Social Entrepreneur Illac Diaz: It’s Possible To Change The World

The Philippine flag has been flying high and proud not just on the lofty peak of Mount Everest, but in the hallowed halls of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston. A team of young Filipino entrepreneurs has been winning competitions with innovative ideas that combine social relevance with business savvy.

Most recently, the team topped the MIT $100K Entrepreneurship Competition with their project CentroMigrante, a self-help business model that provides clean, safe and affordable urban housing for the thousands of Filipinos who come to Manila from the provinces to look for jobs as seafarers.

Earlier, the same team joined–and won–two smaller but no less prestigious competitions. In the IDEAS Competition, which allows members of the MIT community to develop creative ideas that make a positive impact on the world, the team took the grand prize with their First Step Coral project which uses a turbine powered by sea current to energize a wire frame on which corals grow four times faster than the normal rate. In an unprecedented feat, the same group also won the second prize for their replicable, low cost cement peanut sheller, which allows peanut farming communities to peel peanuts for planting up to 50 times faster than the traditional manual method.

The team also won the $1K Business Warm-up Competition for their Earth Classroom project, using locally available materials like soil to build classrooms in rural areas at half the cost.

The prime mover behind all these projects is Illac Diaz, a 30-something former actor, model, athlete and advertising executive turned social entrepreneur. As such, he has blazed a trail in combining social concern, business acumen and constant innovation. A keen observer of the marginalized groups of society, he uses this strength to transform small ideas for socially responsive businesses into acceptable large-scale models for meeting the needs of people who require immediate solutions to their problems. He applies business skills not for personal gain but for the practise of business with a wide social impact.

His most outstanding effort in community-oriented entrepreneurship is the landmark Pier One Seafarer’s Dormitory, which provides clean, safe and affordable transient housing and services for thousands of maritime overseas Filipino workers and their families within the Manila area.

The idea for Pier One came during Illac’s "serendipity walk," an exercise students at the Asian Institute of Management, where he obtained a Master in Entrepreneurship degree, go through. Students are asked to literally take a walk, observe and come up with business ideas. From his walk around the T.M. Kalaw area in Manila, where seafarers looking for jobs congregate daily by the thousands, Illac realized that no housing alternatives were available to this transient, low income group, who had to make do with squalid, cramped and dangerous living spaces usually in squatter areas while they waited for job placements, or while their papers were being processed.

Though the Philippines provides over 25 percent of the world’s ship manning requirements and has adopted labor export as a national policy, it does not provide reliable housing for seafarers. Given the billions of dollars in remittances that maritime OFWs plow back into the Philippine economy, it is shameful that when these seamen come home, they have to struggle to find decent housing until their next assignment, which may not come for months. The government provides them with hardly any assistance beyond a token covered shed on the roadside.

Recognizing this need, Illac set up a 40-bed dormitory in 2000, offering not just a place to sleep but also temporary employment opportunities, job search assistance and even skills upgrading. Today, Pier One is a 1,500 bed concern with branches in Intramuros, Recto and Ermita that has been operating sustainably, with profits invested back into the business, upgrading and expanding facilities. To date, over 80,000 seafarers have been served by the project.

The Pier One prototype has evolved into the winning CentroMigrante project, which will offer a build-for-stay system wherein tenants will be given the option to construct the units from prefabricated parts in exchange for a period of free occupancy. There will also be a work-for-stay system where those without money may sign up for temporary jobs. The shelters will also provide skills seminars on career development, personal finance, remittances management and small businesses, and will coordinate with the 400-plus manning agencies to establish an onsite job board to help with job searches. The prototype system was able to reduce average waiting time for jobs from seven to three months.

Another project, MyShelter Foundation, originated when Illac observed the lack of classrooms in the provinces, at the same time trying to find a way to solve the housing problem in Negros Occidental. Undertaking a thorough business analysis of the area, Illac noticed that the nearby adobe bridges, built by the Spanish hundreds of years ago, were still intact, resilient products of the earth itself. He did research in India where adobe houses are common, then underwent intensive training at the CalEarth Institute in California under the renowned Iranian architect Nader Khalili.

He became an expert in the Earthbag Construction System, and found that this could be applied to the Philippines. By utilizing the endless supply of indigenous materials like soil and using local labor, cost of the houses and classrooms could be kept down, and money kept within the community. These savings in construction could then be applied to increase teachers’ wages and bring computer technology to schools.

The Day-Asan National High School in Surigao, with an enrolment of 273 students, currently holds classes in the basketball court and make-shift huts. Since the town was established 25 years ago, not a single classroom has been built, and students used to walk an hour and half each way to attend school in a nearby town. Local villagers have been trained and will build a six-classroom module using the Earthbag Construction System. The structure can be finished and used within 12 to 14 weeks.

A project that will be launched within the month is the Peanut Revolution, which addresses the tedious task of manually peeling peanuts for planting, a task usually given to women, children and the elderly of the community. Using a simple cast cement sheller built like a large peppermill, whole peanuts are put in from the top, and as they fall into the inside rotor, the shells are slowly ground open, dropping the kernel without harming it. From a mere one kilo per hour when done manually, the process is increased to 27 kilos up to 50 kilos per hour with the sheller. Improvements include a foot pedal model, and one with a blower to automatically remove the crushed shells.

Previous automated peanut shellers have been expensive and well out of reach of the average small peanut farmer. This simple model, made from fiberglass molds that can produce several hundred shellers, only costs around P3,000. Microfinancing programs have expressed willingness to fund its acquisition by small farmers.

Illac and his group are also developing other simple, easily replicated cement agricultural machines that will increase farmer yields in a variety of crops. An international cement manufacturer is considering the project for implementation worldwide.

Social enterprise is not just about the money and jobs that are the bottom line of any business, but more about a central mission to create sustainable models of social development where the measure of success is the number of people helped. Illac’s successes have proven that focusing on human capital as being at least as important as equity capital in private interventions to social inequity is an idea whose time has come.

Illac just completed a research fellowship in the Special Program for Urban and Regional Studies in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at the MIT. At the Asian Institute of Management, he was the youngest ever to be awarded the Honors & Prestige for work in the field of social entrepreneurship. Last year, he became the first TOYM recipient for social entrepreneurship.

Illac belongs to the Diaz clan that includes former Miss Universe Gloria Diaz; his mother is gallery owner and art patron Silvana Diaz. He was once a much sought after commercial model and sometime movie actor, but even when he was still in high school he already exhibited a penchant for social entrepreneurship.

He founded the Usap-Kamay program where teachers from the Southeast Asian Institute for the Deaf (SAID) would teach Ateneo students sign language and they would in turn tutor SAID students in math, science and English. As an indication of its success, Usap-Kamay continues up to the present, with an annual average of 20 Ateneo participants and hundreds of alumni in the program.

He also set up Good Guys Inc. and Sagittarius Copy Machines to help Metro Manila law students by eliminating the daily difficulty of lining up to photocopy legal cases for their classes, as well as bringing in better copying technology that minimized the health risk to machine operators from toxic liquid toners.

Sports also figures prominently in Illac’s already busy life. "My passion for sports has been with me ever since I was young," he relates. "I was a hyperactive child and the only way that my parents found to calm me down was by putting me into every sport possible. That way, once I came home I would be completely exhausted!"

He was on the Philippine team to the Asian Youth Games and the Asian Games from 1988 to 1995, and was national decathlon champion from 1991 to 1993. He holds the UAAP records in track and field for the long jump, javelin, 400 meters and 4x400, and the Philippine record for the long jump. He also climbed mountains with the UP Mountaineers, which turned out to be "the perfect training" for what is now called adventure racing.

He has participated in the Eduro Challenge, the Philips Survival Challenge, the Xterra Triathlon, the San Mig Challenge and the Inter-island Challenge. He was part of the Philippine team to five AXN Urban Challenges, and took part in the Marlboro Adventure and Tiger Beer Outdoor Quest. He sails with the Manila Yacht Club team, and even occasionally contributes to newspapers and magazines.

Illac, whose name is an Aztec term meaning "God of Light," is in a unique position to inspire others with ideas, vision and passion to create enterprises that uplift sectors of society that would otherwise be forgotten. He is pioneering a whole new field of entrepreneurship, one that seeks to bring the strengths, efficiencies and solutions of business to bear on problems of society.

He insists that true charity does not mean giving out cash, and that to engage in socially responsible endeavors automatically means financial struggle. Business and development can and must be working partners, and Illac Diaz is taking that path with resounding success.