Balik Bayanihan Box: Rebuilding Resource Sharing and Rerooting Regenerative Relational Resilience

Sharing is both a simple concept and can be incredibly complex when it comes to the who, what, when, where, why, and how’s of an exchange.  The abundance we carry collectively is powerful, healing, and when shared, can shift our society to build up solutions in times of pandemic, climate change, and ongoing internalized to global oppressions.  Sharing is a necessary part of interdependency that can also cross fine lines of where savior and poverty mentality, disempowerment, and modern day colonization can be perpetuated.  Maria will share a few personal experiences of effective, as well as problematic, forms of resource sharing.  We will journey together from post typhoon Yolanda communities in the Philippines, to the Oceti Sakowin camp at Standing Rock, to transition time as a returning diaspora, and other stories into the time of Covid – 19.  We are in a historic moment of mutual aid groups and other support systems in response to expressed needs.  There is a beautiful collective energy, a bayanihan, that has grown and along with it, the phrases, “we will never go back to how it was” and that we are coming into a “new normal”.   

Join us to take a deeper look together at: 

•        What is working and needs to continue expanding ?

•        What are your gifts and medicine ?

•        What comes up for you around your gifts and medicine ?

•        What hinders your from sharing  and what motivates it ?

•        How do we share generously as well as practice healthy boundary setting? 

•        How do we practice asking for what we need ?

•        How do we differentiate capacity and capability when we are not in a space to offer?

•        Who do we de-center and re-center in our exchanges?

•        How do the multiple identities we carry play an important role to bring about positive change? 

•        How do we decolonize the self and also connect it to movements, land, and struggle ?

•        How do we shift our capital and recognize our inherent value in dismantling status quo systems of oppression 

•        How do you activate your power within your privileges? 

•        How does the intersectional justice begin?

•        And how do we dream and do all of this together?

About Maria:

My name is Maria Muriel Remo Marasigan.  I was born in Malate, Metro Manila.  I am the daughter of Anna Remo Marasigan and Rodolfo Vasquez Marasigan , and granddaughter of Virginia Chavez Remo, Virgilio Remo, Buenaventura Vasquez Marasigan and Estanislao Marasigan who are all from Cuenca,  Batangas.  I am also a sister to Ramiro Ariel Remo Marasigan and Carlo Gabriel MarasiganI am an immigrant settler raised on Ramapough Lenape territory, known as Rockland County, New York. Currently, I am a farmworker in training, finding and learning ways to be a steward of the land that raised me, to build deeper relationships with the elements and the people to grow food for community while preserving agricultural lands and creating greater access for marginalized communities of color.  My previous work entails an international background in sustainable community development, environmental studies, education, youth and women leadership and empowerment.   My consultancy work in the Philippines focused around the areas of community based environmental, post disaster rehabilitation, and sustainable eco tourism organizations such as the Philippine Permaculture Association, Green Releaf, Blue Water Consultancy, the Transnational Institute for Grassroots Research and Action, Earthship Biotechture, and the Global Ecovillage Network of Oceania and Asia.  Prior to my work in the Philippines, I was the director of a youth arts and activism leadership/mentoring program with El Puente in Brooklyn, New York, a Peace Corps volunteer in El Salvador as an Agroforestry and Environmental Education Volunteer, an adjunct instructor at Florida International University’s environmental studies program, and an elementary public school teacher in New York City.