2007 Filipinas Magazine Achievement Awards

International Achievement : Antonio Meloto
Sponsored by Seafood City Group of Companies

When he received the 2006 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Community Leadership, the following was written about Antonio Meloto, executive director of Gawad Kalinga:
“Asia’s vast cities-of-the-poor are visible proof of a hard fact. Despite decades of economic development programs and foreign aid and the earnest efforts of foundations and NGOs, not to mention the sweet promises of politicians, great millions of people in Asia still live in poverty. In the Philippines, nearly half of the country’s 84 million people are credibly said to live below the poverty line. Forty percent of its urban families occupy what the Asian Development Bank calls ‘makeshift dwellings in informal settlements.’ Slums, in other words. Antonio Meloto believes these disheartening facts reveal his country’s failure ‘to work for the collective good.’ As executive director of Gawad Kalinga Community Development Foundation, he is changing this.”

Indeed, Gawad Kalinga, under Meloto’s inspiring leadership, has created an almost unbelievable phenomenon in the Philippines: hundreds of former squatter colonies transformed into attractive, crime-free villages occupied by the former slum dwellers themselves. “Former” is the operative term, because Gawad Kalinga has imbued them with a new sense of hope and a belief in their capacity to overcome their miserable state.

A successful corporate executive, Meloto had an encounter with the Catholic organization Couples for Christ that caused him to reassess his life and priorities. He joined the organization full-time and, in 1995, launched a work-with-the-poor ministry in Bagong Silang, a huge squatter relocation site in Metro Manila. He dubbed his ministry, “Gawad Kalinga”—“To give care.”

It was in Bagong Silang that he saw how a slum environment developed slum behavior, but that even among hardened gang members there was some innate goodness. They just needed a chance to live with dignity. Meloto concluded that building decent homes for them was one way to give them that.

Meloto and volunteers from Couples for Christ began transforming a section of Bagong Silang by replacing the shanties with sturdy and attractive homes with the help of the squatters who would become their recipients. The houses could not be sold and the recipients would volunteer to build other houses and abide by neighborhood covenants. Thus was the first Gawad Kalinga village built.

Inspired, Meloto and his group sought new sites to build on, soliciting donations and volunteer labor and showing off actual projects to allay the doubts of skeptics. Through ANCOP (Answering the Cry of the Poor) Foundation, Meloto then began to reach out to overseas Filipinos for donations. Meanwhile, Gawad Kalinga integrated health, education and livelihood components into the villages to make the residents self-sufficient.

Today, more than 850 Gawad Kalinga villages have been built across the country, each village containing 50 to 100 brightly painted homes with flowers and plants lining neat walkways. In these communities, crime has virtually disappeared. Former street children are in school. The idle have been motivated to find employment and live productive lives.

These villages have been built with donations from overseas Filipinos, concerned Philippine businesses and even foreign private and corporate donors. Gawad Kalinga has set a goal of 7,000 such communities by the year 2010.

The miracle of Gawad Kalinga is not simply in the heroism of Antonio Meloto and the Couples for Christ but in the transformation of thousands of Filipinos, in the Philippines and overseas, into heroes themselves.

Souvenir Programme