Gawad Kalinga: Ending poverty through housing

This week I could not help but think about a well-known housing NGO in the Philippines called Gawad Kalinga. Although the housing projects are not government initiated, like those in Fennell’s book, there seems to be many similarities to other themes throughout the book, such as sympathy and self-governance as a solution to poverty. Additionally, Faith R. Kares in her article, “Practicing 'Enlightened Capitalism': 'Fil-Am' Heroes, NGO Activism, and Reconstituting Class Difference in the Philippines,” argues that Gawad Kalinga takes on a large governance role, and so there can still be some connection made here with the Chicago housing projects.  Gawad Kalinga draws on international support, especially from the Filipino diaspora. According to Kares, Gawad Kalinga has become the main source for housing solutions in the Philippines, and the government has come to rely on the organization for housing impoverished communities. Gawad Kalinga was originally founded in 1995 with a faith-based vision to eradicate poverty through housing, and was supported by the ecclesiastical Catholic community, Couples for Christ. The organization has marketed campaigns for volunteers and donations especially from the Filipino diasporic community. The Gawad Kalinga image and marketing toward diasporic Filipinos focuses on the idea of being a hero (bayani) and centers on the Filipino value of the spirit of community help in times of crisis (bayanihan). The larger goal constructed here is nation-building through providing housing, but the interesting quality is that diasporic Filipinos—Kares focuses on Filipino-Americans, or Fil-Ams—are enlisted in this nation-building project. She notices that participation amongst Fil-Ams leans toward the “second-generation” who are fulfilling a desire for “transnational belonging”. I feel that connections can be made here to Fennell’s idea of sympathy—sympathy in the sense of needing connection. I am particularly thinking of Fennell’s use of sympathy as described here:

The concept of sympathy invites us to consider how suppositions of likeness might take hold through the coordination of proximity, senses, inferences, and bodies. It challenges us to scrutinize the material experiences by which those entangled in Chicago’s experiment learned to extend themselves and forge sociability across long-standing racial and economic divides. Yet is also asks us to consider those instances in which these divides could not be overcome and in fact were reinforced. This book traces sympathy’s fraught acrobatics of identification and differentiation as it unfolded at Horner and Westhaven. (Fennell: 25-26)

Fil-Ams volunteering for Gawad Kalinga are likewise forging sociability across divides--geographical distances, class differences, and arguably more.

References

        Kares, F. R. (2014). Practicing “Enlightened Capitalism”: “Fil-Am” Heroes, NGO Activism, and    Reconstituting Class Difference in the Philippines. Philippine Studies: Historical and             Ethnographical Viewpoints, 62(2), 175–204.