By Joyce Reyes-Aguila
Her message in a bottle spells hope for future generations. More importantly, it inspires refreshing kindness for those craving for clean water — and those wanting to do good.
“Drink hope, you give hope,” says the message inscribed on the “Hope in a Bottle” purified drinking water. The question: How?
For starters, every centavo from the profits of “Hope in a Bottle” Purified Water is utilized by Friends of Hope, an organization Nanette Medved-Po established to build classrooms around the country. To date, nine million water bottles have helped build 37 classrooms for more than 7,000 students. This number of beneficiaries will inevitably increase, as numerous projects are under way in provinces like Davao, South Cotabato, Laguna, and Bohol — to name a few.
As awareness and praise for her work grow, the organization’s chairperson and president is first to set the record straight: Hope is not a foundation, and she is not a philanthropist. “We see ourselves as a for-profit business that just so happens to donate all of its profits towards building public school classrooms,” she says. “We don’t see it as charity. We see ourselves as investors.”
Nanette anchored the concept in the strengths she saw in both for-profit and non-profit sectors. “I thought, why don’t we come up with a hybrid (setup) wherein a non-profit company, with the discipline and professionalism of a for-profit (organization) generates profits for aa social good,” the finance and entrepreneurship summa cum laude of Wellesley’s Babson College explains. “But then, rather than those profits going to me so I can buy a new car, a new house and fancy clothes, we’ll put the profit towards social good.”
To date, Hope has been recognized as the “Best New Brand Winner” and “Best Community Initiative Winner” by the Global Bottled Water Awards in 2015. This year, Generation Hope, Inc., the social enterprise behind Hope, was adjudged grand winner in the Developmental Social Enterprise Awards by Price Waterhouse Coopers. Nanette was also named as one of the Forbes 2017 Heroes of Philanthropy in the Asia Pacific.
The former award-winning actress and model chose to focus her efforts on education in the country, where an acute shortage in classrooms and the quality of existing ones adversely affect how students learn. “I think the ripple effect in education is greater than any other investment that you can make,” she submits. “If you believe that talent is equally distributed in the population but opportunity is not, (it’s) because some people are wealthy enough to take advantage or find opportunity.”
A majority or 27 of the finished classrooms are in Mindanao, the part of the archipelago that “sorely needs investment.” Nanette stresses, “People there need hope (not just the organization). It’s my personal preference to allocate funding there. I wish I had more funding to allocate to Mindanao but I do as much as I can,” she says. Nanette also thinks that if more companies looked at investing in Mindanao, the impact would be nothing short of marvelous.
Secondly, Nanette also expanded the reach of her cause via an agriculture program last year. “It is actually bigger than our Hope water program,” she says of the Mindanao-dedicated project that works with small holder coconut farmers. “It’s kind of a natural extension (because) I’m very opportunistic in these sorts of things.“
Married to Christopher Po, the chairman, president, and chief executive officer of Century Pacific Food, Inc., she narrates that “one of the things that they have is a company that produces coconut products, specifically coconut water. Their facilities are in Mindanao. I thought — hoping that I could leverage my husband listening to me a little bit — that I might be able to convince him to source some of their coconut from the small farmers. (It’s) not that I have anything against the large firms or the large farmers, but I just thought what a great opportunity.
“Luckily, my husband is a lovely man. He’s always willing to explore things like this. It so happened that there are some synergies to be had between what I’m doing at Hope in agriculture and in his case, receiving the supply of our farmers.”
Nanette’s agricultural endeavors seek to create market linkages and productivity interventions between small landholding farmers and not just her husband’s company, but also with competitors. “Hope is not an extension of my husband,” the mother of two clarifies. “We are independent. At the end of the day, we’re here to benefit the farmers. If that means we talk to everybody, then we talk to everybody.”
Nanette, one of the most sought-after leading ladies in show biz before she went to the US to study, shares exclusively that she was able to build all these from scratch as she is a “fixer” by nature, who always wants to make things better. “Even when I was working in the entertainment business, I had a feeling that I would do something that was helpful and productive,” she intimates. “I just didn’t have a clear sense of what that was. Maybe this is my calling and (show business was the) pit stop. (Maybe I became part of) the entertainment business so that I have a little bit of leverage to get an audience.”
Many are surprised when the svelte and gorgeous former celebrity comes into meetings or events for Hope. And Nanette admits that there are times when she was “non-committal about associating (herself) over the years with Hope only because people would see this as a vanity project.” She laments, “I didn’t want that. I would have bursts of ‘Okay, I’m going to be the face of Hope.’ And after, ‘Oh my God! That was not a good idea. I’m going to hide again.’”
Nanette has a special fondness for Hope’s first classroom in Tondo, Manila — a location requested by comedy king Dolphy before he passed away. “He was one of our first supporters,” she reveals of the late actor who headlined a lineup of public school-educated celebrities supporting Hope. “His family fulfilled that promise to build a classroom in Tondo. After he passed away, the family members went to the school. They opened the classroom on Eric Quizon’s (one of Dolphy’s sons) birthday. I’m very close to Eric. It was very emotional.”
But after three classroom dedications, the businesswoman decided to stop attending the events. “When I go, everybody’s so grateful (to me),” she explains. “And I always feel almost embarrassed. I remember (saying) ‘I really appreciate your thanking me for building you a classroom. However, I didn’t build your classroom. I came up with the idea and there are 500,000 decisions made by nameless, faceless people. You should thank them. So when you go out in the world, be sure you’re nice to people. You never know that could be one of the nameless, faceless people who bought a bottle of water to support the cause. Those are the real heroes of Hope. Not me. I just happen to have the organization, but I didn’t buy nine million bottles of water.’”
These days, Nanette finds herself working with lots of millennials, whom she describes as “very passionate people.“
“(They are) very engaged, highly efficient, super-energized, and passionate group of people. I actually think that with millennials, we have incredible hope for our future because they are so diverse, educated, socially aware. I think that they’ll do great things. And we have a good group of them that work at Hope and make great things happen every day.”
Surprisingly, Hope operates with less than 30 full-time personnel (headquartered in the basement of Nanette’s residence) with the help of the Department of Education, corporate partners and volunteers.
By the way, her millennial staff, along with broadcaster Karen Davila, have also influenced Nanette to be active on social media. The usually very private citizen is learning how to maximize venues like Instagram to build awareness. She is slowly adjusting — holding off reading comments for now, adding that she simply does not want any feedback or noise to interfere with what the task at hand.
Her @nanettemedvedpo Instagram account is full of Hope updates, including its “Hope In a Shirt” initiative that sells shirts made from 100-percent recycled bottles, designed by actress and PeopleAsia “Women of Style and Substance” 2015 awardee Solenn Heussaff. Nanette reports that Hope is also working towards offering more eco-friendly products.
Nanette says she continues to learn each day of her “very humbling journey. I always tell people the wonderful thing about what I do is, every day, I get to see the best side of people. Whenever I walk into a room, I see the best of people because automatically the tone is set (when) we talk about Hope and helping schools. That melts the ice and brings out the best in people. With such great reception, you’ll never know, we might actually do great things moving forward.”
We’ll drink a Hope in a Bottle to that, Nanette!
