I would like to give a shout-out to Ms. Noreen Bautista, program officer of ISED, who turns 25 today. Happy birthday, Noreen! 🙂

Dear readers,

On Monday, 29 September 2014, CSR Bookshelf’s parent organization, the Benita & Catalino Yap Foundation (BCYF), is holding the 4^th Philippine Conference on Research in CSR. It’s our flagship event, and an annual one at that – as the name implies, the event on the 29^th will be the fourth iteration of the concept began in 2011.

Design by David Jan Mercado (2014)

This year, the theme is “CSR Enhances Human Dignity”, continuing the 2nd conference’s theme of “Doing Good is Not Good Enough” and the 3rd’s “CSR is Not Just for Business”. The Philippine Conference on Research in CSR is a five-part series that will culminate with next year’s 5th Conference, a grand affair that focuses on one of our advocacies, CSR 3.0 – right in time for the upcoming ASEAN integration, which is sure to result in massive free flows of ideas, information, and even people across member nations.

The Conference will be held in the Asian Development Bank (ADB) in Mandaluyong City, Metro Manila, Philippines, and will run from 7:30 am to 5:00 pm. It consists of four sessions: a plenary session featuring Department of Science and Technology (DOST) secretary Dr. Mario G. Montejo, who will be talking about “Science, Technology, Manufacturing, and CSR: Drivers for Economic Development”; two panel discussions on Making CSR a Lifestyle (one in the morning focused on youth organizations and one in the afternoon focused on different walks of life); and the keynote session, featuring Ms. Angela Kang Joo-hyun, founder of the Global Competitiveness Empowerment Forum in her native Seoul, South Korea. Lunch will also be served.

Dear readers, I would like to focus on the title of the event. It’s the Philippine Conference on Research in CSR. Thus, it is not a CSR conference (although that would be lovely, too), but rather a CSR research conference. The speakers’ and panelists’ diverse professions aside, at the end of the day, this event’s objective is to promote the national CSR research agenda – the reason why the Conference was started in the first place – and then eventually get individuals thinking of living out personal social responsibility, all based on research.

The very fact that persons from all walks of life come together in a daylong academic forum to talk about CSR is interesting. I’ve written about research in some of my previous editorials, and two in particular stand out. The first is on seeking truth through research – in a nutshell, how research makes certain propositions more solidly based and thus more likely to be true. The second is on making research a lifestyle. The very fact that our panelists come from fields ranging from the fine arts, to the corporate sector, and even to youth organizations is a beautiful metaphor of the magic that can happen from making research a lifestyle. Aside from helping add to the CSR research agenda by talking about their concrete experiences on living out their daily lives, they themselves represent a new face of CSR research – how it is not merely confined to the university or academe but is done by everybody, for everybody, precisely by bridging dialogue and concretizing the learning arising from such.

Practically, CSR students, teachers, and researchers stand to gain a lot by taking the Conference to heart and living out their own duties and responsibilities of research. And this is why, dear readers, I invite you to sign up for our Conference, and attend if you can. Two major speakers with their own presentations, plus their own panels of reactors, and open fora should provide for very interesting and lively discussion. Furthermore, this Conference brings together the governmental, private, and academic sectors in the name of learning, so I cannot think of anything more enriching than this.

For more questions regarding the Conference, you may email the BCYF Secretariat at csr@bcyfoundation.org.