The Philippines is one of the world’s most disaster-prone countries. Located along the boundary of major tectonic plates and at the center of a typhoon belt, its islands are regularly impacted by floods, typhoons, landslides, earthquakes, volcanoes, and droughts.

Since establishing its presence in the Philippines in 1983, ADRA has been serving the country in a variety of ways but it has never worked alone. Adventist Community Services or ACS is a department of the church that is focused on encouraging church members to make a difference in their communities.

The National Emergency Management Plan or NEMP is ADRA’s pre-planned emergency response mechanism that allows ADRA to mobilize resources and respond to emergencies quickly when they occur. ADRA and ACS has an exclusive partnership when it comes to the implementation of NEMP, that has resulted in being able to implement and average of 15 interventions and impact an average of 20,000 families per year, resulting in 70 interventions and impacting 102,716 families in the last since 2017.

All these emergency responses are implemented by ADRA with ACS assisting, but when the world shut down due to the pandemic in 2020, this partnership was elevated to another level. With our Emergency Response Coordinator not being able to travel to the disaster zone, it was ACS that took the lead in coordinating, assessing, validating, and distributing the relief assistance while ADRA monitored them from the country office.

With the world opening up again and ADRA going back to its normal operations, we remain grateful for this special partnership that we have with ACS. ADRA is proud of the leadership role we take in enabling and empowering ACS to prepare, respond, and manage a disaster situation. It is our unique selling proposition, and one that we are take pride in.

Henry Ford says “Coming Together is the beginning. Keeping together is progress. Working together is success.”

For ADRA this success was evidenced by more than 100,000 disaster affected families impacted in the last 5 years and manifested by close to a million Seventh-day Adventists Christians that are “Serving humanity so all may live as God intended” in the Philippines.