LONG before the school bell rings, the preparation for every school year ignites with the spirit of bayanihan across the country. Since 2003, the Department of Education’s (DepEd) Brigada Eskwela is an institutionalized program that bridges social responsibility between public and private sectors, communities and organizations.
The traditional public-private partnership model is no longer defined by token drop-offs of standard school bags and generic boxes of chalk. The responsibility has evolved into highly specialized logistics and infrastructure support.
According to Education Secretary Sonny Angara, the private sector has stepped up to absorb the immense operational pressures of preparing thousands of campuses for millions of returning learners.
The scale of this collaborative mobilization is visible in how infrastructure conglomerates leverage their distinct corporate capabilities.
Transforming the education infrastructure
Aligned with their technical expertise, the One Meralco Foundation and its affiliates within the Metro Pacific Group have offered beyond school supplies and assistance.Through its “Safe ang School Ko” program, Meralco deployed engineering teams and linemen to public schools to conduct critical electrical safety audits, fix faulty wiring, and trim hazardous tree branches near power lines. Concurrently, Maynilad addressed basic public health concerns by overhauling water, sanitation, and hygiene infrastructure, while also desludging septic tanks in congested urban campuses to ensure stable sanitation facilities ready for the school’s use and operation.
Providing service in the far-flung communities, the Aboitiz Group focused its resource mobilization on digital equity and rural electrification. Under the AuroraPH initiative, the foundation worked in lockstep with its thrift bank subsidiary, City Savings Bank, to address the needs of off-grid, last-mile schools.
This year, the program focused on remote learning centers, especially the indigenous communities like the Mamanwa group in Agusan del Norte, providing them with functional solar power systems and satellite internet connections. Ensuring the newly established connectivity could be utilized immediately, bank employees volunteered across hundreds of schools, donating flat-screen televisions and setting up digital reading stations to modernize rural public education.
San Miguel Corporation took a highly localized, community-centric route by anchoring its Balik Eskwela interventions directly within the vicinities of its major operational facilities and power plants. Recognizing that the physical classroom degradation remains a persistent bottleneck for regional schools, the company provided massive allocations of construction materials, including high-grade cement, roofing sheets, and industrial paint, to local government units. This structural support was paired with extensive supply drives that delivered standard learning kits directly to elementary students, effectively reducing the out-of-pocket costs that heavily burden low-income households at the start of every academic calendar.
Financial sector
The financial sector also demonstrated how corporate volunteerism can be decentralized to maximize local impact. The Bank of Commerce mobilized its regional branch networks to collaborate with community civic clubs, focusing on distributing tailored school materials and care packages to underserved municipal schools.
Continuing its long-term investment in public education infrastructure, the BDO Foundation has ensured continued funding the complete rehabilitation and construction of multi-purpose classroom buildings. These modern spaces are designed not only to ease daily classroom congestion but also to serve as disaster-resilient evacuation centers for communities frequently hit by the country’s severe typhoon seasons.
Last year CitySavings Bank extended its corporate social responsibility footprint mobilizing its corporate resources and employee volunteer networks for the Brigada Eskwela regional launch in Bacacay, Albay. The bank’s nationwide interventions targeted classroom physical maintenance and the distribution of essential hygiene and teaching kits, ultimately supporting infrastructure preparation across more than 240 public schools, which serve over 310,000 students and 13,300 teachers.
Hospitality and retail
The Sogo Cares program of Hotel Sogo deployed a high-volume distribution network to deliver essential health and hygiene packages to thousands of public school students nationwide. These kits, filled with basic writing tools, vitamins, and medical supplies, were accompanied by donations of heavy-duty cleaning equipment given directly to school administrators to help maintain health protocols long after the initial opening week.
Tying these sprawling efforts together is the pervasive footprint of the SM Group. Through SM Supermalls, SM Cares, and the SM Foundation, the retail giant utilized its geographic reach to implement an adopted-school strategy. Because an SM mall exists near almost every major urban center, individual mall administrations took responsibility for their neighboring public schools. Thousands of mall employees stepped out of their commercial spaces to scrape walls, repaint desks, and fix broken windows.
A collective push
In the spirit of a nationwide bayanihan, this collective push highlights how corporate social responsibility has become deeply integrated into the state’s educational framework. By documenting these millions of pesos worth of materials and volunteer hours through the DepEd Partnerships Database System, these corporations are not just fulfilling the social contract under the Adopt-a-School law. They are actively assuming a shared responsibility for national development, ensuring that the heavy burden of classroom readiness is borne collectively by both the government and the industries that will someday inherit these students as part of their future workforce. - with RGBT