Dinky Soliman, post-SONA

Dinky Soliman will be at the BSLR-East Lecture Room,
UP College of Medicine on 26 July 2005 (Tuesday), 8:00 am
for a post-SONA assessment of the Political Crisis.

A member of the so-called "Hyatt 10", former Department of Social Welfare and Development Secretary Corazon "Dinky" Soliman, an alumna of the UP Diliman College of Social Work and Community Development (CSWCD), is seen as one of the non-political secretaries of GMA.

Is her resignation that significant? Why did she do it? See you at the forum.

Program sponsors:

University Student Council UP Manila
UP Medicine Student Council

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this story was taken from www.inq7.net
URL: http://www.inq7.net/opi/2004/jul/11/text/opi_commentary1-1-p.htm

Who is Dinky Soliman?
Posted:0:50 AM (Manila Time) | Jul. 11, 2004
By Commentary


(INQ7.net editor's note: This commentary was originally published in January 2001 in the Philippine Daily Inquirer)

"Who is Dinky Soliman?" responded Korina Sanchez when President Gloria Arroyo announced the second of her first two Cabinet choices in a keenly watched first one-on-one TV interview.

With a hint of impishness that mystified the mainstream and warmed hearts in "civil society" circles, our new President added, "I bet she’ll fall off her chair if she’s watching because I’ve given no hint that I’ve been thinking of her.

"With that presidential glance, this newspaper has quickly identified the mysterious Dinky as Corazon Juliano-Soliman, chairperson of KOMPIL II. Her kilometric bio-data must wait for another day but, with her phone predictably busy at this writing, the civil society grapevine is already buzzing with her first reaction. She has asked allies to enter deep prayer mode with her to discern the meaning of the turn of events to an organic community to which she is attached like a huge sunflower to leaves, stem and soil.

Simply put, what is being weighed in the balance is whether the heart of Philippine civil society – tried and tested pre- and post-Marcos, Cory, FVR and Erap – is ready to go mainstream. On the con side is the fact that civil society, to which Dinky is a laughing, well-loved eminence at 53, has always done better as a fiscalizer to government. Given the many polarized vested interests of our society, our President has by definition always been a great compromiser at home and abroad. Given that, civil society has historically been more effective as government’s challenger, visionary adviser, and principled ally as times have demanded.

This exercise, going on 30 years for Dinky’s generation of quietly effective leaders not particularly concerned with media projection, has by turns been inspiring, dangerous and tedious. Its historical rewards have however been immeasurable. One telling snapshot of Dinky’s career comes from the years of Marcos’ chemical-powered Green Revolution. In the dead of night, as a young graduate of U.P.’s School of Social Work, she was counting the seeds of indigenous rice strains in the fields of Sta.Rosa, Nueva Ecija with a team of the NGO Masipag. Under military suspicion that they were NPA organizers, they were trying to help local farmers save those rice strains from extinction in a pioneering grassroots program of chemical-free cross-fertilization A second snapshot is Dinky nine months pregnant with her second child, bouncing down the Batasan grounds at the forefront of an NGO campaign for a new landlord-dominated Congress to pass the CARP law in 1987. It was the climax to months of getting the wild horses of the extreme Left to the negotiating table with the rest of the agrarian reform community in the People’s Congress for Agrarian Reform.

Not only did Dinky’s stellar gift for facilitation--getting growling enemies to come to common ground with courtesy and the beginnings of understanding--emerge on a nationwide scale. Her authentic love and appreciation for the farmers of our agricultural country deepened into bedrock as she sought to translate the language of the historically oppressed into working relations with the rest of Philippine society. Evolution, not revolution--negotiating in wait for a better day--was not a popular way of summing things up in the heat of that supremely polarized moment but Dinky and company pulled it off with grace.

Since then civil society hearts have been bruised and broken in the Aquino years, fired with new hope but again disappointed with the Ramos years’ pussy-footing on its own Social Reform Agenda, tentative in the first ten months of Estrada, then angered and stirred to what flowed like an angry river towards EDSA II. This time, thinking things through about Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo involves dissecting her perspective on GATT and the World Trade Organization which, given present terms, remain anathema to civil society - not only here but, as witnessed in Seattle at the end of 1999, globally. A word on the global aspect of Dinky and her civil society allies’ work speaks volumes that may yet save Miriam Santiago’s soul if she would begin reading them. Weaving in and out of global institutions like the UN without concern for personal credit is all in a day’s work in civil society culture. The Rio Earth Summit, the peace negotiations in Cambodia, the Habitat Conference in Turkey, to name only three, are some of the global forums to which Dinky Soliman has lent her gift of facilitation to brilliant account. At home, unknown to ABS-CBN until last Saturday, she is known to Muslim Mindanao, the riverbank communities of the Pasig River, the foothill communities of Mt. Banahaw and farmers all over the country, to name a few. Vision rooted in dependable soil, watered by honest tears, blossoms in wondrous ways with which even speedier airwaves have yet to catch up.

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