Loren Legarda on empowering and promoting Filipino industries, culture, one MSME at a time – Tempo – The Nation’s Fastest Growing Newspaper

Three-term Senator, now Deputy Speaker Loren Legarda, has at all times believed within the potential of our tradition, our rituals, and our textile trade, and the way sure practices, when given ample assist, can rework the livelihood of those communities.

Having served as Chair of the Senate Committee on Finance, Legarda has made certain that authorities businesses that assist our textile trade are given an arsenal of means and methods to assist our weaving communities.

Legarda’s imaginative and prescient to have a everlasting textile gallery within the nation was impressed by her journeys to weaving communities in neighboring international locations like Vietnam and Laos. These visits finally prompted her to companion with the Nationwide Museum of the Philippines. By means of perseverance, the Hibla ng Lahing Filipino: The Artistry of Philippine Textiles was launched in 2012 as the primary everlasting textile gallery within the nation. It homes the Nationwide Museum of the Philippines’s in depth textile assortment, which options the Abel Iloko from Vigan; Tingguian blanket from Abra; Ga’dang clothes from Ifugao; the oldest banton material from Romblon; and Maranao clothes from Southern Mindanao, to call just a few.

As three-term Senator, Legarda authored Republic Act No. 9242 or the Philippine Tropical Materials Legislation, which promotes the nation’s pure materials via using such supplies for official uniforms of presidency officers and workers.

Legarda is likewise the principal sponsor and co-author of the Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises Legislation. She centered on offering funds for the MSMEs and the communities on the grassroots. Her visits to the communities made her understand that safeguarding our id and our beliefs—tangible or intangible—is as vital because the financial and political affairs of countries. This has led her to determine weaving and cotton processing facilities, in addition to cotton farms, nationwide. “One is ready to empower these small communities for so long as we give them due significance,” Legarda stated.

One of many small communities that Legarda has helped is the household enterprise managed by Librada Donato in Namarabar, a distant city in Penarrubia, Abra. They make blankets, shawls, scarves, and superbly woven textiles. They might personally thank Legarda, whereas she was Senator, for all of the provides and threads that she had offered. The enterprise of Donato has been constantly collaborating in one other challenge of the three-term Senator, in partnership with the Division of Commerce and Business, referred to as the Nationwide Arts and Crafts Honest.

Legarda has additionally assisted Angelina and Sammy Buhle, who run a home-based weaving middle in Ifugao that makes a speciality of ikat weaving. Sammy Buhle has been chosen as one of many collaborators for the profitable curatorial proposal of the Philippine Pavilion on the 59^th Venice Artwork Biennale, with the exhibition titled “All of us current, That is our gathering (Andi taku e sana, Amungtaku di sana).”

Legarda’s residence province of Vintage, the place she at the moment serves as Congresswoman, has additionally gained from her steadfast assist. For example, the BagtasonLoomweavers Affiliation in Bugasong now has its personal weaving middle that she funded via the Philippine Fiber and Growth Authority (PhilFida), whereas the NCCA offered help in establishing their very own pure dye middle. 

Even piña weaving in Tibiao, Vintage, which began round 2005 however stopped resulting from lack of demand, was revived via Legarda’s help, bringing to life an trade that might in any other case have been thought of gone. Aside from collaborating within the DTI’s Nationwide Arts and Crafts Honest (NACF), the weavers from Tibiao had been capable of showcase their distinctive expertise earlier than a global viewers after they went to Geneva in Switzerland and Prague in Czech Republic for the Hibla ng Lahing Filipino Travelling Exhibition. 

Legarda has at all times harassed that empowerment is all that these communities have to ensure that their livelihoods are sustainable, particularly throughout these making an attempt occasions.