Our Strategies

piloting of sustainable community-based social enterprises, developing the productivity and marketing capacity of land tenure secure farmers, upland settlers, and indigenous peoples, AND Rural-urban (poor-to-poor) linkages and solidarity 

 Movement building for agrarian reform, food sovereignty, and agroecology through the "bibingka strategy", community organizing, strategic alliance work, and redistributive reforms and tenurial.

Rural movement building through community organizing remains to be our primary strategy. It is people-centered and people-oriented; the main actors are the rural poor. We aim, however, to catalyze change and be part of the movement as social movement embedded activists who are integrated into the people's struggle for genuine social change. 

Rural social movement building focuses not only on land struggles but on post-land transfer issues as well. This entails developing regional movements around distinct issues such as the public land reform movement, rice farmers' movement, coconut farmers' movement, etc. Eventually, these movements shall become essential players in the theme or field they are championing. 

Rights-based state engagements

The state is duty-bound to protect, fulfill and respect human rights. Therefore, the state shall be mainly responsible for ensuring that rural poor people are able to enjoy their rights. The state, however, is to be considered an arena of engagements where various interests compete and where the outcomes of such competition may not be pro-poor. In this regard, effective state engagements on multiple rights and concerns of the poor shall be the dominant form of asserting the rural poor's rights to development. "Bibingka strategy", or the positive interaction between social movements from below and reformist initiatives by state agencies and officials will be adopted in situations where state reformists have a strong presence in the bureaucracy. The rightful assertion will be the primary mode when reform is blocked because of resistance from within and outside the state. 

However, rural poor's rights assertion shall not be exclusively state-centered. In many rural communities today, non-state armed groups also trample upon the rights of the rural poor to self-determination. Because of this, they unnecessarily become targets of violence themselves. The non-state armed groups will continue to harbor such attitudes for as long as they maintain that reform is counter-revolutionary or against the interests of their landlord masters.

Research and systematic documentation to generate reliable knowledge, support informed decision-making, and ensure transparency and replicability in understanding complex issues.