Throwing a Lifeline
How the country’s biggest business leaders fed our poorest citizens during the lockdown—and it only took one phone call at a time. Bill Luz shares the story
Words by ALYA B. HONASAN & AN MERCADO ALCANTARA
Photographs by XYZA CRUZ BACANI
How do you feed 7 million poor, hungry individuals in the midst of a pandemic, in the fastest, most practical way possible?
That was something the Ayala Group Management Committee had to grapple with less than a week into the Enhanced Community Quarantine (ECQ), which started on March 16.
Having spent the first few days of the lockdown making sure that Ayala employees and partners were protected and secure, the Mancom worried next about the most vulnerable members of the population. It was not enough to look only after their own people, what about those who had nobody to look after them?
“We came to the realization of the problem and the broad solution all in one Zoom meeting,” recounts Bill Luz, who received the urgent call for him to join the online meeting just 15 minutes before it began. As chief resilience officer of the Philippine Disaster and Resilience Foundation (PDRF), he had an inkling what the meeting could be about, but he never imagined the scale it would take.
All hands on deck. The Ayala leadership team assembled on Zoom to discuss the fastest way to help the most number of people.
“He had an inkling what the meeting could be about, but he never imagined the scale it would take. ”
In the call were Ayala ManCom members, including Jaime Zobel de Ayala (JAZA) and Fernando Zobel de Ayala (FZA). “The realization was that there was going to be a problem with hunger, and the need for food was immediate,” Bill says. “The solution was for the Group to work together to provide that assistance.”
The assistance had to be taken to a massive scale at the quickest possible time. “We thought of a million families, and how to provide them with P1,000 worth of assistance—so right off the bat, that is a billion pesos,” Bill says.
From this germ of an idea, Project Ugnayan was born. A rapidly put together consortium for immediate aid, which would eventually include the Philippine Disaster Relief Foundation (PDRF), Caritas Manila, and some of the country’s biggest corporations.
Bill Luz
““Speed is everything with hunger. Hunger does not wait.””
Clear Mission
Bill believes it was the straightforward nature of the goal that made it relatively easy for this “unprecedented assembly” to raise a billion so quickly. “The concept was very urgent, it was easy to understand, and it had a very clear mission. It takes only a few minutes to explain the story.”
The story had Ayala business leaders picking up their phones and tapping their vast networks to get commitments. “A lot of phone calls happened in 24 hours, personal calls to friends tracked on simple spreadsheets. And then of course we kept going, because people were interested. Executives said, ‘Hey, I know so-and-so who might be interested to help.’ It was really ‘friends-raising,’ rather than ‘fund-raising.’”
The day after that first Zoom meeting, the group had not only hit the target in record time, they even exceeded it with P1.5 billion in pledges.
““People also reclaimed something they felt they had lost in a time of crisis: a choice, no matter how small.””
‘A-ha!’ moment
Now armed with enough donations, how would the assistance be given? “We could not imagine buying, distributing, and delivering a billion pesos worth of food, or a million food packs, because we had a very big target in mind. And speed is everything with hunger. Hunger does not wait.”
Many options for delivery were explored, but all came at additional cost, time, and effort, as Bill explains. Digital cash would require a system, while debit cards would mean producing, loading, and reading the card with a dedicated machine. Cash distribution would be a logistical nightmare; “Can you imagine walking around and delivering cash to the barangays?”
Then came what Bill calls the “A-ha!” moment: the decision to use supermarket vouchers and gift certificates. “We didn’t need any devices or readers, and it was easy to understand. When people got it, they could buy something with it. It’s a piece of paper, lightweight, and can be distributed quickly.”
The vouchers also had to be delivered door-to-door, for practical as well as humane reasons. “The most obvious reason was physical distancing; people should not be made to risk infection by falling in line,” Bill says. “We didn’t like the indignity of making them line up for something.”
A united effort. Bill Luz, speaking as the Chief Resilience Officer of the Philippine Disaster Resilience Foundation, shares how businesses, the church and LGUs came together in what ANC called “an unprecedented mission.” (ANC, Business groups raise P1.3-B under 'Project Ugnayan' to help poor Filipinos amid COVID-19 lockdown. May 29, 2020.)
““People should not be made to risk infection by falling in line. We didn’t like the indignity of making them line up for something.””
People also reclaimed something they felt they had lost in a time of crisis: a choice, no matter how small. “When you line up for a food pack, you receive something that has been pre-selected; someone has already decided what’s good for you. With a voucher, you pick what you need, because not every family is the same. Some have infants, some have elderly members.”
And yes, people spent the assistance wisely, Bill reports. “We didn’t see them blowing their money on beer, hard liquor, or cigarettes. They really went for food.” Some poor people had never even been inside a supermarket before, and it was a touching sight to see them dressed in their Sunday best to make the trip.
Dignity of Choice. Project Ugnayan reached the most vulnerable communities, including Smokey Mountain. The majority of its residents are scavengers who earn ₱100 a day—and lost even that during quarantine. Receiving grocery vouchers meant they had a chance to choose what they wanted for themselves. For some, it also meant going into a large grocery for the first time in their life. Photos by Xyza Bacani. (Read the full photo essay on the Project Ugnayan website.)
Walking Distance
Even the choice of grocery partners was carefully thought out, with the ease and dignity of recipients in mind. Two factors had to be considered: bang for the buck and easy access. High-end stores and convenience stores were quickly scratched off because of their price points. So they focused on budget supermarkets. “And of course, because of the lockdown, there was no transit,” Bill explains. “So people would have to be able to walk to these supermarkets.”
They mapped out stores with branches within walking range and narrowed down the options to SM hypermarkets, Robinsons supermarkets, Puregold, and Super 8. As it turned out, some of these chains had already pledged to be donors to the project, so it was not difficult to convince them to come on board. “They loved the idea,” Bill shares. “So we bought their gift certificates (GCs), but they were also giving GCs and cash to us.”
The partnership didn’t end there. When the beneficiaries came in droves with their GCs, the stores were prepared. “Suddenly there could be a lot of people, so the stores had to learn how to manage them really well,” says Bill.
That meant managing the queue inside the store, making sure social distancing was observed, and also taking care of the queue outside the store. It also meant making sure that shelves were well stocked with what they needed or wanted most.
““You may have a lot of projects in mind, but does it really have an impact on the poor? The only way to ensure that is to go down and check on them.””
Soldiers of Christ. Caritas Manila volunteers helped distribute gift checks to residents of Smokey Mountain. BIll Luz likened them to valiant foot soldiers who braved the heat and risk of infection to help the poor. But through strict safety protocols, none of them contracted COVID-19. Photos by Xyza Bacani.
Spiritual Frontliners
Teaming up with Caritas Manila was a no-brainer, as far as Bill was concerned. A distribution network big enough to reach people, a non-government organization (NGO) and non-private group with no corporate affiliations, and which people trusted because of its neutrality and credibility, was key. Caritas Manila, a 60-year-old NGO and social service conduit of the Catholic Church, ticked all the boxes. “The church is just like a branch network of a large retail company; the parishes are branches, and the parish priests are the branch managers,” Bill illustrates. “They have people on the ground, so they were our foot soldiers. This became their ministry.”
Fr. Anton Pascual, executive director of Caritas Manila, describes the priests, nuns, and lay volunteers of various parishes in Mega Manila who participated in Project Ugnayan as “spiritual front liners.” Wearing face masks and armed with a sense of mission, they braved the April summer heat and the fear of infection to go deep into the urban poor areas to distribute P1,000 peso GCs. The amount was determined to provide at least a week’s worth of food for a family of five.
Good shepherds. Fr. Anton surveys the area in Lower Bicutan before distributing gift checks. Photo by Xyza Bacani.
Like true shepherds, some priests even accompanied people to the grocery to help put them at ease, and to make sure that the store was ready to receive them. “The priests were so conscientious, they looked after the whole process,” says Bill. “They would tell the store manager to make sure they don’t run out of anything. There’s nothing more disappointing than for hungry people to run out of what they need. So, if the priest was there, we would get a report, and the supermarket would replenish stocks.”
The process became both efficient and compassionate. At the end of every day, the volunteers would give update reports to the Project Ugnayan team. As Fr. Anton points out: “The Church will always be at the service of the poor, especially during this COVID-19 health crisis.”
By April 20, Project Ugnayan-Damayan had distributed P1,000 grocery vouchers to 1.5 million families or 7 million individuals in the poorest communities of the Greater Manila Area. Other mobilized distribution channels were ABS-CBN's Pantawid ng Pag-Ibig; the Asian Development Bank (ADB) and the Philippine government's Bayan, Bayanihan program, through the networks of the Philippine Army and the Department of Social Welfare and Development; and Jollibee's FoodAID program.
As of May 27, Project Ugnayan reported, help had reached a total of 2,837,367 families or 14,186,835 individuals. As the program leader, Ayala Corporation president and chief operating officer Fernando Zobel de Ayala, stated on the Project Ugnayan website: “This unprecedented assembly of so many of the country’s corporations and business families coming to the assistance of the most vulnerable in our society illustrates and speaks of the heart and generosity of the business community.”
““This unprecedented assembly of so many of the country’s corporations and business families coming to the assistance of the most vulnerable in our society illustrates and speaks of the heart and generosity of the business community.””
Continuing Disaster
In spite of years of experience in disasters, from typhoons as devastating as Yolanda to the Taal Volcano eruption of recent memory, and even with exposure to dealing with viruses like Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) and the Avian flu, PDRF truly had to buckle down to work for COVID-19. “This has been, I think, the largest-scale disaster, and certainly the most unusual and longest-running we have come across,” Bill says. “In other disasters, you could see everything. The problem was visible to us, so we could set targets.
“But the coronavirus is different. It’s a continuing disaster. And that’s the challenge, how to respond because the needs change, almost every day.” As of this writing, for example, attention has shifted from food to public health, which means helping provide personal protective equipment (PPE), ventilators, test kits, testing machines, and testing labs.
At the moment, Bill is focused on Task Force T3 (for test, trace, and treat), the public-private task force convened by the Inter-Agency Task Force (IATF) for the Management of Emerging Infectious Diseases and the Department of Health (DOH), with support from ADB, to expand the coverage of definitive Reverse Transmission–Polymerase Chain Reaction (RT-PCR) testing for COVID-19.
“We often ask ourselves, what lessons did we learn from all of this?” Bill concludes. “If we were forced to do this all over again, what would we do differently? And what would we do the same way? What institutions need to be strengthened, or built from scratch? We really have to take stock, and start planning. And it takes a lot of leadership to make that happen.” #
PUBLISHED AUGUST 26, 2020
