Go to a party in the Philippines and you’re likely to find bottles of San Miguel beer but the country’s largest brewery is no fair-weather friend. When disaster strikes – be it a typhoon or a pandemic – San Miguel is usually among the first responders. The conglomerate, which has been a food and beverage company for most of its 135-year existence, diversified this century into petrol, power, infrastructure and banking. It now has the reach to provide food, fuel and other emergency essentials at a speed that the government would be hard-pressed to match. The sense of corporate responsibility comes from the top. Ramon Ang, San Miguel’s CEO and majority owner, is the son of Chinese immigrants. He has set the company the goal of uplifting the lives of 15 million Filipinos by 2030.

Achieving this will require drawing on every arm of the conglomerate and also depends on the efforts of several of Ang’s children who work across the business. Chief among them is his eldest daughter, Cecile. The 43-year-old leads two of the company’s highest-profile projects: the creation of a new multibillion-dollar airport to serve Metro Manila and the overhaul of the capital’s existing hub, Ninoy Aquino International Airport. Cecile is also plotting a new course for the San Miguel Foundation, transforming a reactive body respected for its one-off disaster relief, medical missions and food donations into an active change-maker. Though these projects couldn’t appear to be more different, they all involve fixing problems and making a lasting difference.

“We can give away a million food packs but the next day people will be hungry,” says Cecile, sipping dalandan juice at a hotel next to San Miguel’s headquarters in Ortigas, a business district of Manila. “That’s not the type of foundation that we want to be.” She started her career at a family-owned luxury hotel and she clearly knows the hospitality industry well. “We measure our impact with the number of lives that we have actually changed. And you can’t change lives if you’re only there once a year.”

Cecile has worked for different San Miguel subsidiaries for about 20 years, including oil refiner Petron Corporation. She officially became the foundation’s chair in March but her involvement dates back five years. “We don’t have a set budget as a foundation,” she says. “We knock on every subsidiary’s door to see who is interested in giving us money for our projects. Some resonate with certain subsidiaries more than others.” It was during a stint at San Miguel’s property arm that she was inspired to do something different. Tasked with auditing the company’s idle property holdings, she decided to offer an old beer warehouse in Manila to the foundation. The outcome was the first Better World Community Centre, a school, health clinic and food bank that feeds 400 children a day in Tondo, one of the country’s most impoverished areas.

“These children have never had a place to play safely and don’t get fed so we provide them with meals every day and groceries for their families,” says Cecile, a strong critic of the Philippines’ growing income inequality. Though she lacks her father’s experience of coming from nothing, she has an authentic perspective of her own. Her childhood home is three streets away from the original Better World location. The neighbourhood has since become known for people scavenging for pagpag, a Tagalog term for food from bins. “The area has gone down quite drastically,” she says. “My parents were pretty poor but they weren’t that poor.”

Since the first Better World opened in 2019, the foundation is averaging one centre a year. Every branch works with a different set of charities and not-for-profits. The services on offer, such as free meals, counselling and micro loans, are tailored to the most pressing needs of the specific community. The AHA Learning Centre, an education-focused not-for-profit, is the only anchor partner. “We would like to do more but you have to have the right partners too,” says Cecile. “We are not into just giving money and I don’t believe in padding numbers just so we can say that we have a certain number of centres. We don’t know how successful we are yet because it’s all new but we are trying to commit to something and sticking to that is the most important thing.”

Monocle joins Ang on a visit to one of the newest Better World community centres and a return to Tondo. The Smokey Mountain centre opened in 2023 alongside one of the Philippines’ most infamous landmarks: a smouldering landfill site and slum that the government officially closed in the 1990s. Today, Smokey Mountain is a fraction of the size. Though families still live on the remaining hill, the surrounding community can generally afford to eat, freeing the centre to go beyond the basic needs of providing food and water to focus on providing opportunities for the whole family.

Better World Smokey Mountain has 39 classrooms spread across four storeys. On the ground floor, we meet Marille Hernal, a mother who grew up in the neighbourhood, who speaks glowingly about a gender-empowerment class that she has just attended. About 500 children attend the centre every day and the sewing shop will soon start making their uniforms. Other products, made using recycled clothes and fabrics, already generate an income and could one day reach an international market. Cecile has her eye on a shop at the new airport so she takes a keen interest in the quality of the craftsmanship.

“San Miguel is the only corporate foundation with a long-term community project,” says Jaton Zulueta, founder of AHA Learning Centre. In his experience, many international donors usually like to invest in short-term projects in the Philippines that can deliver quick results – outcomes that can only be achieved by selecting the brightest and best students. By contrast, Better World allows his non-profit organisation to behave as an incubator for the most-in-need young people and achieve genuine local engagement. “When the community knows that it is a multi-year programme, the response is different,” he says. “They trust us more because they know we are not rushing children towards outcomes.”

After visiting Better World Smokey Mountain, Cecile has to rush off to attend a meeting about Ninoy Aquino International Airport. San Miguel will officially take over the terminal in September and the transition requires monthly sit-downs with the state-owned operator.

Given all of the headaches of her day job, it would be easy to characterise Cecile’s work as chair of the foundation as her release but that’s not how she sees it – not by a long shot. “We don’t necessarily need a foundation to make us look nice and it is not representative of the bigger picture that we are really doing,” says Cecile, who gives short shrift to examples of corporate whitewashing.

Her motivation and purpose comes from doing her day job – a job satisfaction that she shares with her colleagues. San Miguel is regularly voted as the best employer in the Philippines and staff wear their liveried polo shirts to work with pride. “We started out as a food and beverage company but, after that, we really made this conscious decision to invest in projects that are going to benefit the country, even if they are risky or have small margins,” says Cecile. “As a company, I’m comfortable to say that we do good.”
Cheers to that.