[This is a short version of an article, originally titled "Urgent Need: Poverty Alleviation Through the Conscious and Effective Application of the Synergism Principle by the Cooperatives," written in March 2000. This was submitted to leadiung officials of the National Anti-Poverty Commission (NAPC) during the formal launching of the National Anti-Poverty Agenda in 2000. Part of this was carried in the book Empowering Partnerships for the People: The PDAP Experience, which was finalized by the same author and released on April 6, 2000.]

POVERTY alleviation and eventual eradication has long been the concern of Filipinos across generations. It has been a consistent fixture, in one form of expression or another, in campaign platforms and actual programs of governance of a long succession of administrations. There is now active body, no less than a full commission, namely the National Anti-Poverty Commission (NAPC), precisely to address this priority agenda in an integrated and comprehensive manner.

However, the problem of mass poverty seems to elude alleviation. Material resources, largely sought as investment and loans from abroad, and structures for empowerment that have been extant especially since the 1986 People Power Revolution, have not sufficed to give poverty a decisive blow.
A vital component has been missing in the strategy. This is the culture of empowerment and mass upliftment through the full understanding and popular application of the principle of synergism, the principle of magnification of the combined capability of people who work closely in healthy teamwork.

The principle of synergism should be most ideally embodied in cooperativism. However, our country's cooperatives have been haunted by periods of miseducation and misdirection. Past administrations encouraged many cooperatives to be built, not really to synergize substantial material and human resources of its members as cooperatives should, but to act as conduits of external financial resources. Playing as fund conduits, these cooperatives had encouraged among its members a strong sense of dependence on external sources and rendered many cooperatives to exist, and eventually die, as milking cows of their officers and privileged members. This has run in the exact opposite of the supposed nature of cooperatives as defined by the International Cooperative Alliance.

Still, the existence of tens of thousands of cooperatives nationwide, and of their confederations and apex organizations, holds the great potential in real people participation in a successful poverty-alleviation program. These existing cooperatives have had their own respective cooperative education programs.

But existing cooperative education programs have not included a component focused specifically on deeply imbibing the essence, spirit and practical efficacy of the principle and technology of synergism to make the necessary impact on the quality of recruitment, orientation and consolidation of cooperative memberships or on quality evaluation systems on the dynamism of cooperative life.

Some leaders in cooperative development have claimed that only the term "synergism" itself has been missing and that any term, after all, can not be all that necessary. Even just on the level of semantics, however, such a response begs the question and betrays a lack of receptiveness, for we seek a conscious application of the principle of synergism because there is a value to be had from using that precise term.

Moreover, the actual practice and state of the cooperatives under the effective influence of these personalities belies such dismissive response; a mind set of long-term dependence on external resources remains, and so does member overdependence on the work of leaders, and both of these run contrary to the basically synergetic essence of cooperatives.

We seek to see such a widespread conscious application of the synergism principle within and among Philippine cooperatives for two basic and consequential reasons: One, it is the only way to strengthen internally the cooperatives for them to make possible the "Cooperative Revolution" being envisioned by former Bulacan Gov. Roberto Pagdanganan and the poverty-eradication being envisioned by all administrations notably the Estrada administration, and for them to help build, and really benefit from, mutually-beneficial partnerships with local government units (LGUs), as envisioned by a joint project of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), Cooperative Development Authority (CDA), and Philippine Cooperative Center (PCC).

Two, it is the only the way the cooperative sector could effectively teach by example the rest of Philippine society in a more comprehensive recovery of the essential heritage of "bayanihan" and in the needed effective application of the principle of synergism in surmounting the challenges being confronted in our march into the new millennium. Thus the cooperative sector will be the Katipunan's present-day successor in reviving the bayanihan spirit for the whole nation to attain unity and prosperity!

These two general points were first delivered in well-received talk by SanibLakas Foundation Board Secretary Joydee C. Robledo before the general assembly of the Visayas Cooperative Center (VICTO) held in Bohol in April 1998. SanibLakas has learned much more about cooperativism since that time and her talk, in our view, has consistently been revalidated. Ms. Robledo herself became very actively involved in the implementation of the UNDP-CDA-PCC joint project mentioned above.