The final prayer for our YFC Shared Learning was filled with these series of words:

“Thank you, Lord!”


“Salamat po!”


“Gusto lang po namin mag-thank you!”


“…kahit na medyo maulan, biniyayaan pa rin kami!”


“… di Mo kami pinabayaan!”


“Salamat din po sa mga darating pang mga blessings!”

This kind of gratitude is very rare.  Most of the time, people will be praying for supplication, for blessings.  Most of the time, people will pray to receive, not give thanks.

And this is what Bo Sanchez, in his new book (which unfortunately I forget the title as of the moment!) wrote.  We should learn to be thankful for the things we have received, what we are receiving, and what we will receive.

Bo tells in his book that this is the way to attract daily miracles in our life.  Perhaps this helps, because this kind of philosophy inevitably leads a person to look at life half full, that somehow a Higher Being, and in my case, God, will shower blessings and will continue to do so out of love.

Taking this to a level of business perspective, isn’t it amazing that businesses can become enablers of gratitude for people to spread blessings?

Let businesses become enablers of gratitude – from the past, present, and future!

Our mentor in the Social Entrepreneurship and Good Governance Training Program at ADMU said that social entrepreneurs must introduce:

“Pattern-breaking social change”.

Then I remembered my father telling me that positive change can only happen, especially in the Philippines, when:

“People get sick and tired of being sick and tired.”

Is tremendous poverty not yet enough?  Do we need more tantrums from Mother Nature before we act and take things seriously?

It’s time for us to get sick and tired of being sick and tired.  We should be, in our own ways, be inducers of pattern-breaking social change.

I know that what I write is easier written, easier said, than done.  And I know that I do not yet have the best answers to these issues I am writing here.

But I know that I’m in the process of finding the right answers, the right things to do.  Maybe, this is my own little leap of faith, that since what I’m craving for is for the greater good including my good, perhaps Someone  out there will guide me however invisible His hand is.

It’s time to change the status quo.

It has been quite a year.  Since January, I have been eager to explore a career social innovation, particularly through social entrepreneurship.  Some would deem me as to being too worried – I still have one academic year to decide what to do after graduation.

I have enrolled in a short course in Ateneo De Manila University, which is dubbed as the “Social Entrepreneurship and Governance Training Program”.  This class is very interesting, and in the vernacular, nakakakaba, since most of the students are graduates already and in fact, some already have their own social enterprises.  Only I and James Fernando are the undergraduates in this course.

However, this makes the whole experience more interesting.

We are witnessing startup social entrepreneurs practice and offer insights on what I learn from my COSORES class – the importance of integrating business ethics to business entities.  Indeed, ethics is embedded to the business model since social enterprises use profits and market-based solutions to address social problems.

And again, pardon the blatant redundancy, but this dynamic of a class is very interesting.

In the Philippines where corruption is so institutionalized, how can social entrepreneurs remain ethical, especially in applying for business permits and needing political connections for support?  The first session, though introductory, allowed me to realize how the collaboration of the public and private sector is vital to the success of social entrepreneurship.

I am very excited to meet established social entrepreneurs, even the rarer sustainable entrepreneurs.  I think this is a great chance to network, and even set up interviews with sustainable entrepreneurs for our group’s thesis.

This term is a period filled with opportunities to explore CSR and social innovation.  I’m enrolled in COSORES and the Social Entrepreneurship short course, having a thesis on sustainable entrepreneurship, while being a part-time intern for the Benita and Catalino Yap Foundation.

I sincerely hope that I can integrate social innovation to my long term career plans – get a lucrative life yet make the society and environment richer as well.  This is the materialization of my almost impossible dream to be strike the best of all worlds.

Ethics has been a very delicate issue especially in business. Numerous principles and frameworks, such as utilitarianism and deontology, have been developed and even applied to the business setting to address the need for enterprises to have guiding principles.

This is a tricky situation, indeed. How do you mix ethics in an environment where results are measured down til the final centavo? How do you apply principles to highly competitive results-driven performers?

Can virtues such as honesty, fortitude, and temperance directly achieve multi-million dollar profits?

How do you mix soft and intangible things to an entity that must maximize income and minimize cost?

This is where CSR and business ethics enter.

It disproves the notion that businesses are just profit achieving entities filled with selfishly-driven individuals. Instead, it sees using different lenses, that businesses are also organizations with benevolent intentions, fueled by human beings capable of being stewards of God’s creation.

We are entering a major paradigm shift, wherein these noble things are being appreciated and are now even used ti mitigate the harshness of exploitive capitalism.

We are in a world where one does not anymore need to sell one’s soul to the devil ti achieve greatness. And this is the way that things ought to be, transcending the past, the present, and the future.