PANELISTS
PANELISTS
LARA FRAYRE
Lara is a 27-year-old Social Entrepreneur, Designer, and Eternal Optimist. She is the Founder of Batak Craft helping the Vanishing Batak Tribe of the Philippines survive and thrive in the modern economy. She lives in Quezon City, Philippines.
GLADYS LLANES
Gladys is the co-founder of diinsider and the executive director of Chnage Magazine. She also works ful-time as a documentay filmmaker / editor, doing films for social justice, and is based in Manila, Philippines.
Gladys: How did Batak Craft started?
Lara: Batak Craft started when I went to Palawan [ Philippines ] to volunteer for a construction project of a yoga center. A few of our workers are Batak, an indigenous group in Palawan, and that’ s when I met them. I took notice of them because of all the workers we had they were the hardest working, the most honest, and the toughest workers.
Then, I made good friends with them and I started doing research about their tribe and that’ s when I realized that they were actually a vanishing tribe. An anthropological research dictates that they’ re technically going extinct because their population has decreased. And so it all started from there when I knew that they were vanishing and I knew I had to help. They made baskets and mats already and so with my industrial design and visual design background I was able to help them create a brand.
Gladys: What strike you during your immersion that let you know immediately that you can help this tribe?
Lara: The craft was already in place. They already made baskets and crafts with patterns. It is basically inspired by nature, from the rice fields, seas, some others are like snakes, that been theirs all along.
I think my contribution was just to improve it and connect them to the international market who definitely respect enough the craft to pay the right price for it.
One of the challenges they have was when they sell their crafts to local markets, they were always asked for the cheapest price and sometimes the market buyers won’ t even pay them unless the product were sold to the costumers. It was very unsustainable for the Batak. What strike them as very special is that they already had the skill, they already had a rich heritage. The danger was losing it to urbanization or modernization.
Photo by: Lara Frayre
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