2022 taught us many things… we need to work as a team, we are better with partners and allies, and we need to document our experiences. This year, we continued to build our organizational capacity by providing our members and volunteers access to empowering activities. To date, we now have 42 trained community-based HIV screening motivators across the region – ready to provide health education and equipped with the necessary skills to facilitate HIV screening.
Richard B. Hayag
President
(2022 Year End GM Meeting)
December 30, 2022 - Year-end Gathering
GM alone could not have gone too far. We are thankful for the support of our friends and allies. The AIDS Healthcare Foundation Philippines provided us the funding support to train our members and implement our programs across the region. The Department of Health ROV, Department of Education division offices of Tabaco City & Legazpi City, and the Philippine National Police Region V, which supported us in our sexual and reproductive health rights advocacy, in expanding our reach despite operating with lean staffing and limited resources. The local government units in the region and their respective social hygiene clinics, and the BRTTH-HACT, which continued to trust our organization’s capacity and expertise were also elemental in our success. Indeed, we are better with partners and allies.
Through our volunteers with the support of partners, we are able to reach over 3,000 individuals and able to provide them access to sexual and reproductive health information and services. (Click for 2022 Annual Report)
Our HIV advocacy work and services remained the core of our program implementation. GM Bicol continued to complement the government-led HIV initiatives. GM as an organization of volunteers and advocates worked together as a team, and we successfully overcame the challenges we faced. Through the collective efforts of GM members, partners and allies, we have gone a long way in this journey.
We are now trying to pursue becoming the center of excellence in the work that we do. This year, we started to strengthen our knowledge management system by documenting our efforts, experiences, and challenges faced. We trust that these bits and pieces of the collective experiences of our members and volunteers will serve as our guide to make our work better.
GM Bicol is still a very young organization with seven years of existence, and advocacy work experience. Ambitious it may sound, but as the head of the organization, I trust that our collective compassion will lead us to become the center of excellence in sexual and reproductive health, and rights in the near future.
With a grateful heart, I wish to thank our volunteers, members, our trustees, our advisers, and all our development partners. Dios Mabalos po!