2nd Partners’ Meeting Gives Renewed Push to SPM
Over 45 representatives of partner organizations, with 17 coming from Luzon, 14 from Visayas, and another 14 from Mindanao, gathered last May 18, 2010 for Oikocredit's 2nd Partners' Meeting, which was held at Torre Venezia in Quezon City. The meeting had for its theme "Building on our Social Gains and Upholding Social Performance in Challenging Times".
The day-long event was set to give a renewed push to social performance management (SPM). Specifically, the meeting was aimed at identifying the key operational challenges and issues confronting the partners on social performance management and recommending possible solutions, as well as identifying the areas where strategic Oikocredit interventions may apply. The event was also aimed at inviting partner organizations to come to a unified stand on accountability to clients/constituents as social enterprises and lastly, updating the partners on relevant program and organizational developments within Oikocredit.
Dr. Antonio La Viña, Dean of the Ateneo School of Government (ASoG), in his keynote speech asserted that the 2nd Partners' Meeting theme if posed as a question, "how do you build on your social gains and uphold social performance in challenging times?" can be answered by two concepts: leadership and social entrepreneurship, which he referred to as the "new revolution". Dr. La Viña urged the participants to learn in action, thru the capacity of moving back and forth "between the field of action and the balcony". He said that partner organizations should judge themselves on their social performance, and treat their clients the way they treat themselves. He underscored the importance of capturing the knowledge as they do things.
Dr. La Viña closed his address by pointing out that the solution to the social ills of the country lie partly in governance and the other part in poverty alleviation. "If we don't defeat poverty, we won't be able to defeat corruption because we don't have the enabling conditions," he declared. He believed that the Philippines can be changed not by a top-down approach but through a "mosaic" approach, that is, one piece at a time. Moreover, change will not happen in some grand fashion. Rather, change will happen in different steps in different places.
Since the 1st Partners' Meeting in 2007 with "Social Performance: Our Shared Responsibility" as the theme, Oikocredit had extended capacity-building assistance, pursued a partnership with the Grameen Foundation on the implementation of the Progress out of Poverty Index (PPI) as well as with the Microfinance Council of the Philippines (MCPI) on SPM, and launched the first SPM Partners Learning Network in collaboration with MCPI and Grameen in response to the concerns raised by the partners. Oikocredit also launched and tested the use of Cerise social audit tools, supported the research, publication and launching of the book "Measuring Social Enterprise" among others.