Philippines

The Foundation’s first Philippines programming is scheduled for December 14–16, 2026, organized with Andrea Sy — a Stanford E145 alum from Chuck’s 2012 class, now back home running the family retail and real-estate business across the Philippines, Singapore, and Malaysia. With her sister, Andrea also founded Vector, a small incubator and angel fund that has invested across Southeast Asian startups and run basic coding and robotics workshops for students who don’t usually get exposure to STEM. The Foundation’s mission and Vector’s are closely aligned, which is what made this trip possible.

The Philippines programming, like the Vietnam and Tanzania trips before it, came through a former student — the pattern that produces the Foundation’s most durable partnerships.

What the trip is structured around

Three days of workshops across Metro Manila partner institutions, plus a parallel set of corporate engagements. The student-facing programming follows the pattern the Foundation has refined across earlier trips: short (≤2.5 hour) hands-on activities rather than lectures, with the preference leaning toward college students and teacher cohorts — where the multiplier effect is real — while staying open to younger groups when the partner mission lines up.

The corporate engagements have a Philippines-specific angle that’s worth noting up front. The Philippines is one of the world’s largest business-process outsourcing (BPO) economies, and a major share of that work — call centers, back-office services, software QA — sits at the front line of AI-driven displacement. Chuck’s corporate AI sessions for the trip will be framed around exactly that: AI adoption inside large organizations, what worker upskilling and retraining actually need to look like, and which adoption patterns work versus which break under contact with real teams. This framing keeps the corporate work mission-aligned with the Foundation’s broader commitment to communities that get the early costs of technological change.

Partners being engaged

• Gokongwei Brothers Foundation — a long-term partnership aim. The Foundation has been investing in education access across underserved Philippine communities and recently partnered with Khan Academy to bring online learning to remote-area students.
• Teach for the Philippines — modeled on Teach for America; trains high-potential recent college graduates and places them in schools. A natural partner for the teacher-training side of the trip.
• University of the Philippines — the country’s top public university, which serves a much broader income range than most peer institutions because the bulk of students attend on full scholarship. A workshop with their student body reaches Filipino talent who otherwise might not get exposure to Silicon Valley-style entrepreneurship pedagogy.
• U.S. Embassy Manila — building on the Foundation’s earlier work with the U.S. Embassy in Kuala Lumpur, which connected us to local NGO partners and to the American Tech Corner program. That partnership in Malaysia was unusually productive, so we’re working to set up something similar here.

Why it matters

Vietnam taught us that the Foundation’s most durable partnerships come through people who were once Chuck’s students. The Philippines is the same pattern — and the same bet. Andrea has the local context, the access, and the network. The Foundation brings the curriculum, the cross-border perspective, and the Stanford research base. The work in the Philippines will be built on that combination, with the hope of returning year over year and building the kind of long-running NGO relationships that move outcomes over a decade rather than a single visit.