July 2005. Laura Vicuña Foundation (LVF), a Winrock CIRCLE partner in the Philippines, continues to implement its “Community Organizing and Mobilization” project with great success. Located in the middle of a sugarcane plantation, the project addresses the high rates of hazardous child labor and missed educational opportunities that are endemic among sugarcane workers and their families. With its unique methodology, the project is promoting educational opportunities for 500 children of sugarcane tenant farmers and substantially increasing community awareness about child labor issues in Negros, Philippines. It aims to keep children in school and to provide those who complete high school, or its equivalency, with vocational training so they in turn can help siblings and other family members complete their education.

As one of its innovations, LVF has made parents a central focus of its CIRCLE project. This partnership extends beyond public awareness and parent-teacher associations, and involves activities that focus exclusively on the parents and the choices they make for themselves and their children. LVF considers this focus critical, considering that many parents pressure their sons and daughters to work on the farms or to perform tasks better left to adults.

The Foundation believes that parents need to be an ally in educating at-risk working children, and removing them from harmful work that compromises their health, and prevents them from being in school. The approach should be interactive, positive, and realistic for poor families. Furthermore, it should have a built-in educative component that can be sustained. Adept at working with families through its Sunday Parents Formation Program, LVF modified an existing government program for parents called Parent Effectiveness Seminar (PES), incorporating core values and skills that will enable them to be active advocates of education and prevention of child labor in their own families and communities. To start, LVF/CIRCLE staff assessed parents’ knowledge, opinions and needs based on information from its baseline findings (2004). Some of the more significant needs were the following:

• Additional knowledge and skills on child rearing
• Behavior management of children
• Enhanced family relationships, especially of the husband-wife relationship

LVF then designed and delivered participatory “Parent Effectiveness Sessions” in major learning areas – one every Sunday at its center – in order to help parents appreciate their children’s needs and rights and to improve their parenting abilities for the better education and protection of their children. In addition to the topics mentioned above, the topics included “Parents’ Child Rearing Responsibilities,” “Child Rights and Child Labor,” and “Child Abuse and Exploitation.”

After only three sessions, 20 parent volunteer leaders emerged as lead advocates and trainers of other parents in the local communities. They now continue to assist in conducting neighborhood public awareness surveys, act as peer counselors to other parents, help in following up on the school performance of working children enrolled through CIRCLE, and spot children at-risk of dropping out or not attending school. They constitute a key branch of the project’s “preventive alert system.”

Roselyn, 40 years old, shared with LVF-CIRCLE staff what it means to be a parent volunteer:

Roselyn was overcome with emotion when she shared her “River of Life” exercise with her co-volunteers in one of their formation sessions. As intelligent and witty as she was in high school, she had never had the chance of making her greatest dream – of becoming a teacher – come true. Constrained by poverty, she had worked in various factories as a casual employee, got married and had five children. In spite of being a busy housewife and mother, her ambition never faded in her mind. She became a very good teacher to her children, making them the best among their classmates.

Now that she is an LVF-CIRCLE volunteer, Roselyn feels her greatest dream has finally became a reality. Since her training, she now teaches others about parenting and life, subjects that go far beyond the four corners of a formal school.

At present, Roselyn is one of the most active volunteers of LVF. Her involvement has influenced more parents to join the Parent Effectiveness Sessions, even those who are not part of the LVF-CIRCLE Project. She has also become concerned about the rights of children, especially their protection from abuse and hard labor. As a volunteer, she reports abuses in their community to LVF project staff, thus, actualizing the preventive alert system.

One year after the launch of these Parent Effectiveness Sessions, more fathers are joining their wives in demonstrating a value-added role for parents. They are convincing their peers that mothers and fathers are children’s first nurturers and promoters of rights. Their message has become an empowering one: poverty is no excuse for child work, and every child ought to be in school.

The fact that 94 % of enrolled children in the project’s four educational streams have persisted and are now moving to the next educational level attests to the effective supportive role that these parents have played. At the February 2005 Parents Congress attended by 153 parents (60 of them fathers), the mothers and fathers reiterated their commitment to keeping their children in school. Moving from 94% to 100% now seems quite realistic.

Funding provided by the United States Department of Labor under cooperative agreements E-9-K-2-0048 and E-9-K-4-0005.
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