Revival of school chairs project marks launch of donation website

Revival of school chairs project marks launch of donation website
August 29, 2011
Newsbytes Philippines

The recent re-launch of a school chairs project in honor of former President Cory Aquino also marked the unveiling of a donation website aimed at soliciting funds from Filipinos inside and outside of the country.

PBSP executive director Rafael Lopa speaks during the recent launch of iGiveBackNow as Viel Aquino-Dee and former Ambassador Bienvenido Tan Jr. listen.

The Philippine Business for Social Progress (PBSP), a non-profit organization whose member companies include some of the country’s biggest corporations, unveiled the online giving facility recently at a simple launch event in Makati City.

The donation website, iGiveBackNow, is separate from the PBSP’s website and is hosted by UnionBank.

The online facility incorporates a number of features, including a dashboard to monitor collection information, guidance for Paypal, Facebook, and Twitter set-up to facilitate local and global donations, mobile text donation, GCash, and Smart Money to make the process easier.

The online giving facility will start off with the President Corazon C. Aquino School Desk Project as the primary beneficiary. The project is being re-launched nine years after it ended in 2007 and nine years after it began in 2002.

After providing desks and chairs to various schools from Iloilo to Basilan and Maguindanao, the project would now be targeting at least 486,303 seats for around 2,523 public elementary and high schools nationwide, mostly in the poor provinces of the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (ARMM).

The project aims to benefit more than 5 million Filipino students who lack school desks and chairs, squatting on the floor, or sitting on one-slab benches inside their makeshift classrooms.

From 2002 to 2007, the school desk project was able to grant at least 23,259 school desks to around 120 public schools nationwide. PBSP spearheaded the project through Ambassador Bienvenido Tan, a former chairman of its board of directors.