BACOLOD CITY – The city government of Bacolod received a P300,000 fund for the implementation of the Family-based Actions on Children and their Environs in the Slums (FACES) Project for 2012.

The FACES Project for 2012 is an initiative of the Department of Interior and Local Government- Local Government Academy (DILG-LGA) under the DILG's flagship program on human rights.

The funding assistance was received by the Millennium Development Goals (MDG) FACES Project City Core Team headed by Councilor Em Ang, with City Social Services head Sally Abelarde and Secretary to the Mayor Moises de la Cruz, during the signing of the memorandum of agreement on May 30 at Bayview Park Hotel in Manila.

Ang, who chairs the Sangguniang Panlunsod committee on social services, said that as project site, Bacolod will receive both technical and financial assistance.

We will also benefit from knowledge-sharing and mentoring from the previous MDG FACES pilot cities and will have the opportunity to access other LGA-related programs, she added.

The project acknowledges that the human face of poverty is best manifested among the children in the slums, and children become the locus that helps trigger collateral impact on the household as a whole and the slum community at large.

The primary purpose of the project is to set targets, initiate actions and provide solutions where the process is inclusive, gender sensitive, and rights-based.

Mothers or women-headed households in the slums will be tapped and mobilized to take the lead at the household and community-levels to manage the Family MDG Covenant, a document that contains the desired MDG targets and proposed actions each family is committed to achieve and act on.

To complement the family effort, quick response mechanism will be developed and established at the household, city, and national levels to ensure concrete actions are made to provide solutions to MDG issue of children in the slums.*NLG