The Human Endeavor of Intentional Communities: The Gawad Kalinga Movement

Abstract

This is a story of a social movement's conception and the articulation of its meaning and meaningfulness. Gawad Kalinga, an ambitious Philippine community development cum nation building movement, initiated "GK777" to build 700,000 homes in 7,000 communities, in seven years. I assessed the national and global implications of this social movement's social networking model of nation-building through community development, poverty alleviation, and slum eradication. Using an ethnographic case study to conduct an inductive, grounded theory analysis, the study sought to explore if strategies and actions that go beyond traditional and conflict-centered social movement conceptions are enabling it to achieve their goals and to transfer its model to five other countries. The global implications and replicability of GK's nation-building model on the emergence and development of other forms of social movements, civil society-state governance, are compelling. The attempt at articulating and integrating political process and opportunity structure, resource/ structure mobilization, framing process, and new social movement theories in explaining another form of social movement and of civil society highlights the suitability for such kind of research, long-term monitoring and evaluation, and theorizing.