2017 Apples & Lemons Awards

THEY are under the spotlight, or prefer to stay under the radar, or just refuse to take the credit due them.

These men are the newsmakers for the year and much deserving of the Apples Award.

If a designer can be canonized to sainthood, Emi Englis will be the first on line. He made teaching an advocacy and he is passionate about imparting knowledge— even the recent one he’s learned— to his students (and peers) while drawing out the undiscovered intrinsic talent from within them.

He is involved in several projects at a time, all of which seeking to develop skills—product development with Mindanao Trade exposition and Department of Trade and Industries for local artisans, mentoring young designers to create globally competitive goods, accrediting schools offering Fine Arts, Interior Design and Architecture with PAASCU.

As part of the academe, he spearheaded a project— Artisanal Heritage Studies and Creative Enterprise Center, which was granted a five million pesos fund- ing for PWC, one of the 50 schools in the country. The school also inked a partnership with NCAA to help mainstream traditional communities develop various skills for dressmaking and product design.

With his fashion group DFDC, Englis “co-facilitated” the linkage and networking of the group with government agencies CITEM and DTI and the indigenous community. This is part of his belief in empowerment—to enlarge everyone’s perspective outside of the designing.