How Wearing Your Heritage Creates Generational Change In The Philippines

When you chose to #WearYourHeritage with our Filipino jewelry in 2021, you helped Cambio & Co. create and sustain impact for generations in the Philippines. 

**For the latest developments and our continued impact - 2022 Impact Report Now Available!

As a majority Pinay-owned and -operated company where Filipino culture is at the heart of our business, we want to make sure we’re not just sharing our culture, but also giving back to it. 

Since we founded Cambio & Co. in 2015, our mission has been to foster meaningful and generational change in 3 core areas:

• Create sustainable livelihood for traditional artisans in the Philippines 
• Dismantle colonial mentalities in our Filipino community across the homeland and the global diaspora
• Redistribute wealth to BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and people of color) and other historically marginalized communities 

Cambio & Co.’s rallying cry #WearYourHeritage isn’t just a social media hashtag—it’s a call to action that keeps our team centered on our Why, a purpose and social mission. 

So every year, we release an annual impact report to document the work we’ve done and to hold us accountable to our mission. Check out how we did in 2020. 

Here’s how your purchases and support helped us create generational change in 2021. 

1. Sustainable Livelihood For Filipino Artisans In The Philippines

Filipino artistry has long been undervalued. Cambio & Co. aims to create sustainable livelihood for traditional artisans and craftspeople in the Philippines, celebrate Filipino excellence, and preserve our crafting traditions across the islands. 

Here’s how we did in 2021:

These are the provinces across the Philippine Islands where our community partners operate, and where your purchases contributed to hours of livelihood!

The more artisans are able to practice and earn a living wage from their craft, the longer we keep crafting traditions alive for future generations.

2. Dismantle Colonial Mentalities Within The Filipino Community

To #WearYourHeritage is both an act of love and resistance. It’s our mission to empower Filipinx/a/o across the diaspora to be loud, brown, proud, and unapologetically who we are. 

To do this, we aim to dismantle and challenge colonial mentalities through storytelling, education, community conversations, and brave spaces. 

Here’s what our community impact in 2021 looked like:

Your kind words not only encourage us, but guide us to where we need to grow and the stories we need to tell.  In your words, here’s what our work has meant to you:

Find out below how much we raised in 2021 towards emergency relief.

Check out the Padumna Minimalist Necklace here.

Holding Safe Spaces For Our Community

In response to rising anti-Asian hate crimes and violence, we decided to host a series of events for Asian Heritage Month in May. In a world that tries to keep us quiet, submissive, and small, we wanted to hold space for our community to show up loud, brown, and proud.

The theme for our event series was Homecoming.

Our goal was to host a safe space for our community to ask questions like: What does it mean to come home to ourselves (in every sense of the word)? And how do we radically take up space with our voices, our bodies, our stories, and our existence?

With the help of friends in the Filipinx/a/o community, we co-hosted three virtual events in 2021:

• Wear Your Heritage Night with Pinayista
• “Celebrating Your Homecoming: a Storytelling Workshop” with Justine Abigail Yu of Living Hyphen
• “Lakas Ng Loob: a Spoken Word Poetry Workshop” with Sheilah Madonna M. Salvador.

In these intimate gatherings, we embraced and celebrated each other.

We felt like mga diyosa (goddesses) “walking down the runway” in our favorite Filipiniana. While we felt seen reading out loud our rawest writing about home and inner strength (lakas ng loob) to people who innately understood what we were talking about.

Stories That Challenge Colonial Mentalities & Encourage Our Healing 

 

In 2021, we continued to write honest and intimate stories about Filipino fashion, beauty, and cultural identity.

Below are stories we published in 2021 that resonated most with readers:

• I Traced The Roots Of My Filipino Family Tree: Here’s What I Learned 
• 5 Truths I Learned About My Mental Health As A Filipino
• Let’s Talk About Body Shaming In Filipino Families: How To Gently Call In Your Loved Ones 
• A Love Letter To My Filipina Nose 
• What Does It Mean To “Look” Filipino? 
• An Ode To The Filipino Duster: Embracing The Beauty Of My Lola’s House Dress 
• Now NOT To Be A Toxic Tita: Lessons In LIfe And Filipino Beauty From My Aunts 
• 5 Morena Positive Skincare Brands To Celebrate Your Filipina Brown Skin 

3. Redistribute Wealth To BIPOC Communities

Wealth is power, and to create the systemic change our world desperately needs, we must get more wealth into historically marginalized communities. 

Cambio & Co. aims to be a business that builds generational wealth for every single Filipino/a/x that works with us, while striving to be in allyship with Black, Indigenous, and other people of color.

We’ve built social impact directly into our business model, so the more we grow, the more we can reinvest into our communities.

Thanks to you, we paid our partners a total of $150,000 CAD in 2021! That’s over 6 MILLION Philippine Pesos and double what we were able to invest back into the homeland in 2020.

In addition to sustaining livelihood, your purchases and support went towards crucial community projects in the Philippines.

Together, we donated almost $3,000 CAD (over 120,000PHP) throughout the year. These went towards relief goods and emergency aid through local grassroots organizations.

CONCLUSION 

We are our ancestors’ wildest dreams. And while there’s so much more we hope to achieve, we’re truly so proud, grateful, humbled, and touched. 

Maraming maraming salamat to all of our advocates and partners for the foundation you’ve helped us build in 2021. Here’s to an even bigger and more impactful 2022. 

In gratitude,

The Cambio Team