Twenty-three master's degree students from the USC School of Social Work traveled with Professors Annalisa Enrile and Valerie Richards to the Philippines for the first-ever Feminist Theory, Social Action and Social Work seminar this past summer. The program, offered at the University of the Philippines, Dilliman, taught participants about the feminist perspective in social work and its influence in facilitating social change.

Students heard from guest speakers on labor issues, land ownership, poverty, prostitution, legislative process and health care. Field trips provided an up-close-and-personal view inside a peasant community, picket line, export-processing zone and red-light district. Students kept journals, which helped them articulate observations and insights, and participated in a field research project they presented to the USC and Los Angeles Filipino-American community at the end of the trip. Participants had the option of earning four units of course credit toward their degree.

"There were two primary reasons why we went to the Philippines," Enrile says. "The first is that Filipinos are the second-largest immigrant community in the United States and, second, they have a very vibrant women's movement over there."

The goal of the trip was to learn from the community and engage in community action projects. The students split into four main groups, working on relevant projects that would provide effective tools for education and empowerment during their time in the Philippines. The group projects included a get-out-the-vote kit for Batasan Hills, a podcast and radio public service announcements on political repression and human rights, a domestic violence calendar covering a different issue every month and a project discussing clinical strategies for working with child victims of human rights violations. On their return to the United States, students presented their projects at one of three venues: the Los Angeles County Commission on Public Social Services, a "brown bag" discussion with the school's International Social Work Caucus or a community forum in Los Angeles' historic Filipino town.

"We had extensive meetings with people in the community," said Jollene Levid, who participated in the trip. "I worked on the get-out-the-vote kit. It was the very first one there."

While the students were exposed to a wide variety of experiences, the one they say affected them most was visiting the red-light district.

"The most difficult experience was visiting the prostituted women," Levid said. "They don't have a lot of opportunities that we have."

Enrile said that while everyone had a positive experience, she felt many participants were on an emotional rollercoaster, feeling the despair of seeing people in unimaginable poverty at the dumpsites of Payatas and Vitas but also witnessing the encouraging, uplifting work of GABRIELA, one of the only women's political parties in Asia.

She hopes to take another group of students back to the Philippines next year, but plans to extend the trip and limit the number of participating students to further enrich the experience.

"The importance of the international experience is it puts people in areas they would not normally be able to go to," Enrile says. "It forces them to get out of their comfort zones and universalize the skills that we are building."