverse. Pursuing a vision of equity, development and peace for Mindanao through a sustainable integrated area development (SIAD) approach by promoting democratic participation in local governance and agrarian reform implementation obviously entails a lot of work in community organizing, networking, partnership building, research, publication and advocacy.

SIAD through mainstreaming participatory processes in local governance

For the most part, BMFI locates its interventions squarely in the barangays, developing a model for institutionalizing and mainstreaming democratic participation in local governance at the barangay level: in effect, transforming the barangay development planning process into a more democratic, participatory and meaningful process that local communities can use as tool to improve their access and control to resources. What BMFI does is this: organize and strengthen people’s organizations and cooperatives, facilitate the reorganization and strengthening of the barangay development council or BDC, the conduct of participatory rural appraisal or PRA as participatory data-gathering method, and the democratic and participatory formulation of barangay development plans, and the mobilization of internal and external resources for such plans.

It may sound simple enough: get people to participate in their barangay’s planning process, surface the real problems and issues in the barangay, help the community identify its interests and needs in the form of a plan, and then help the barangay find resources to pursue these interests.

The real work involved, however, is much more complicated. First, BMFI has to gain the confidence, trust and cooperation of the municipality and barangay stakeholders to undertake the BDP-PRA process. Second, BMFI has to conduct training and orientation to ensure that the barangay has the capacity to undertake the process. Next, the BMFI facilitates the actual conduct of the PRA and BDP, mobilizing the participation of people in the process. After this, BMFI takes on the task of editing, layouting, translating and overall packaging of the actual barangay plans that will be understandable to possible resource partners. Finally, BMFI facilitates the conduct of a Stakeholders Forum, inviting congressional representatives, local and foreign foundations, and other funding sources to a forum where barangay officials can present their projects for possible funding.

Since 1996, BMFI had helped 24 barangays in Claveria, Misamis Oriental, 13 barangays in Gingoog City, also in Misamis Oriental, 10 barangays in Loreto, Surigao del Norte, 10 barangays in Davao del Sur and other barangays in other areas formulate their barangay development plans. Today, through the help of BMFI, most of these barangays have formulated 5-year barangay development plans through this participatory planning process. In addition, BMFI, through the conduct of stakeholders for a, have proved instrumental in helping source at least 100 millions of pesos for the implementation of specific barangay projects under these plans.

In Claveria, some 100 million pesos were sourced for infrastructure projects and food security in 10 brangays as well as pledges from the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) and commitment from line agencies to provide technical assistance to the barangays. In Gingoog, particularly Brgy. Sangalan, almost 20 million pesos were sourced for road rehabilitation, potable water system, resource tenure improvement and capability building activities. In Loreto, the World Bank – ARCDP committed to invest in 4 barangays designated as agrarian reform communities. In addition, some 10 million pesos were committed by other agencies that responded to the call for help like UNDP, PDAP, PACAP, LWR and others for environmental and potable water system projects and other projects identified and developed by the barangays themselves.

Local politics, traditional mindsets resistant to change, the hostility of vested powerful interests and the sheer demand on human, technical and financial resources are among the hurdles that BMFI has to overcome or deal with before and during the entire process.

What makes the work easier, Kaloy Manlupig, BMFI Executive Director states, is the presence of full-time community organizers living in the barangays they work in. BMFI has 14 focus barangays [in the year 2000] where full time community organizers live and work, or what BMFI calls its SIADOs (pronounced shadows) - Sustainable Integrated Area Development Organizers. BMFI also believes in forging and nurturing partnerships with people’s organizations and non-government organizations in their areas of work, and helping these organizations build and strengthen their capacities.

In addition to its work on mainstreaming participatory development planning at the barangay level, BMFI also does paralegal systems development and undertakes developmental legal assistance, through its Legal Team in its focus and service barangays in the provinces of Bukidnon, Misamis Oriental, Agusan del Norte, Agusan del Sur, Davao City/Oriental and Davao del Norte, Compostela Valley. This Team has eventually evolved into an independent NGO called BALAOD-Mindanaw.

Basically, developmental legal assistance consists of providing para-legal training and legal services to BMFI’s focus and service barangays in its PRA-BDP needs. More programmatically, BMFI also sought to put in place a community-based paralegal program, entitled the Barangay Access to Justice program, attempting to develop community-based para-legals in its barangays, especially in helping address land tenure issues.

BMFI also has a Resource Center for Empowerment and Development (RCED) that provides research support to the BMFI in its SIAD interventions. RCED handles the training and education, research, information and publication needs of BMFI and its partner organizations.

At the regional and international levels, BMFI plays a leadership role in Mindanao campaigns and Mindanao-wide NGO networks, including providing secretariat functions for such coalitions as the Kusog Mindanaw, Lihuk Pideral Mindanaw, Mindanao Congress of Development NGOs, Mindanao Coalition of Development NGOs, Mindanao Peace Advocates Conference. BMFI is also at the forefront of the campaign for federalism as the form of government for the Philippines, in the belief that a federalist structure would adequately ensure the protection and promotion of Mindanao’s unique political and cultural identity.

It is a testament to the viable successes of BMFI’s work that in the past two years, both its development legal assistance and RCED teams have attained independent identities and have grown into NGOs themselves, now known as BALAOD and RCED respectively. Both organizations, now registered with SEC, continue to provide support to BMFI’s work while branching out into projects of their own.

Basing development work in the barangay

While other SIAD-oriented NGOs have a sectoral, municipal or provincial focus, BMFI firmly believes that the most viable form of intervention should begin at the barangay level. According to Kaloy, any intervention that does not take the barangay as its primary unit may not prove sustainable, as it will not be grassroots-based.

BMFI, therefore, defines its approach to community-based natural resource management as territorial-based, specifically, barangay-based, instead of ecosystem-based. Instead of defining what resources needs to be managed and conserved in a given area, for example an endangered specie, a specific river or forest area and then organizing around this issue, BMFI recognizes the barangay as locus and nexus for development work and allows the barangay through a participatory process and with guidance from the organization, to determine what resources it has and hopes to manage. This approach is being increasingly adopted by many other NGOs.

In fact, BMFI only seeks to realize what is already mandated by the law, that any form of development planning must begin at the barangay level. Only, this is not what happens. The national government forms its plans on its own, and the province, the city or the municipality does the same; hence a top-down approach. What BMFI seeks to do is to overturn the process and locate development firmly at the barangay. This approach entails that the barangay community – men, women, youth, farmers, fishers and lumads – identify their own resources, identify their communities boundaries, interests and needs and develop plans of action in which to utilize and manage their resources to serve the community’s needs and interests. Only this approach, says BMFI, will ensure that any intervention, any action will be based on the community’s situation, get the community’s participation and ensure sustainability of any such action.

BMFI also has a firm belief that the root of Mindanao’s poverty and underdevelopment is the problem of landlessness, that keeps most of Mindanao’s people, especially the lumads, powerless. In order for development to be possible, therefore, BMFI believes in firmly addressing the land issue, by also integrating interventions to help agrarian reform implementation in the region. In other words, community-based natural resource management can only be possible if the community owns its resouirces, starting with the land.

In upland Barangay Sangalan, for example, where Christians and lumad farmers and fishers live together, the residents identified in their barangay planning that their main problem was the lack of land tenure. A majority of the land in the barangay is classified as timberland and covered by a timber license agreement held by a timber company (NALCO). For years, farmers had little incentive to improve farming, resigned to being laborers only in the timber company. When the timber company left, though its license continue to hold, farmers went back to subsistence farming of bananas and other crops, but with little farming equipment and technology. As such, farmers, before BMFI came in, held little hope of ever possessing claims to the land they had farmed for countless years. Through BMFI’s help, the barangay was able to process an application for a community-based forest management agreement with the DENR that is now awaiting final approval from the department secretary. Farmers and barangay officials in the Sangalan are now looking at the fulfillment of their dream of staking possession of their land and its management.

In addition, Sangalan has been able to utilize its P160,000 IRA allotment that has lain unused for years through the BDP process. After the barangay development planning, Sangalan utilized half of the amount for as a credit facility made available for small farmers, while half of it went to the purchase of farming equipment.

Perhaps more importantly, BMFI, through its organizing work, was able to help in the formation of two people’s organizations in the barangay, a farmers cooperative and a women’s organization that is now in the midst of developing and implementing small projects. BMFI also assists in sourcing funds for the two organizations’ projects.

BMFI had to deal with a different situation in the municipality of Loreto in Dinagat Island, in the province of Surigao del Norte. There, much of the land that farmers have tilled for ages, is classified as mineral land, therefore government-owned and not eligible for land distribution to farmers. To compound the situation, a mining company holds rights to the land for mining. Residents of these barangays, therefore, are forced to eke out their living in subsistence farming and fishing, again with little hope of owning their land.

The interventions that BMFI conducts in Loreto, aside from facilitating the PRA-BDP in these barangays, is to introduce farming techniques aimed at improving the productivity of the small farms in Loreto. While the issue of land tenure remains unresolved, BMFI continues to assists farmers in developing “demo farms” to increase incomes and living standards.

“Lumads are the poorest of the poor in Mindanao”. This statement captures BMFI’s special focus on working with indigenous peoples. In all barangays that it is working with therefore, BMFI ensures that the voices and experiences of the indigenous peoples are adequately represented. BMFI also seeks to preserve and promote indigenous knowledge and practices. BMFI is helping several tribes/clans of Higaonon people devise a system of land sharing and management using traditional conflict-resolution rituals and methods of the Higaonon. Under the project, BMFI will document the conflict resolution process as a way of preserving and disseminating viable indigenous methods at conflict resolution among lumads.

In 1998, two years after BMFI was launched, it saw the need to improve its agricultural expertise. With its emphasis on agrarian reform and agriculture, and as many of its barangays were farming communities, BMFI nonetheless lacked technical expertise in agricultural technologies which has been increasingly identified as a needed intervention to assist farmers in improving their living situations.

At the same time, Kaloy relates that there was a dearth of Filipino agriculturists, with many of these opting to work for large multinational agribusiness companies. BMFI, therefore collaborated with VSO for the possible placement of a volunteer agriculturist to assist BMFI.

Thus, in 1998, Simon Brook, an agricultural worker from Britain, arrived in Mindanao as a volunteer with BMFI. His placement objectives were: to help BMFI in developing a SIAD framework by contributing to the agriculture components of the framework as well as assist in the development of farming technologies that can be used by BMFI farmer-partners.

Both BMFI and Simon admit that the first year was rough sailing for both. Simon’s placement entailed his being based in Loreto, in far-flung Dinagat Island in the western tip of Mindanao, which entailed seven hours of , well, literally, rough sailing as you brave the rough waves and winds of the Pacific Ocean. On Loreto, life is also a universe away from life in Britain. There was no electricity or running water, the place is isolated from life outside the island, and life virtually stopped at sundown when the villages went to sleep.

Moreover, Simon did not have a development background; he was purely an agricultural worker and his expectation was mainly to assist in farming. BMFI, on the other hand, was a development organization with strong political foundations.

Because of this gap in expectations, it took time for both BMFI and Simon to adjust to each other, so to speak. Simon had difficulty understanding meetings and discussions and why he was made to sit through them when he had expected to be farming, and BMFI staff found Simon “suplado” at first. Understandably, Simon also had a different experience of farming systems in Britain and took time learning about farming systems in Loreto. While he was able to start a demo farm with farmers in Loreto, the farm did not prove fully sustainable, as Simon left after ten months on the island, and the farmers also gave limited time to it as they were preoccupied with fishing at certain months of the year.

After three and a half years, however, both Simon and BMFI expressed much satisfaction and affection with each other. To hear Simon talk, to read his reports to VSO, is to hear an NGO worker talk; he does not talk about the technical aspects of farming but about the poverty of people, the local politicians who do not have the people’s interests at heart, the lack of opportunities for people, and the powerlessness that pervades people’s situations.

BMFI, on the other hand, takes pride in Simon’s development and the contributions that he has made to BMFI’s overall work. While Simon did not prove to be the agricultural expert BMFI sought, he has found his own niche in the organization: helping BMFI in facilitating the barangay development planning in the barangays, assisting in packaging the barangay plans for submission, in drafting project proposals to funding partners, and on his own, making project proposals and sourcing funds for barangay projects from his own contacts.

As a result of Simon’s initiatives, he was able to source funds from VSO, the British Embassy and other institutions for several projects, including a solar dryer for a barangay, exchange visits between farmers in Loreto and Claveria and other small projects.

Simon also began assisting in the development of a monitoring and evaluation system for BMFI’s area-based work.

BMFI staff, including Kaloy and Simon’s counterpart Felix Vergara, believe that Simon’s biggest contribution was in providing a mirror in which BMFI can see its work reflected. Inadvertently, both Kaloy and Felix stated that Simon did contribute in refining BMFI’s framework, not through his agricultural expertise, but in his earnest questioning and clarifying of the directions that BMFI is taking. By asking his questions, by challenging BMFI’s assumptions, by compelling BMFI to continually explain their framework and political foundations, they said Simon helped BMFI keep on the right track. “Nahahasa yung direksiyon namin dahil sa pagtatanong ni Simon”, Kaloy says.

For Simon, on the other hand, resistance and confusion on why agricultural work should entail so much political discussion has given way to a deeper understanding of why politics plays such a huge role in any project that seeks to help people. He has personally talked to mayors and other local politicians, and he has talked as well to local farmers, fishers and lumads.

One of us

Perhaps what has helped a lot is BMFI’s own commitment in nurturing the staff and people it works with. Aside from pursuing partnerships with communities, people’s organizations and NGOs in Mindanao, BMFI also consciously tries to nurture a supportive working environment for its own staff and volunteers. Obtaining a comfortable, spacious and well-kept office is only one of these efforts. Continuously finding and sustaining resources to ensure competitive remuneration and allowances for the staff is another.

Simon also has a deeper appreciation of how and why BMFI works the way it does, especially when he became involved in the controversial Mapalad case, a campaign the BMFI, along with other NGOs vigorously pursued. Simon arrived at the height of the controversy: some 65 farming families,mostly of the Higaonon tribe, in Bukidnon were awarded 145 hectares of land by the Department of Agrarian Reform but the landowner appealed and the order was overturned. The issue reached then President Ramos. In the meantime, the farmers had gone on hunger strike, attempted to occupy the land and the landowner had retaliated by destroying the farmers’ shacks and putting up barbed wire around the property. In his report, Simon told of how the farmers, deprived of their land and blacklisted by other landowners from being farm labor, had to eat poisonous yam to survive.

Simon is even more poignant in his reports on how the participatory development planning process facilitated by BMFI is effecting change in the barangays the NGO serves. In Loreto, where Simon lived for almost a year, he witnessed how people, for the first time in their lives, were able to stand up to a mayor, largely supportive of mining interests in the area, and insist on the implementation of the barangay plans that the people had developed on their own. Years of intimidation by armed goons hired by the mining company and local politicians fell away as farmers stood up in a meeting with the mayor, present their barangay plans and demand that government services be given to them. Simon believes this would not have been possible without BMFI’s intervention.

Finally, because of his experience with BMFI, Simon relates that he has gained not only greater respect for the organization, their framework and the people they serve, but has also gained greater confidence in himself, grateful for the experience that he would never have had had he stayed in the UK. While his placement is over, he has plans to return to Philippines in the future and continue doing development work.

All’s well

BMFI, on the other hand, is preparing for the arrival of another volunteer, another agriculturist for their Davao del Sur work, obviously a testament that their first experience is worth repeating. For BMFI, Simon’s presence and contribution, and the opportunities afforded to BMFI because of Simon’s presence have been worthwhile. BMFI staff note that the conferences BMFI was able to attend and the cross-visits among farmers from different BMFI areas – all made possible by the SCRUM program – have been helpful in many small ways in further strengthening BMFI’s work. And while Simon is too modest himself to name his own contributions to BMFI, he would surely agree.

Helping One Another

Perhaps what has helped a lot is BMFI’s own commitment in nurturing the staff and people it works with. Aside from pursuing partnerships with communities, people’s organizations and NGOs in Mindanao, BMFI also consciously tries to nurture a supportive working environment for its own staff and volunteers. Obtaining a comfortable, spacious and well-kept office is only one of these efforts. Continuously finding and sustaining resources to ensure competitive remuneration and allowances for the staff is another.