KORONADAL CITY — Blaan tribal leaders and a private company had produced another licensed social worker through a joint community-empowerment initiative that bankrolled the schooling of 793 graduates of different college courses in the past seven years.
Radio reports here and in nearby Central Mindanao cities on Sunday stated that Raida G. Castroverde, who is from an impoverished ethnic Blaan family in Barangay Pula Bato in Tampakan town in South Cotabato, passed the 2024 social worker licensure examination with the help of the Sagittarius Mines Incorporated (SMI), and tribal leaders in the municipality.
Ms. Castroverde was quoted in Sunday’s radio reports as saying that she is grateful to the SMI for having funded her four-year college education and her licensure review classes.
Up to 46 beneficiaries of the college scholarship program of the SMI and Blaan tribal councils had become licensed social workers in recent years, according to local executives in different towns in region 12, among them Vice-Mayor Naila M. Mamalinta of Columbio and Mayor Theresa D. Constantino of Malungon.
Domingo N. Collado, indigenous people’s mandatory representative to the Tampakan municipal council, told reporters on Sunday that about half of the 789 beneficiaries of the SMI’s college scholarship program who are now teachers, engineers, social workers, agriculturists and veterinarians, are from marginalized Blaan communities. — John Felix M. Unson