Payatas-based Rags2Riches wins US enterprise award
By Tina Arceo-Dumlao
Philippine Daily Inquirer
First Posted 01:23:00 05/03/2008
MANILA, Philippines--The women simply wanted to put food on the table. So they made rugs from scrap fabric collected from the Payatas dumpsite and started selling them.
They've come a long way from rugs. They have won for Ateneo de Manila University and the Philippines the coveted Social Enterprise Award during the 2008 University of San Francisco (USF) International Business Plan Competition held on April 24 in San Francisco, California.
Rags2riches, a social business enterprise composed of students, alumni and professors of Ateneo, as well as prominent alumni of De La Salle University, has helped the women of Payatas earn a fair profit and maintain a sustainable livelihood.
Xavier Alpasa S.J. of the Ateneo's Simbahang Lingkod ng Bayan, the partner institution of Rags2Riches, which helped organize the 24 Payatas women, told the Philippine Daily Inquirer via e-mail, that the Ateneo team tied for the award with another team composed of three universities: Indiana University, Purdue University and Fort Wayne.
They bested the groups from some of the world's best academic institutions for the Social Enterprise Award, including University of Cambridge of the United Kingdom, and Yale University, Stanford University, Duke University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Carnegie Mellon from the United States, Alpasa said in his e-mail.
The last time a Philippine team made it through the stringent screening of the USF-Entrepreneurship Program was in 2005, when a Filipino inventor had developed a technology to keep fish fresh during delivery by making them sleep.
Surprise
It was a surprise that the Philippines still managed to bag the award considering the tough competition, Alpasa said in his e-mail.
The schools, he said, submitted "really, really good" projects to improve the lives of people around the world.
The Ateneo team fielded a 4P entry, which stands for people, planet, profit and positive influence, and the business plan called for the production and sales of wooden frames with cloth straps, which added to the Payatas women's portfolio of products.
Hard work
Cynthia Cabrera, Rags2Riches vice president for production and a rug-maker herself, told the Inquirer that the group had come a long way.
Last year, they earned only P1 from each rug they made. Sometimes, they lost what little profit they could make because unscrupulous middlemen ran away with their rugs without paying for them. They gave flimsy excuses like the money got stolen, Cabrera said.
Because they did not know what else to do, they could not severe their ties with the middlemen who went from house to house in Payatas collecting the finished rugs made of scrap fabric thrown in the Payatas dumpsite.
These traders earned as much as P25 from the hard work of the Payatas women who would painstakingly weave by hand at least eight rugs a day just to put food on the table.
More, please
Fortunately, their luck changed in July last year when a group of business professionals formed Rags2Riches to help improve the lives of the women in Payatas.
With a social enterprise framework in mind, the concerned businessmen saw that the solution was to get rid of unscrupulous middlemen and for the women to sell their rugs directly to the market through Rags2Riches.
The Payatas women's first attempt at meeting their buyers came late last year when they were asked to join a bazaar in Ateneo.
Three women, including Cabrera, came with just 100 pieces of rugs, prepared according to the design and higher quality standards of Rags2Riches. The women were ecstatic after selling all 100 rugs in just two hours with bazaar guests clamoring for more.
Wonderful feeling
"We earned P1,000 in just two hours. It gave us such a wonderful feeling," said Cabrera in Filipino.
The women left the bazaar inspired to do even more. The blessings came fast and furious, especially when fashion designer Rajo Laurel joined the Rags2Riches project in September last year.
Laurel opened the women's eyes to the rug's other possibilities, allowing them to diversify the product line to include bags, purses and wine holders made from scraps of cloth thrown away by textile factories.
The result are handmade products, named after the people behind Rags2Riches: Mark wine holder (P420), Reese yoga mat bag (P480), Cynthia bag (P560) and Javy eyeglass case (P135).
They are sold at Firma in Greenbelt 3 and House of Rajo (Villena corner Mañalac Streets, Makati).
Works of art
From just P70 a week or P10 a day, Payatas women in the project now earn as much as P1,000 a week thanks to the growing orders for their products. Since they no longer have to deal with middlemen, they earn more for their hard work.
They also contribute to saving the environment as over 40 tons of scrap cloth have been transformed into affordable works of art.
The latest collaboration between Laurel and Rags2Riches is the Knotty Purse, which will be exclusively available at Max's Restaurants nationwide from May 9-11 as part of its three-day Mother's Day promotion.
"These women are dignified individuals who are creative in their own right. All they needed was an opportunity to manifest their skills," said Rags2Riches executive director Reese Fernandez.
"What we have now is not just for us. Our mission is to help others in the same way that other people are helping us," Cabrera said.
|
