PHILIPPINE Airlines’ (PAL) steady progress to profitability has kept in step with its commitment to CSR (corporate social responsibility).  But in 1998, that fateful year when PAL was plunged into receivership, the very survival of the PAL Foundation, its CSR arm, was also at stake.

PAL Foundation executive director Menchu Sarmiento recalls that dark chapter in the airline’s history.  The nation’s flag carrier was reorganized and she was seconded to the foundation as its new executive director.  From a staff of nine, the foundation had been whittled down to herself and an assistant.  Almost all the foundation’s funds had been used for the separation pay of its previous staff.  Being under receivership, PAL could no longer give the foundation its annual cash endowment for program expenses.  However, a few days after she took over, Menchu got a phone call from a PAL employee whom she will only identify as an angel.  Their office just happened to have P100,000 that they had decided should go to the PAL Foundation. Although the amount is minuscule in CSR terms, Menchu interpreted it as a sign from a Higher Power that the PAL Foundation would survive.

Not only has the PAL Foundation managed to survive for the last 10 years but, more important, it has also helped some of the neediest Filipinos to get a new lease on life.  Though the PAL Foundation does not have millions for program expenses or glitzy “corporate events,” it has definitely made a difference in the lives of the poorest and the marginalized.

Its flagship program for humanitarian assistance and social development is the Medical Travel Grant.  This enables Filipino charity patients to travel to where they will get free care for serious ailments at specialty centers wherever PAL flies.  Its most high-profile Medical Travel grantees were the formerly conjoined Aguirre twins.  For them, PAL Foundation went beyond merely giving tickets. Menchu made the rounds of hospitals to get their many baseline and imaging tests done for free so the American medical sponsor would accept their case.  She found funds for their travel documents and helped them, including their mother and grandmother, to get their visas to the United States.  

PAL also flew Dr. Willy G. Lopez, then chairman of the Philippine General Hospital’s (PGH) Neurosciences Department, to the States twice for the first and the last of the Aguirre twins’ series of separation surgeries.  Dr. Lopez continues to pay it forward by doing free brain surgeries for PAL Foundation patients, and getting several of his PGH colleagues to donate their services for free, too. 

The PAL Foundation also works with other foreign charities, such as the Rotary Gift of Life, Childspring International, Children’s Chance, Healing the Children, Mending Kids International, World Cranio-Facial Foundation, Shriners Burn Institutes, Romac Australia, Rotaplast, Interplast and Operation Smile.  In a very literal sense, the foundation is helping change the face of poverty as most of those afflicted with disfiguring cranio-facial abnormalities belong to the poorest sectors of Filipino society.  

Meningoceles or fronto-nasal encephaloceles are a common birth defect.  PAL Foundation helps the Operation Smile World Care Program send kids like these to the Tippler Institute in Hawaii for free surgery.

Some of the PAL Foundation clients don’t even fly PAL. Like Vanessa and Markjil Cabasa, two of three siblings who are all afflicted with the rare genetic disorder osteogenesis imperfecta, or brittle bone disease.  Since meeting them, PAL Foundation has trawled for donations from the West Coast to Tokyo—for their quarterly chemotherapy, to build them a house, and to send Vanessa and her mother to high school.  The mother wants to be empowered to get a job so she can help support her family. A Department of Social Welfare and Development social worker remarked she had never come across such a comprehensive and inclusive approach to helping. 

Although PAL’s core business is in air travel, the foundation has a very grounded and down-to-earth approach to doing CSR. They are exploring ways to use the airline’s resources in the advocacy for child-wise tourism and against human trafficking.  With other PAL departments, they are also working for clean development mechanisms.  This is done without fanfare.  Menchu laughs that they are so uncorporate that the foundation doesn’t even have a brochure. They would rather use the money to directly assist the poorest of their medical travel grantees: to pay for immunizations, urgently needed antibiotics, passports and visas. 

“When you fly PAL, ideally you should feel at home ka na, alaga ka pa,”  Menchu explains their singular approach to CSR. “We don’t have the numbers but we try to make sure that what we do counts. As the saying goes: one person is worth the whole world.  When the foster family of a child we sent for treatment continues to support that child’s schooling even after the child has returned to her province, then we know we’ve really helped to make a difference.” 

And so a decade into what may also be considered its second lease on life, PAL Foundation continues to touch lives: hand to hand, heart to heart.  Just as Philippine Airlines as the flag carrier remains a very Filipino airline, so does the PAL Foundation approach to CSR remain simple lang at Pinoy na Pinoy.

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The wind beneath their wings

PHILIPPINE Airlines’ (PAL) steady progress to profitability has kept in step with its commitment to CSR (corporate social responsibility).  But in 1998, that fateful year when PAL was plunged into receivership, the very survival of the PAL Foundation, its CSR arm, was also at stake.

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Father & Son & Co.: The Uys

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