Foundation financing sustainable village in Iloilo

MANILA, Philippines – The Greg Secker Foundation (GSF) is channeling its philanthropic funds into the Philippines in 2017 to complete the transformation of a model village in Lemery, Iloilo.

Greg Secker said about 90 percent of the foundation’s budget for its projects this year will go to the Philippines, particularly for the GSF Village in Lemery, which was devastated by Super Typhoon Yolanda more than three years ago.

The foundation will finance the building of 100 brand new homes in the fifth-class municipality.

“This is our big year for the Philippines,” Secker said.

“This will be the year when we will launch the first 100 homes of our village. We’ll also build a school and we’ll build a training center and a farm,” Secker told a press briefing at the Shangri-la The Fort on Friday.

“We won’t go live with this village until the training center, school and farm is in place because we want it to be sustainable,” he said.

Secker shared the huge funding they were giving to the Philippines was a necessity after they met what he called “challenges” in completing the first 50 of the 100 homes they are building in the GSF Village.

“We’ve had some big challenges. We underestimated the amount of erosion caused by rain and typhoons,” he said.

The foundation is undaunted by the challenge to undertake some costly slope protection works, he pointed out.

“We’ve had to increase our investment by about 40 percent.... The land is sliding away. So we have to go in with wire mesh and rocks, completely re-establish the land,” Secker said.

“It was unexpected…It’s a bigger year than we thought it would be. We’ve currently built 50 houses, now we’ve got 50 more to go. We’re building the houses at quite a fast rate,” he said.

The homes being built by the foundation for selected beneficiaries are showcase homes compared to houses of the middle-class in rural Iloilo.

The concrete homes have a lot area of more than 80 square meters and floor area of more than 40 square meters, with tiled comfort rooms and stainless steel sinks and whose future lawns are now being landscaped by the designated beneficiary families who will live in the houses.

“They’re good quality houses, they’re typhoon resistant,” he said.

“If you look at the quality of the homes compared to the other ones around that have been built by other organizations, these are a little bit more expensive. But I wanted to create something which is sustainable and would last,” Secker said.

Secker added he is setting up business operations for his Learn To Trade forex education business so as to allow him to engage in business while pursing philanthropic activities in Lemery.

“It’s the year that we’re setting up our operations here in the Philippines. We set it up just before Christmas last year. We’ll probably double our operations here to pay for our foundation,” Secker said.