MANILA, Philippines – Rappler's civic engagement arm MovePH signed a partnership with Project PEARLS, a non-profit organization that provides scholarships and health care to underprivileged children, for the use of online platform X on Tuesday, September 13.
Project PEARLS (peace, education, aspiration, respect, love, smiles) plans to use Rappler's self-publishing platform to share its stories, promote its programs, ask for aid, tap other organizations for partnerships, and raise public awareness about the communities that it provides aid to.
According to Monica Aclan and Karen Bublañes, both full-time staff at Project PEARLS, Rappler's online influence and trusted name have been very helpful in expanding the organization's reach.
"It's very nice that Rappler is using this kind of hype to let non-government organizations and their advocacies be noticed, especially by millennials who are all over social media," said Bublañes.
By expanding its reach through Rappler's X, Project PEARLS hopes to mobilize more people to provide aid to the two communities it currently works with – Barangay Batia in Bocaue, Bulacan, and the Helping Land in Tondo, Manila.
The organization currently supports over 500 children from these two communities, offering them scholarships from preschool to college, providing them with food and health care, and creating livelihood programs in their neighborhoods.
MovePH, for its part, will train Project PEARLS on storytelling and content creation.
"We want X to be the journal of hope and the online diary of children that Project PEARLS caters to. We want them to have a chance at a decent future through our platform," MovePH executive director Rupert Ambil said of the partnership.
Launched in July 2016, Move Network is a community of student organizations and non-governmental organizations that share MovePH's vision to use social media as their platform for advocacy. More than 150 student organizations and 30 NGOs are part of the expanding network. – Rappler.com
Check out Project PEARLS' X account here.
Do you want your organization to be part of the Move Network? Send us an e-mail at move.ph@rappler.com.
A junior BS Management student at Ateneo de Manila University, Paco Tantoco is a Rappler intern.