Berkley Center

Background: As part of the Education and Global Social Justice Project, in July 2010 undergraduate student Brian Dillon interviewed Father Bienvenido Nebres, S.J., president of Ateneo de Manila University. In this interview Father Nebres discusses the successes and challenges of balancing academic excellence and social justice in a university setting, as well as the importance of adapting programs to fit local needs. He also describes health and sanitation as a key future area of engagement.

I’ve read a few talks you’ve given about the role of pursuing social justice in Jesuit education, and wonder what you have found to be the biggest successes and challenges to balancing working towards both academic excellence and social justice.

Within the university setting, the biggest structural challenges are how universities are compared to each other, and the very specialized nature of most academic journals. On the other hand, we always to want to engage poverty and social justice. That work has to be interdisciplinary, so it is difficult to engage faculty as the work takes time away from their other research and probably won’t be published.

Basically, the metrics for excellence in higher education don’t consider working on poverty. We are looking for journals that publish interdisciplinary work and work on service-learning. Still, though, a lot of the energies for the poverty work have to come from students and the special centers we’ve established. We’ve had a group of people in the social science come up with some writings that we’re looking to publish, and looking at other disciplines. Ateneo is hosting a meeting now with people from Jesuit business schools, and our undergraduate business school is making social entrepreneurship a flagship. We have students at our School of Medicine and Public Health go to [Ateneo Center for Educational Development, ACED] communities as well.

We’re slowly finding ways to bring this all together; otherwise you have both academic excellence and poverty engagement—but they’re separate. The biggest challenge is getting them to meet, which is the ideal outcome. The other question we always ask is how we can achieve scale and sustainability in his work. This seems most promising when we can engage the local government, as ACED and Gawad Kalinga do in Payatas, Quezon City. The challenge related that is, of course, having elections every three years.

Overall, the really big challenge in the Philippines is how there is such a knowledge and cultural distance between the elites and the poor. If you ask me what our biggest role is, it is a bridge across those gaps. The biggest solutions will only come from our next generation of leaders who will have a better feel for the poverty in the country. People in power have tended to take simplistic approaches to the poverty. Consider the businessmen who seek an improvement to our struggling public schools by adding two years to the curriculum. My point is, 700,000 students drop out before grade six, and 1.2 million do not finish the current high school curriculum. Solutions like getting more computers or adding years of school won’t work for these student dropouts. Our challenge becomes connecting these leaders with the actual problems the poor have.

The paradigm we follow is based on a study we were asked to do by [the Department of Education] to determine what separated performing and non-performing schools from the same socioeconomic situations. We realized engaging the community and the leadership of the principal were most important. If you want a school to improve, don’t just give them something like computers. You have to engage the people, show them the reality, and challenge them to establish their priorities. The school profile is a reality check for many communities. Once we engage them to take those steps, any input you give a school will be better used.

At the end of the day, we can all help, but it’s their own will that will help a group of people propel themselves forward. Sir Caling [a principal in Payatas] is a great example. His leadership style would go against a lot of management theory, but he’s very effective and the people love him. He has to come harder in his approach, because the people he’s working with are so desperate that they otherwise might not hear him. We’ve learned a lot of lessons from him.

What were some specific events that pointed you to focusing these efforts, specifically in the schools with ACED, and what do you look to for continued motivation and inspiration in the work?

Personally, this work on social justice has always been part of my mission as a Jesuit. The question was always, how? There was a period when I wondered about Marx. There were many ideological perspectives in the 1970s ,and during the period of martial law we saw the importance of organizing in poor communities. But we realized later that only organizing the communities was unsustainable, because you always need to be there with the community. There were still no jobs and something was missing: education.

It’s been a long journey, and we started working with Gawad Kalinga around 2000. At that point we decided to work in Payatas with no presuppositions to see what schools needed. Anne Candelaria was the person who really tested all our theories and saw what the schools needed to move up.

The many pieces started to come together. In the 1990s we’d established the School of Government related to work specifically in local governments. We realized that if we wanted to make an impact and scale up these projects, we had to work alongside governments, especially locally. The Philippines is separated in many ways—geographically, logistically, and among the rich and poor. There is no one national solution to these problems, so there needed to be a local focus of our work.

Our Graduate School of Business has always had a health management program. In the mid-1990s the Leaders in Health program grew out of the idea that in most places, the biggest health problems are actually related to lack of safe drinking water, poor sanitation, and malnutrition. A doctor can’t solve those problems in his work and has to learn to engage the mayor and barangay captain to work on these larger health issues. This process has worked in the 50 municipalities where we have tried it.

Again, you can only make progress when you put all these pieces together. There can be different points of entry to engaging poverty. The poor communities need everything from health to houses. In Payatas, our points of entry were through Gawad Kalinga and ACED. But we realize that no matter how you enter a community, all these pieces are needed.

How do you see Ateneo working to integrate the work of all these groups, like ACED, Pathways for Higher Education, Gawad Kalinga, and Health Development Institute?

It’s not quite easy, because each of these groups don’t yet work in the same communities; but we’re now trying to take programs from the School of Medicine and Public Health and the Health Development Institute into ACED schools. Ideally we would be able to reach the parents of the ACED students, too. But, it becomes a problem of scaling up the projects, because of the number of people they affect and the number of people used to implement each of them.

But, we have in some ways to address problems the children have. The kids don’t only need help with educational studies, but are very shy and need to develop in personality and self-confidence as well. We saw drama as the best way to do this, and our performing arts groups have run programs related to it.

Whenever they can, we encourage the programs to work together. What’s emerging now is that the most promising entry point could be through health. The government established PhilHealth six or seven years ago, providing health insurance for the poorest communities. Using health as a vehicle and working with mayors through this program, we could reach more people.

In San Isidro, former mayor Sonia Lorenzo was very innovative with implementing the health insurance program and led to very dramatic change and economic development. The municipality went from one considered fourth- to second-class, improving its income almost tenfold to 50 million pesos. I couldn’t have made this connection without her; but the health insurance program allowed farmers to produce with a higher yield on their crops. Before the PhilHealth, somebody in a family would get sick, and they would have to borrow with lenders who charged them at “five-six” rates where, for example, they would have to pay 60 pesos at the end of the month on a 50 peso loan. Although they didn’t realize how bad those terms were, the farmers would go deeply into debt and couldn’t spend on their farm inputs. With the new insurance covering the health issues, the family can now spend on farm inputs and increase their harvest. Especially if we get mayors on board (and particularly in rural areas), PhilHealth seems like a great way to form a wider base of poverty alleviation.

In terms of ACED, education is still important, but over the very long term. No matter how hard we try, we have to reach out and improve people’s livelihoods beyond the education, which is tough. Think: if people can save money because of health insurance, it helps better feeding the children to be educated. All of this is a work in progress.

Where do you see other institutions, like Georgetown, playing a role to support the work Ateneo is doing on social action and nation-building in the Philippines?

One thing I had wondered about was whether Georgetown, just as Ateneo acts as a mediator between the government or groups with money and the poor, might consider that role internationally. Especially in terms of education, one of our groups, the Synergeia Foundation, receives much of its support from USAID, but through a company that bids for the work and can insist on certain inputs without a ground-level understanding of our work. If Jesuit schools in the United States could coordinate a bid for these projects, for Ateneo and other people doing similar work, maybe we could work as better partners with them.