Dr. Mizell on the Datu Bago Awards

The Datu Bago Award is the highest honor the city of Davao confers upon its people. The award recognizes exemplary and selfless contributions of Filipinos who has contributed to the growth and development of the city. To put it in perspective, the award is given to individuals who have contributed in the preservation of the city’s culture and heritage.

The announcement for this year’s Datu Bago Awardees was made by City Councilor Pilar Braga last February 27 during a regular session of the City Council. Awards night took place last March 13 at the Royal Ballroom of The Royal Mandaya Hotel where City Mayor Sara Duterte-Carpio, together with the members of the Datu Bago Awardees Organization, presented the Datu Bago Awards 2018 to the seven (7) beneficiaries.

There is no glory without sacrifice. Dr. Aland David Mizell has called Davao home for more than a decade. His passion to help the disadvantaged and marginalized urged him to create various programs that cores upon the growth and development of children who cannot afford to go to school. Based on research and policy development of community resources and needs, MCI activities and projects focuses on the following areas: scholarship, student exchange program, Micro loans, weekly study forum, study retreat, service learning, tutorial program for the drop out students from the community, tools for school outreach program, and partnership with the universities in Mindanao and abroad. MCI committed to helping the most economically disadvantaged minorities. One of MCI main venues to assist students from impoverished backgrounds to attain a college education is through the granting of scholarship. Through these scholarship MCI hope to prepare students with academic and life skills and to help them their extended families become self sustaining and thereby break cycle of poverty.

One of his notable program is the College Education Behind Bars, the mission of the Social Entrepreneurship Institute’s College Education Behind Bars is a higher Education Program established to provide College courses to inmate students at the jail by partnering with universities to engage faculty and students in the vital issues of the country’s burgeoning incarceration population , to help inmate students build meaningful, academic, physical, and spiritual ambitions and to preparing them lives inside the jail as well as to prepare them for successful re-entry into their communities and society at large to reduce the recidivism. Dr Mizell believes education is freedom. With faculty and student engagement learning, the detainees students can study in a discipline of their choice from a wide courses offered in the College Education Behind bars . Education is the best rehabilitation. Their newly acquired educational background and celebrate recovery program will give them options as them return to participate filly in their community. Dr. Aland Mizell is a columnist of Mindanao Times and is active in the Kairos Housing Project.