Starbucks serves our schools
It was a slow school day in 1999 when Starbucks Loyola Heights first opened. I can still remember how the smell of good coffee first filled its streets. Coffee sparked intellectual conversations, fostered cozy study sessions, and cultivated bonds of friendship; I could never imagine high school life without it.
I didn’t think much of it then but now, I can see how privileged we were to have some spare allowance to spend on our tall, iced Mocha Frappuccinos in the afternoons, coming from our well-ventilated classrooms, seated at our stable desks, and doing seat work with our own sets of books. Some school kids weren’t as lucky. Now, a decade and a half later and a long way from school, what I thought to be the great social equalizer still remains heavily lopsided, as the states of both private and public schools grow vastly apart. Even after monumental academic reforms, the same sad conditions still haunt some 20 million public school students daily: a staggering shortage of 150,000 classrooms, and about the same number of water and sanitation facilities, 95 million schoolbooks, and 100,000 teachers. In Metro Manila alone, 82 percent of the 764 public schools are congested, causing students to attend classes in shared shifts, often outside the confines of a proper study room.
While this bitter reality can’t be sweetened by an extra serving of syrup, it is comforting to know that a cup of your favorite brew from your community café can help in lightening the load.
“We’ve always been a supporter of education,” explains Starbucks Philippines’ responsibility manager Zarah Perez. “Year after year, we’ve become really successful, so we are in a position to help some more. We first volunteered with several events for Teach for the Philippines in 2014, and now, we decided to support the program ‘ Renovate to Educate.’ What drew us to this program is how they can identify the problem of education very specifically, and their approach is very unique.”
With over 164 branches all over the archipelago, the country’s largest coffee chain shows that it hasn’t grown too big to walk the talk. Recently, 135 volunteers from its various Metro Manila branches visited the Malaban Elementary School in Biñan, Laguna, to aid in the rebuilding and reparation programs of the community school that accommodates some 3,400 students. Teach for the Philippines, Starbucks Philippines’ partner NGO for its Renovate to Educate program, chose this specific school because it poses both progressive potential and perennial problems.
While its school administrator, Clarita Rey, has introduced simple yet efficient learning solutions such as portable blackboards and visual instructions for her students, the new principal, who started her tenure with Malaban Elementary School only a year ago, found herself inheriting a few headaches as well. Due to the recent overflowing of Laguna de Bay, Malaban Elementary School had served as an evacuation center for displaced families in the area. This not only drove her students to hold classes outside of their classrooms, it also led to expensive predicaments of broken armchairs, doors, comfort rooms, and blackboards that their visitors left destroyed.
So, with the premise of getting these school fixtures fixed, and a few other spruce-ups, principal Rey, for her part, recognizes that, “It’s a very good program, and there are really a lot of benefits that it brings to us, especially for our students. It really is a big help for us.”
Established seven years ago, the Renovate to Educate program has benefitted 30 schools around the country, most of which are in the urban areas, and six of which are fostered by Starbucks Philippines. The program spends as much as P100,000 on materials at each site, while an annual budget of P1 million is required annually for them to serve an average of two school sites per month.
“We have partner schools in Navotas, Quezon City, Mandaluyong, Marikina, and we hope to organize the Renovate
to Educate events down South, as far as Cagayan de Oro,” shares JP Santos, the 22-year-old events associate for Teach For the Philippines, who notes that recommendations for school recipients come under close scrutiny and coordination by his organization. “If there is a high need for repair, that is the time we go and visit those schools.”
Renovate to Educate managing director Paolo Delgado says, “The worst thing that you can do is to help a school site that doesn’t need it as much as others. You expend time, materials, and resources and the stuff you make or build just ends up in storage. So our partners know that, if we’re coming to a school site, it’s because they’re needed, their dollar-for-work is going to be maximized, and that their employee engagement is going to be very high. For companies like Starbucks, it’s not just about the giving,” he continues, “it’s about bringing the whole community to the site and having their baristas and their managers interact and know what the values of their company are. So when we set up activities, it has to be win-win for everyone, win-win for the school, for the company, and for the volunteers.”
So, in just a day’s work, the legion of Starbucks and Teach for the Philippines volunteers — powered by caffeine breaks freely offered by the Venti van — was able to repair 35 armchairs, seven blackboards, six teacher’s tables, six bathrooms, five benches, four canteen pantries, and successfully planted 50 plants and herbs, as well as created three large murals that became colorful and enduring reminders of how our public schools can once again be conducive to raising the next generation of learned leaders.
“Starbucks believes that the Renovate to Educate events are a more sustainable approach to helping schools,” says Perez. “Here, the activities have a more lasting effect. So for us, as volunteers, the work is more valued and the results are more valuable.”
There may be more problems that plague our public school system, and the accomplishments at Malaban Elementary School could seem like a mere drop in the bucket. Yet, taking a proactive approach in solving the deficiencies of our schools, be it one armchair at a time, certainly does more good than simply sitting and complaining.
“We can’t leave the problems of education with the government and say, ‘It’s their issue, they need to solve it,’” Delgado says. “These guys are our future. Take action now. We can contribute and do it in a responsible manner, and a manner that can be measured. Count and measure what we’re putting in because these make us active members of our community.”
That way, seeing our public schools become better may not exactly be a tall order.