Sleeping on a bamboo bed in the middle of the mountains, pounding rice, drinking rice coffee, experiencing how to cook native chicken, cooking bats, walking a 4-km beach at night to look for turtle eggs and being eye to eye with a whale shark are only a few experiences of my time in the Philippines. For more than four months I changed my life as an MSc student on Forest and Nature Conservation in Wageningen University in the cold Netherlands to the position of an intern within PRRM in warm Manila. Doing an internship is part of my MSc program and I chose to do this in the Philippines.

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PRRM signed a partnership agreement with Global Links Management Institute (GLMI), a Japanese development NGO, to jointly implement a project covering 500 families in 8 upland barangays in the 4 municipalities of Kayapa, Dupax del Sur, Sante Fe and Kasibu in Nueva Viscaya. The signing was held last 17 January 2008 at the PRRM Board Room with PRRM President Ding Navarro and GLMI officials led by Representative Director Keiko Nishino.

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Panibagong Paraan, the nationwide search for innovative ideas to address development challenges, is back!

Entries are now being accepted for the Project Grant Competition, where winners will be extended grants of up to PhP 1,000,000 to turn their innovative ideas into action.

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Coconut farmers, led by coconut farmer advocate former Sen. Wigberto “Bobby” E. Tañada, filed a Petition in Intervention with the Supreme Court to reverse the Sandiganbayan decision last November 28 declaring that the 20% San Miguel Corporation shares being claimed by Danding Cojuangco are not public property and not part of the coco levy funds.

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The Philippine Rural Reconstruction Movement (PRRM), the Philippines oldest non-governmental organization (NGO) engaged in rural development, recently received the “Volunteer Lifetime Achievement Award for 2007” from the Philippine National Volunteer Service Coordinating Agency (PNVSCA).

PRRM, which was founded in 1952 by a group of civic-minded Filipino leaders headed by the late Dean Conrado Benitez, received the award “in recognition of its outstanding achievements as a volunteer development organization, as a pioneer and leader in harnessing volunteerism as a strategy in accomplishing its goals and objectives.” the organization was the first NGO to send youth volunteers to work in the rural villagers in order to carry out an integrated fourfold program of education, livelihood, health and self-governance.

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