Fr. Anton Pascual named one of Outstanding Filipinos

FR. ANTON Pascual was recognized as one of the Outstanding Filipino (TOFIL) awardee for 2016 by the JCI Senate Philippines in the awarding ceremony held recently at the Malacañan Palace.

Thirty years of humanitarian, servant leadership, and stewardship excellence in the fields of education, cooperative development and social services is how best to summarize his accomplishments.

Rev. Fr. Antonio Cecilio Tuason Pascual more popularly known as Fr. Anton was ordained in 1987. His first assignment was at the Our Lady of the Holy Rosary Parish, Lower Bicutan, in Taguig City where most of the members of the community were impoverished and unemployed.

This motivated him to develop programs for the poor while performing his duties as a priest. He established the Simbayanan ni Maria Foundation to provide programs on health and nutrition, job placement, skills training, scholarships for families of fishermen in Taguig.

After the foundation, Fr. Anton organized the Simbayanan ni Maria Multipurpose Cooperative (SMMPC) to provide socioeconomic programs and activities for economic empowerment of the poor people of Taguig City.

Now, SMMPC is the biggest in terms of assets, revenues, equity among community- based cooperatives in Taguig and one of the top 100 cooperatives in the country. SMMPC’s assets grew from barely .5Mn with 389 members to 659Mn with 28,714 members from 1991 to 2015.

In 1994, while serving as chaplain of Greenbelt Chapel in Makati City, Fr. Anton became part of the Task Force Cooperative Bank formed by the Makati NGO Network (MNN). In 1996, the Task Force Cooperative Bank became Metro South Cooperative Bank (MSCB) where Fr. Anton was a founding director. As of December 2015, the total assets of MSCB has grown to P2.5 billion. It now has 823 member-cooperatives nationwide and two million individual cooperative members. Fr. Anton is the present Chairman of the Board of MSCB. Fr. Anton is envisioning to consolidate all cooperative banks in the Philippines under MSCB by 2020.