Since its formal launch in 2001, the Gawad Kalinga Community Development Foundation (GK) has already built more than 850 houses for free for more than 100,000 families in the country’s various regions. Under its GK 777 program, the foundation has committed to build 7,000 homes for 700 communities within seven years, or by October 2010.

For this worthy project, GK executive director Antonio Meloto and the foundation he leads received this year the Ramon Magsaysay Award (RMA)—the “Nobel Prize of Asia”—for Community Leadership.

Meloto was honored for “inspiring Filipinos to believe with pride that theirs can be a nation without slums.” GK was recognized for “harnessing the faith and generosity of Filipinos the world over to confront poverty in their homeland and to provide every Filipino the dignity of a decent home and neighborhood.”

“This (RMA recognition) is a celebration of ordinary Filipinos who have found their strength, voice, and power because they have decided to stop blaming each other and instead work together. I thank God for His beautiful plan, (and) that I was born a Filipino," Meloto says.

FORGETTING THE POOR

The 56-year-old Meloto came from a poor family in Bacolod City, with their home situated very close to a shoreline squatter community. As an American Field Service scholar, he repeated his senior year at the De Anza High School in Richmond, California. He then returned to the country and enrolled at the Ateneo De Manila University (ADMU) as a full scholar.

It took 32 years for Meloto to return to the Ateneo after his graduation, choosing not to join even the reunions and homecomings of the school “simply because of a sense of guilt of a person who grew up with the suffering poor, but later forgot them after I got an ADMU education.”

“I forgot the poor. I left them behind. I left them like so many others before me,” he laments. “There are many who blame the rich and powerful for the plight of the poor. I know there is basis for the accusations, but I cannot bring myself to blame them. How could I expect them to love the poor whom they do not know when I grew up poor and yet forgot to help them, too?”

Thus, when he finally returned to Ateneo as the guest speaker in the school’s 2006 commencement exercises despite “having no business empire, holding no political power, and being no academic genius,” Meloto called the attention of his fellow graduates to the urgency of caring for the poor and restoring the dignity of the Filipino in his own country.

“This is not just healing for our country’s poor and neglected, but it is healing for me and many like me as well,” he told the graduates.

FAITH RENEWAL

In his healing process, Meloto, a former businessman involved in production and trade, joined the Couples for Christ (CFC) in 1985. “The schools did not train me to be a good husband and a good father. They only trained me to be a good businessman and a good professional,” he says. “I joined CFC because I wanted to be a good husband and a good father. I wanted to really be successful with my family because (without that) no success outside the home could be justified.”

His faith renewed, Meloto became an active CFC member in Amparo Subdivision in Novaliches, Quezon City, rising to become one of its most active members. He brought CFC to Negros Occidental, his home province, where it currently has 40,000 members. In 1993, he set up the CFC Family Ministries to expand the organization’s scope to include the youth and single persons.

While assigned in Australia as a CFC country coordinator, Meloto, as he put it, heard the “Lord’s call” to work in a youth program in Bagong Silang, Caloocan City. It was a resettlement district where slum communities dominated, and various crimes, gang wars, and vices thrived. Through CFC’s Answering the Call of the Poor (ANCOP) Foundation International which conducted a youth leadership camp, the rehabilitation of the district began. Eventually, Meloto helped expand CFC’s effort to restructure the whole community.

In 1995, Meloto and CFC volunteers involved in the rehabilitation of the Bagong Silang community started building colorful houses in neat rows, providing them with pocket gardens and paved walkways. The project eventually expanded to what is now known as Gawad Kalinga (a Tagalog phrase that means “to provide care”). Thus, the Bagong Silang community became the first GK village that is “integrated, holistic, and sustainable.”

As word about GK’s project spread, many Filipinos, both rich and poor, as well as foreigners, volunteered their services. Donations, both financial and in kind, also poured in.

Described by former president Corazon C. Aquino as the “new People Power,” GK was asked by President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo to “work hand in hand with the government in building homes for the country’s informal settlers.”

As he continues implementing the GK program, Meloto exhorts Filipinos to always remember four things: “Never stop hoping for our country; do not stop caring for our people; demand greatness from yourself as a Filipino, and inspire greatness in other Filipinos.”

“Wherever you are in the world, excel and prosper but remain connected to the motherland and dedicate your success to the fulfillment not just of your dreams but of the many in your country who have lost their capacity to dream,” he says.