News! We Edaya is selected as one of the TOP 120 social enterprises at Social Venture Challenge Asia!!!!

"EDAYA is a creative education project from rural Philippines that empowers local and international youth to find their core, explore innovative channels, and take action, combining the indigenous wisdom and bamboo culture of the Kalinga tribe with leadership, design thinking, and creativity workshops."

Four years ago, we started as bamboo jewelry brand which design was inspired by vanishing intangible cultures of Kalinga indigenous people in rural Philippines. However, we needed to struggle so much to make impact because crafts business in general is hard to scale (in quantitative way).

Then while we still try to find the best way how to manage crafts business, we started to explore the field of educating and empowering local and international people thorough the knowledge and experiences which we have had by then such as "How to do product design (→ can be applied to project design) " "How to start and operate social enterprise" "How to transmit cultures to next generation/ how to find cultural core in you" and "How to manipulate bamboo (in any way)". We really wanted to make social impact in both qualitative and quantitative ways. We organized many educational workshops in both Japan and the Philippines using bamboo as medium.

※You can check our concepts of the workshops at that time thorough the link below. http://www.wochikochi.jp/…/present-state-and-future-perspec…

Then from last year, we seriously started to develop our education branch of EDAYA to make creative education program; unique one from rural Philippines. We started to call both international and local youth to our program. We are still on the way for making impact from this program but because we have so many wonderful people around us, we can keep on moving forward. Thank you very much for all the support.

By the way our crafts side also, we could finally get "social products award 2016" in Japan and I feel we could reach in certain level regarding crafts. We are so excited to share our experiences of products design to next generation potential social entrepreneurs (both local and international) and also apply that skill to project design to make more impact to the world from rural Philippines.

(By Ayaka Yamashita, Director and co-founder of EDAYA)