Learning from the Country's Best

Although HPP Employees Multipurpose Cooperative can be considered as one of the fastest growing cooperatives in the country with its P60M in Assets and more than 1,200 members in just 5 years, it did not stop HPPEMC from trying to learn from and benchmark itself against other bigger and more established cooperatives in the country.

On September 23-24, 2019, HPPEMC visited three large cooperatives to try to learn more about their operation, their history, best practices, success stories, and cooperative management. Dubbed as Lakbay-Aral, these educational tours are a practice among cooperatives as part of Cooperative Principle #6 – Cooperation Among Cooperatives – where cooperatives help each other for their collective growth.

The HPPEMC Lakbay-Aral 2019 started at 6am on Monday, September 23 where some officers and staff met at McKinley Hill in Taguig. Our first stop was the Baclaran Vendors Development Cooperative. At around 8:30am, the HPPEMC delegates were welcomed by several BVDC officers and staff led by their CEO, Mr. Sonny Regencia. Mr Regencia shared with us that BVDC was organized 42 years ago, in 1977, more due to a necessity faced by some Baclaran vendors at that time who were forced to vacate their stalls to give way to building renovation. Since they lack the capital needed to get new stall rights, these vendors were forced to borrow money from the “5-6” loan sharks. To save the vendors from these usurious interest rates, the founders decided to organize the vendors into a cooperative. They were able to gather 250 vendors and were able to generate P33,000.00 as starting share capital.

Owing to good governance and the continued patronage of its members, BVDC steadily grew. And in just 10 years of operation, BVDC was able to buy its own lot in Baclaran and build a 4-storey building. BVDC then became one of the few cooperatives at that time with its own building.

BVDC has since expanded to other public markets in Pasay and Cavite to try to help their fellow vendors in the area. Today, BVDC has grown to more than P400M in Assets with more than 6,000 members.

Next, the group went to Paranaque to visit the San Dionisio Credit Cooperative. It was around 12NN when we reached SDCC. After a sumptuous lunch courtesy of SDCC, we were officially welcomed by SDCC officers led by their CEO, Ms. Cielito Garrido.

SDCC is a community-based cooperative that was founded in 1961 by 28 founding members with a starting share capital of P380.00. Today, SDCC is one of the oldest and most successful cooperatives in the country with more than 20,000 members and P2B in Assets.

Ms. Garrido shared that although SDCC is a very successful cooperative today, that was not always the case particularly in the early years of SDCC. There were a lot of challenges and doubts early on particularly as SDCC is a community-based cooperative, which is more difficult to run than institutional or employee-based cooperatives like HPPEMC.

But through hard work and perseverance of the founding members, SDCC was able to overcome all of those challenges and brought SDCC to where it is today. Ms. Garrido emphasized that for a cooperative to succeed, strong volunteerism is important. After more than 50 years, and even with all their successes, Ms. Garrido is proud to say that their officers and Board of Directors still don’t get any compensation. They are still all volunteers. Her challenge, therefore, to the HPPEMC officers present is to be able to inspire future leaders to have the same passion and “malasakit” as the original founders and to continue running HPPEMC with a higher purpose of service and cooperativism.

At around 2:30PM, we left for Batangas for our third and last cooperative to visit. It was 4:30PM when we reached Sorosoro Ibaba Development Cooperative. We were welcomed by Ms. Arlene King, Executive Assistant to the CEO, since the CEO, Hon. Cong. Rico Geron (AGAP Partylist), was not available.

Through Ms. King, we learned that SIDC was first founded in 1969 as Sorosoro Ibaba Farmers’ Association with 59 founding members and P11,800.00 initial share capital. It’s first business was a Sari-Sari Store. Today, SIDC has gone a long way from a mere Sari-Sari Store owner to a cooperative of more than P3B in Assets, with around 35,000 members, and close to 1,200 employees. They have since diversified into multiple businesses, all in the service of their members. These businesses include feeds mill, fertilizer production, savings and loans services, supermarket, convenience stores, hardware store, gas stations, resort, cable TV, Internet service, printing services, and egg layer farm. We were also pleasantly surprised when we learned that SIDC runs SAP.

It was already dark when we left the SIDC head office. We proceeded to Sorosoro Springs, the resort owned by SIDC, to spend the night and to try to capture all the learnings from the three coops visited and how to replicate them in HPPEMC.Ms. Nonalyn Hermogenes, our accredited CDA trainer, facilitated the discussion. 

The workshop continued the following morning with the team laying out plans that we can adopt into our own cooperative. On our way home, we passed by SIDC’s chicken egg layer farm in Ibaan, Batangas, where the group was treated to a tour of the premises and a demo of the egg-sorter machine.

Everyone agreed that the 2-day Lakbay-Aral has been a success. The group went home inspired and full of learnings from all the sharing and guided tours that were generously given by our “big brother” coops. The team saw for themselves, how even small cooperatives, with an almost impossible task, can accomplish great things with focused leadership and by putting service above all.