(L to R): Charmaine Bauzon of Ayala Land, Inc. (ALI), Jeannie Javelosa and Chit Juan of ECHOstore, ALI Sustainability Consultant Macky Maceda, and ALI Chief Operating Officer and Vice President Rowena Tomeldan.

ECHOstore has won a second award in less than a year of operations! The store received The Ayala Malls Green Award from Serendra in the 2009 Annual Ayala Malls Merchant Rewards Program.

The Green Award (a new category presented this year) is given to merchants’ initiatives in educating and promoting sustainability of the environment to their customers, as well as practicing sustainability in their store operations.

Awarding ceremonies were held during the Merchant Forum last May 12 at the Hotel Intercontinental Manila.

ECHOstore recently launched a new line of products called SECOND LIFE. Focused on supporting the environment, these products are made from old, discarded or unused items. The items are recycled, redesigned and recreated into new functional products, and literally given a “second life”. SECOND LIFE supports home livelihood to assist in poverty alleviation, women empowerment and dignity of life.

The product line started with the donation of used tarpaulins from Rupert Sales (Rupert’s Signs & Display Services) one of the country’s biggest billboard suppliers. He sent over tons and tons of misprinted tarpaulins and banners to ECHOstore and wanted us to find good use for it. ECHOstore co-founder Jeannie Javelosa decided to go back to being an artist and started to look for “design potential" in the scrap tarps before cutting them to specific sizes of bags and cases. We’ve even gone corporate with sleek all-white Second Life conference envelops which were used by CSR Asia Manila Forum participants at the conference held at the Ascott Hotel last May 28.

Go functional with our Second Life multi-purposes cases and colorful totes.

Second Life's Alphabet Series	Second Life's Nature Series	Second Life's Abstract Series

And still more on scrap: Next to our tarp bags are our ring pull bags…

ECHOstore’s beneficiary and production partner organization is the Philippine Christian Foundation, Inc (PCF), headed by Jane Walker, a dynamic and untiring British woman working to elevate lives and give hope. The PCF has focused on protecting children & families in communities around dumpsites for over seven years. Its programs include poverty alleviation through education, medical and family enhancement programs, feeding programs, fair trade and livelihood development programs; values formation and spiritual care. Three PCI communities are in Smokey Mountain in Tondo (4,500 families), Navotas (2,500 families) and Baguio.

PCF-trained workers from the dumpsite community crochet these ring pulls into beautiful clutches, laptop bags and different styles of fashionable conversational pieces. As you open another can of soda or beer or even soda water, think of what quenching your thirst can do to help someone lift herself out of poverty. The ring pull or “tab” of aluminum beverage cans are collected by thoughtful customers and are sent by the jars and bags to PCF, in particular, to a dumpsite in Baguio.

"We want some..." we told Jane Walker of PCF, as she told us of the bags’ journey to Fair Trade stores in the UK and all over Europe. Over there 20-30 pounds sterling for a special bag is not much. We tried to “localize” the prices, but since it is fair trade, you can rest assured that the woman who create the bag has been paid equitably and works in comfortable conditions. This explains the price differential. Please do not react to the prices. They are already scaled down from UK prices and you can make sure the creator of the bag was paid well.

PCF Manang at work	Children given a new life in PCF Tondo school

Some good may come out of drinking that otherwise unhealthy soda … collect soda can’s aluminum pull tabs and go fashionable! We need around 800-1,000 metal pull-tabs for each handbag.

Gather papers and send them over for us to create into fashion statements! Check out our newspaper jewelry.

ECHOstore has more! This time, from the bags of the Invisible Institute designed by visual artist Ann Wizer, another untiring lady who makes “stuff out of disposable stuff” so garbage can be ..well, as her name says it… “invisible”. Her products are made of knickknacks, old CDs, computer wires, disentangled mish mash of wires and circuitry from mother boards and computer cases and her most popular line—the “guess which supermart” series–of plastic shopping bags carefully cut in strips and lovingly crocheted by women in their 60s and 70s. These women are doing us a favor as crocheting is an art they still know and are now passing it on to today’s younger women.

“Is that a hamper?” asks another customer. Yes it is. A hamper or a toy basket, these SECOND LIFE containers use computer wires which otherwise would end up as toxic waste in lakes or landfills.

Not surprisingly, these bags have sold well at ECHOstore’s pocket stores at the Shangri-La Makati’s Travel Box, probably because its concept is readily-acceptable by foreign tourists looking for something special and willing to pay the not-so-cheap price for such a labor of love and compassion.

Ann Wizer started her work in a community in Malibay, Pasay and has since adopted another community at the periphery of Fort Bonifacio Global City. She is untiringly helped by her household staff who doubles up as trainors and as delivery staff as well.

Our third community partner is Baranggay Luz Homeowners Multi- Purpose Cooperative in Metro Cebu. This is headed by the indefatigable Captain Nida Cabrera who has started women empowerment programs amongst its 16,000 residents. Nida established the cooperative whose members are about a thousand mothers who now have added income from sewing bags made from recycled materials. This baranggay, with the help of Cebu Holdings Inc, is also in charge of picking up more than three tons of garbage from Ayala Center Cebu, sorting them and making compost out of the wastes the mall tenants dispose of every single day. The compost is then sold to customers like Shangri-la Mactan, making yet another livelihood program for the male members of this progressive baranggay.

Baranggay Luz Manang at work	Newspaper box bag

SECOND LIFE ITEMS ALREADY AT ECHOSTORE
Come and pick what you can purchase and use! Or ask us about bulk orders. Also...

• Buy your corporate and personal gifts from us. We have a whole line of items coming up.
• Plan your Christmas gifts way ahead of time so we can help develop ideas for you.
• Gather and send to ECHOstore old tarpaulins, used CDs, old glossy imported magazines, old computer mother-boards, and whatever else dry waste you have. Call us so we can tell you where to deliver them.

Email Stephanie Panganiban at steph@echostore.ph or smp.echolifestyle.store@gmail.com, or call her at 0922 -8234647.

Earth Hour 2009 aims to reach more than one billion people in 1,000 cities around the world, inviting communities, business and governments to switch off lights for one hour at 8:30pm on Saturday March 28 and sending a powerful global message that we care enough about climate change to take action.

Come to ECHOstore and be part of this lights out event to show your support for this cause on March 28, 2009 at 6:30 p.m.

PLUS! ECHOstore will also be launching its newest summer drink, Lambalites Flavored Lambanog! Bring your own shot glass and get to sample all four flavors for free!

Lights out and Drink Up at ECHOstore! See you there!

ECHOstore is located at the Ground floor of the Serendra Piazza, Bonifacio Global City Taguig. For inquiries, you can reach Steph Panganiban at 0922-8234647 or (02) 9013485.

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As we end our first three months and the year that gave birth to ECHOstore, we wish to share with you our holiday news. What a way to end the year! Stressed out and tired, but happy and euphoric, we have lived through three months of keeping ECHOstore alive and kicking, and being recognized!

We submitted an entry to the First Business Plan Competition of the Philippine BiD (Business in Development) Challenge, a network which provides coaching and investor matching for sustainable enterprises. Now on its third year, the Philippine BiD Challenge is presented in partnership with Dutch non-government organization Fair Ventures, and is organized by Philippine Business for Social Progress (PBSP). This international competition has created sustainable development products for poor communities in Bolivia, Ecuador, Jordan, Uganda, Tanzania, Kenya, Argentina, Peru, and Columbia. The Philippines was the first in the world to host its own version of the BiD Challenge three years ago, and has helped small or micro entrepreneurs start businesses by helping them with business plans, coaching, and even partnering with investors.

The ECHOstore plan we submitted included the flagship store at Serendra and the café. Besides retail sales, ECHOstore will also offer seminars, workshops, and mentoring on entrepreneurship, product development, branding, marketing, and packaging. Our gondolas were the third part of our proposal. These display fixtures are miniature versions of the full retail store. The gondolas will occupy minimum space—approximately one square meter, are seven feet high, and placed in retail stores, duty free shops, hotel lobby stores, and other retail environments where people look for gift items from various artisan groups. Products will come from marginalized communities who otherwise have no access to retail markets. All products will be fair trade-compliant, environment-friendly, and sustainable.

And so we won all the prizes, besting 106 entries from the Philippines and emerging as one of the eight winners who each got P100,000 startup capital to further expand their business. We also received a special prize—free one-year website hosting for an e-commerce website and payment gateway. And, finally, ECHOstore was named Philippine Champion alongside Rags2Riches (who, by the way, was our first partner organization and one of the first products we brought into ECHOstore).

We are set to exhibit our concepts in Amsterdam in the international BiD marketplace on January 27, 2009. There, hopefully, international funding groups and agencies choose us as a viable concept so we can get more funds to help us expand and develop the ECHOstore sustainable lifestyle community.

(Left to right) Rene Fortuno of PBSP joins Reena Francisco who is carrying the one-year award for a free e-commerce website, Chit Juan holding KLM's plane representing the trip to Amsterdam for the International BiD Marketplace in January 2009, and Jeannie Javelosa carrying the Php100,000 prize given to ECHOstore as startup capital.

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By Kitty Arambulo-Clinton

The verdant and tranquil compound of the Correctional Institution for Women (CIW) feels like the countryside, where women work amidst lush gardens, vegetable patches, and abundant fruit trees. The main road towards the principal buildings and offices winds past small, but well-kept houses in front of which small children play and an occasional sari-sari store where people flock to snack and chat, all set in patches of green with colorful flowers and plants. Yet this idyllic setting belies the institution's true purpose. Set in the middle of Mandaluyong City and founded in 1931, the CIW is a prison; under the stewardship of Attorney Rachel Ruelo, the CIW's objectives are "to keep women convicts in custody for their safety and for the protection and security of society, and to prepare and rehabilitate these women for a better life upon eventual freedom from confinement."

During my weekly visits to the CIW, initially to just connect with the inmates, and later to teach yoga classes, I've gotten to know some of its more than 1,500 inhabitants: they are young and old, from all walks of life, generally poor, but some are well-to-do, and are incarcerated for a wide range of crimes, mostly for painfully long periods of their lives. What these women have in common is that at one point in their lives they made a mistake, for which they are now paying dearly. It is easy to think that this could only happen to someone else. However, talking to these women makes it clear that the same fate could befall anyone: to make a very bad decision and not get away with it.

Most inmates comprehend the gravity of their mistakes and accept the punishment meted out by a justice system that doesn't always seem so just. They often embrace religion as their beacon, offering solace and guidance in the seemingly endless days of their imprisoned existence. Many have taken the opportunity to join the CIW's educational program, which allows them to continue their studies or even set their first steps on the academic path, literally learning how to read and write for the first time in their lives, a skill that will serve them well once they have served their sentences.

What I found most striking in the CIW is the workshop—a small building at one corner of the compound where inmates with drive and skills spend their days on creative and productive exploits. Some of them operate sewing machines, making inmate uniforms, potholders, or blankets. Others make crocheted products and things made out of beads, such as bags, wallets, and key chains. All these products are sold solely in the CIW shop then, and now at ECHOstore.

A handful of women in particular deserve closer attention: they work in the paper crafts section and make beautiful woven items-from bags, fruit baskets, and tissue boxes to flowers, hampers, and doll houses, and even Christmas parols. What is amazing is that they create all these products from the pages of telephone directories. Patiently rolled, glued, and sometimes wrapped in colored paper, individual strands are then woven and varnished to look like wood or wicker.

Felicia (not her real name), one of the senior paper weavers, was in the CIW for 19 years and 11 months. Her work is of remarkable creativity and finesse, exuding a love for the craft, as well as years of acquired experience and patience. She started doing these paper crafts to earn a little money, as inmates usually have to pay for many of the prison's amenities (like hot water) and small additional comforts (such as 3-in-1 coffee sachets and snacks). This was also how she financed her medical treatments for thyroid cancer. Over time, it became an essential part of her life in confinement, a way to focus her attention and release her creative energy. (At the time of print of this edition, Felicia had been released from prison after serving her term).

Most CIW inmates pass their days in quiet desperation, hoping fervently for a miracle to shorten their time behind bars; only a few are involved in gainful activity. And they may be considered lucky, as this may be, for the moments that they are engaged in it, the times that they can let their creative souls take flight and be free.

Kitty Arambulo-Clinton is a human rights lawyer and a self-professed world citizen calling many parts of the world home; presently, that is Manila. A human rights lawyer by training, an international bureaucrat by profession, and a yoga teacher at heart, Kitty's greatest passions are her boys (Lucas and Daniel) and yoga. Everything else is a bonus, including husband Andy. Kitty is presently pursuing a Masters degree in Development Management at the Asian Institute of Management.

 

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By Chit Juan

I was very excited to spend three weeks with two Muslim women during a recent International Visitor Leadership Program grant to visit the US to learn more about "Women and Entrepreneurship." It was my first time to actually eat and sleep with their kind, with headgear (tandong) and prayers in between (Rima Hassan would excuse herself to pray at designated times of each day). I was excited just at the idea of learning. To learn about their culture, which is ours too as much as it is theirs, was a high point in my three-week journey.

I would as much as possible take the chance of having breakfast with Gianida Lumanggal and Rima to see what they eat, what their habits are, and what was different in the things we did every day. Call it bonding just like Sarah Jessica Parker with her friends, except without the carnal desires. As we were suffering from jet lag for a week, Gianida and I would have coffee (our rooms had espresso machines!) at 4 a.m. Washington DC time, and discuss the problems her community had and how we could best help them. These 4 a.m. sessions would slowly adjust to breakfast sessions and, for the next three weeks, would be our kapihan with the rest of the group: Aklan-born Rose Nepomuceno and Manila girl Dina Rodriguez.

(Left to right) Gianida Lumanggal, Chit Juan, and Rima Hassan

Before we parted ways, some leaving for relatives' homes in the US and some going straight home to Manila, we pledged to keep in touch and to visit each other no matter the distance from Makati to Davao or Basilan.

The next month was Ramadan, and the two Muslim ladies begged off from any business discussions. As soon as Ramadan ended, Gianida and I saw each other in Davao, where she brought samples upon samples of buri baskets, vine baskets, banana chips, and even coffee. My ECHOstore partners Reena and Jeannie critiqued her products and zeroed in on the buri baskets, rather than sell more banana chips which are aplenty in Manila.

Gianida rounded up the old women weavers of Kitulaan, Cotabato, and started what now is a microenterprise creating different containers (some for rice and some for squeezing coconut milk with, among others) and buri mats (banig). It would pull at your heartstrings to note that, while each bag or mat may take an hour or a few days to make, even P50 for a day's production makes a BIG difference to a woman who used to earn nothing. The women are mostly in their 50s, no longer physically strong to do heavy manual labor, but productive in crafts such as weaving, which they know by heart, having grown up in these parts where buri is a backyard palm tree and weaving can be done almost with their eyes closed.

Today, our mentoring sessions over coffee in Washington have turned a small community into a busy hive, each one weaving a product they know by heart. It pleases me to know that Gianida turned our mentoring sessions in entrepreneurship into a real microenterprise that now empowers ten women at a time, and soon the rest of their small town in Cotabato.

Gianida is a teacher by profession, but her humility made her my student even for just a few days, a few weeks in something she was not familiar with. I also am her student in the traditions of the Muslim way of life. Together we teach and we learn. The education I have gotten is priceless, perhaps even worth more than an MBA. And all it took was a friendship that was open, humble, and honest.

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The women who made these buri containers are from the barangays of Galakit and Igam in the municipality of Pagalungan, Maguindanao. The other women are from Barongis, Pikit, Kitulaan, and Carmen in Cotabato. They are all over 50 yevars old and continue this craft for as long as they can still see. They depend on this craft to buy their daily necessities whilst preserving the traditions handed down by earlier generations. While the containers are made to primarily keep rice, it is actually a multipurpose vessel for storing knicknacks and many other things. It also makes for a nice gift basket during the holiday season.

Weaving buri is not so common anymore due to the availability of plastics, but we remain hopeful that, with your support, this age-old industry will come alive once more. Older women who know the craft will gain employment or livelihood as they teach the younger generation these traditional crafts.

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Issue 1: September-October 2008
Issue 2: November-December 2008
Issue 3: January-February 2009
Issue 4: March-April 2009
Issue 5: May-June 2009
Issue 6: July-August 2009

Buy ECHOstore gift certificates

Give GIFTS OF HOPE all year round with ECHOstore gift certificates.

PERFECT for people who have everything, people who love receiving gifts with meaning, people who understand what sharing means, people who love to buy their own gifts, and for people to give to others!

Visit our store at Serendra to purchase or ask about our gift certificates. Available in P500 denominations.

Hold your seminar at ECHOstore

ECHOstore is open for use by groups and individuals who need space for lectures and workshops related to the sustainable lifestyle. Here are details to get the space exclusively for your event:

Please e-mail puj.echolifestyle.store@gmail.com or call us at 901-3485 to block off your preferred schedule.

Donate old newspapers

Donate your old newspapers and foreign magazines, and we'll give them to communities to help in their production of one-of-a-kind bags.

Contribute to our eView

We welcome newsletter contributions to the ECHOstore eView. Articles can be related to ECHOstore's philosophy of sustainable living or its principles of nurturing the self, the community, and the planet. E-mail your article to Jeannie Javelosa at jej.echolifestyle.store@gmail.com.

Unplug your power!

10% of the electricity you use in your home is burned by communication devices and appliances—even when they're off! So unplug your electric fans, microwave, TV, computer, and cellphone charger from the wall if they're not in use or totally unnecessary.

Turn off your tap!

When you're not actually using the water while brushing your teeth, turn off the tap. You can save up to 5 gallons of H20 a day—that's as much as one plastic bottle on a water dispenser!

Rearrange you furniture!

From It's Easy Being Green by Crissy Trask

Arrange furniture to take in natural light from windows. Place desks and reading chairs next to windows to cut down on the need for supplemental, artificial light during the day.