BACOLOD CITY—In 2010, a group of around 20 friends based in Bacolod City, Negros Occidental, banded together with one mission in mind: provide nutritious meals for undernourished and poor children in their community.
Little did they know that this would lead to a higher calling.Now, the group, the Negrense Volunteers for Change (NVC) Foundation Inc., is busy in multiple projects—from overseeing a nutrition program that has enrolled 435 malnourished children in Camarines Norte province, serving indigenous peoples in typhoon-battered Polillo Island in Quezon province, helping provide better practices to small farmers in their home province of Negros Occidental, to shipping relief goods to flood-stricken Maguindanao provinces.
NVC, formally established in August 2010, aims to fight hunger and poverty not only by providing nutritious meals to poor children but also offering sustainable livelihood opportunities to parents.
“We started off with almost nothing, thus we could not claim any extraordinary philanthropic accomplishments in our early years. At most, all we were doing was linking dreams to donors, and donors to dreams,” said Millie Kilayko, one of NVC’s founders and is currently its president and CEO.
The foundation has since implemented projects in 60 provinces. They served 22,598,043 “Mingo meals,” an instant nutritious complementary food made of rice, monggo (mung beans) and malunggay (moringa) for infants and toddlers. It also extended assistance to fisherfolk families, famers, workers, students and the homeless.NVC was also known for its swift delivery of calamity aid to as far as Tacloban City, Leyte, when Supertyphoon “Yolanda” (international name: Haiyan) struck in 2013, to Batangas when Taal Volcano erupted in 2020, to war-torn Marawi City and to earthquake-hit parts of Mindanao.Most recently, with members now numbering about a hundred, it mobilized for families hit by the pandemic, as well as typhoons “Karding” (international name: Noru) and “Paeng” (international name: Nalgae) this year.
No slowdown
Instead of slowing it down, the health crisis made the foundation busier than ever.
To address the lack of personal protective equipment for health workers at hospitals and clinics, NVC produced and distributed 17,040 laboratory gowns for free. The volunteers also made and distributed face masks and face shields.
These donations came with note cards with inspiring messages to help lift the morale of the overworked health workers.
The foundation also delivered more than 1.2 million Mingo meals to families, and more than 8,000 meal bags containing assorted fruits, vegetables, dried fish and rice—good for five meals—to those who lost their sources of income because of the pandemic.
Through its Artisans of Hope livelihood program, it has also created handmade and upcycled products that command prices befitting their fine quality and workmanship. The proceeds go to fund its other projects.The foundation’s officers are volunteers themselves, serving for free. The staff members earn less than their counterparts in the corporate world, and have been known to waive holiday pay when producing Mingo meals, treating them as their personal contribution to disaster relief efforts.
Kilayko are all praises for them, hailing them as the key to the organization’s growth.
NVC has received many accolades for its work, the latest being the Ateneo de Manila University’s Parangal Lingkod Sambayanan Award which was given on Nov. 22.
Ateneo, in announcing the award, said NVC epitomized what the power of the human spirit could achieve.
The foundation’s fundraising success can be attributed to Kilayko and her team of volunteers, who passionately tell moving stories of people in need and how their lives later changed thanks to NVC’s programs.
Sharing these stories on social media help win the hearts of supporters, often complete strangers.
“NVC is not a corporate foundation which can count on a base of support from a mother company. It is not a family foundation that can rely on a trust fund. But somehow, by the grace of God and the love that overflows from our support group inside and outside of our organization, we have grown beyond our expectations,” Kilayko said. INQ
