In 2007, Avon’s Hello Tomorrow Fund granted funding worth P100,000 each to 4 remarkable Filipino women to assist their existing projects. The grantees were Socorro Arevalo, Betty Lourdes Tabanda, Lynnie Denilla and Mila Udang.

The Luzon grantee is Betty Lourdes Tabanda of Baguio City. She applied for the fund to continue improving the reproductive health care information and services available to women. Her group estimates that one in 20 indigenous women in their area gets illnesses of the reproductive system, including cervical cancer, every year. Her group has been working since 1998 to reduce this number. According to Tabanda, bringing proper information and services to these women, as well as addressing their adherence to physically harmful superstitious beliefs are her group’s main goals. The additional resources will help provide proper medical orientations and examinations to more indigenous women in Baguio.

Commending Avon for its effort, Tabanda shares, "In helping other women, we actually help ourselves become more empowered women. Every woman has a right to be empowered in making informed decisions about her body and have a better future."

In Visayas, the Zonta Club of Iloilo City II is raising awareness about violence against women, encouraging vigilant reporting of such cases, and providing women with increased options to financially support themselves and their children. Seminars in Iloilo City’s public schools teach students to recognize physical, psychological and sexual violence, and early signs of abuse, as well as current laws, institutions, and how to foster gender equality at home. The club will use the Hello Tomorrow Fund to produce more information materials.

“We wish to see a better tomorrow where a woman in the barangay is free to exercise and relish her self-worth and lead and enjoy a life of dignity, whether alone or in the company of other people,” says club president Lynnie Denilla.

The Mindanao grantee is CDO Blessed Hope Foundation, which aims to improve the living status of urban poor women. Apart from conducting values formation, skills training, and livelihood seminars, the group has also been planning to establish its cooperative Bayanihan Community Store. Avon’s contribution will jumpstart their dream of running and managing a coop that will augment all members’ household incomes.

“Through this project, it will make [the urban poor women] financially productive, self-reliant and most of all, boost their self-esteem that, as women, they have done something to impact their community,” says Mila Udang, executive director of the organization.

“It gives them such dignity and faith in themselves, [knowing] that they can improve their lives upon deciding to do so,” adds Genesis Udang, the group’s president.