Mr. Ricardo Aguado Executie Director, Magna Kultura Foundation

If it is reinventing the wheel that transforms society, then this is what Ricardo “Dickie” Aguado, executive director of Magna Kultura Foundation (MKF), is doing, ostensibly. Throughout most of his career, Aguado has created guilds pillared on the values of social entrepreneurship and social marketing.

When asked what he does on an ordinary work day, Aguado emphatically answered “bringing people together” understandable, since Aguado’s work as a social marketer requires passels of networking activities to connect people and organizations in search of or to address a cause.

Fusing his years of experience as an artist and businessman, Aguado set out to entrench values in the community veered towards strengthening the Filipino’s sense of identity. The 40- something social entrepreneur started as a playwright, after attending a workshop with a reputable organization. But that did not last long, as , eventually, Aguado went his own way and put up a theater guild for out-of-school youth in Rawis, Tondo in the the City of Manila.

“I wrote the play and the children presented it in the streets,” Aguado says. “That gave me an idea of not only putting up theater but, these people being jobless, we also gave day jobs for them.” That was the time, in the later part of the 1970s, when social entrepreneurship and social marketing were still virtually nonexistent concepts, “but we were doing it (already),” Aguado says. “At night, there were presentations, but during the daytime, (those who performed) sold street food stuffs. Tiangges (stalls selling various items) were not yet widely known at that time, but they also did that during the theater.”


The assassination of Benigno Aquino in 1983 shifted the “flow of the tides.” “We branched out into other things, not only in theater, but we also did seminars and we did lots of events,” said Aguado, who subsequently joined an advertising industry to help pioneer some of the more popular corporate social responsibility (CSR) programs known today, so that “the integration of social and business components proved critical to the success of (our) endeavors.”

One such project was a nationwide sports clinic sponsored by a global food conglomerate. “What we did there was we turned the sports clinic in to a franchise business,” Aguado says. We approached the physical education (PE) teachers, gym instructors, and village sports people to avail of that franchise, and then we taught them how to run a business.”

Another success is in Aguado and his team’s effort to reinvigorate the kite flying culture in the Philippines through a nationwide kite flying festival under the same company, which ran for 15 years. Someone told me to ‘go fly a kite,’” Aguado says. “That gave me an idea of starting the nationwide kite fest.”

Other involvements include spearheading the production of the June 12 Grand Philippine Centennial Independence Day Parade at the Luneta Grandstand in 1998; running social marketing campaigns, like the Yosi Kadiri of the Department of Health; and serving as consultant of the Department of Tourism (DOT) for the development of community-based tourism programs and domestic tourism promotions under the terms of former DOT secretaries Mina Gabor, Gemma Cruz-Araneta, and Richard Gordon.

Aguado’s work isn’t done just yet, though. These days, he dedicates much of his time on Larong Pinoy, an organization that brings the games of the Filipino heritage to public schools, to “promote the values of nationalism, family bonding, and sense of community through the rebirth of the games from an almost bygone era.”

“These are not just games,” Aguado says, “since we thought that this is a fun way to teach the youth Filipino nationalism amidst the modern age.”

Aguado adds: “There are many benefits of outdoor play, but with Larong Pinoy, we teach kids to love things that are Filipino — give them a pride of having our own sport, understand what it is to be Filipino; to teach family bonding; and provide a sense of community.”

An up-and-coming plan for the MKP team is to set up a public art council in every city in Metro Manila. “(We) envision that there will be a strong arts sector. Much like the transport sector, (which lobbies) for an increase of transportation fares or whatever, there are other sectors that are strongly (protecting the beneftits of its members). But what about the artists? We have artists who are starving artists. What can we do for them?” Aguado says.

With Aguado, the answer may just be more positive.