San Miguel Corp. said Tuesday it constructed a livelihood center and established a cooperative for close to 500 families who used to reside at the New Manila International Airport Project site in Bulakan, Bulacan.
San Miguel Aerocity Inc. Livelihood Center in Barangay San Nicolas, Bulakan provides former residents at the NMIA project site training support so they can apply the skills they learned to earn a stable income for their families.
“Our continuing efforts to engage residents and local officials in Bulakan has allowed us to fine-tune our existing livelihood restoration programs, as well as come up with new initiatives that will adapt to their needs,” SMC president and chief executive Ramon Ang said.
“With these, we can better ensure that the economic growth that the NMIA will bring in the coming years will be inclusive and will be felt by Bulacan residents and the rest of the country,” he said.
The SMAI Livelihood Center is a partnership between SMAI, the Bulacan provincial office of the Technical Education Skills and Development Authority, the Department of Trade and Industry and the Gintong Aral Foundation.
The launch of the SMAI Livelihood Center, led by SMAI project lead Cecile Ang and Bulakan Mayor Vergel Meneses, coincided with the formal creation of the Livelihood sa Pag-unlad consumer cooperative.
Through the LIPAD consumer cooperative, SMAI, in partnership with Gintong Aral, aims to empower residents through training and knowledge transfer on the inner workings of a cooperative to harness the strength of collective membership and ensure a stronger enterprise with better profitability.
With assistance from Gintong Aral, residents organized themselves into a consumer cooperative to run the facility, which will feature a coffee shop, a spa, a sewing room and several training areas to help equip other members of the community with practical skills to increase their chances of employment and also success in individual business ventures.
“We want to put our residents in a position to succeed through sustainable ventures that will ensure that they will be able to provide sustainably for their families. It is not enough that we provide skills and help them develop their entrepreneurial mindset. By pooling their resources together through a cooperative setup, each member claims a stake in their collective success,” Ang said.
Bulakan residents who earlier benefited from the SMAI’s housing support program welcomed the establishment of the livelihood center and cooperative.
SMC also teamed up with the church organization Nazarene Compassionate Ministries early this year for a mushroom farming and processing project that has benefited 70 families in Bulakan.
Through this program, relocatees are earning guaranteed income with 12 families already growing mushroom at their respective homes.
The program beneficiaries harvest 40 kilos of mushrooms per week and their income is expected to increase through the processing of mushrooms into products like mushroom chicharon, burgers, and sisig.