Young Focus Foundation is WiT For Good’s 2026 beneficiary. Since 2008, WiT For Good has raised nearly $1 million for women and children across Asia.
Can you recall a moment that changed your life? For Paul van Wijgerden, living in Amsterdam at the time as a young man in the 1980s, that moment was when he watched a video.
The grainy scene showed people living in a garbage dump in Manila, not just near it, but in it –scavenging and living off it, surviving from what others threw away.
“It was the very first time we saw people actually living from garbage,” Paul, whom I caught up with in Manila, recalls. “At that time, I didn’t even know where or what was Manila.”
Curious to see it for themselves, he and his wife Ann travelled to Manila to visit the Smokey Mountain area of Tondo, one of the city’s poorest districts.
Both came to explore how they could help. They both ended up staying and, in 2008, set up the Young Focus Foundation “whose vision is to improve the mental, physical and social wellbeing of young people in poor communities by means of education, health care and personal support”.
The long road to Young Focus
The road to establishing Young Focus was a long one.
“We arrived in Manila with no grand plan in mind,” he says. In fact, he had more questions than answers. “I wondered how with my graphic design and photography background I could help,” he adds, admitting with a wry grin, “there was very little I could do practically.”
He then got into primary healthcare, and spent years working on the ground, volunteering, but something nagged at him. There was effort, but no real change. “I got a bit frustrated; there was no impact.”
That frustration turned into clarity – if survival was the problem, then education was the way out. And so, slowly, he changed course and explored how they could bring education to the youths in Tondo.
Just as he was about to get started, life intervened. He had a nervous breakdown in 1994, which forced him back to the Netherlands. “I meant to stay away for three months; it became 14 years before I was able to return.”
For most, it would have been easy to leave the story there, but some places don’t let go of you. In 2008, Paul and Ann returned to Manila, to the same communities, this time with a clearer mission. That was the beginning of Young Focus Foundation.
Building something that isn’t just about money
Today, Young Focus supports over 1,000 students, from preschool to college, with 40 staff – many of whom were once beneficiaries themselves.
It runs social programmes and offers educational opportunities to youths, from pre-school to college. It runs two centres in Tondo, one of which caters specifically to dropouts. “The purpose of this centre is to get them back to school and continue their education,” says Paul.
In its 2024 annual report, Young Focus cites a 2020 census that approximately 75,000 people live within the communities it serves, “most residing in makeshift, densely packed and poorly constructed shelters”.
Asked what’s the biggest lesson he’s learnt in the past 16 years, he says, “It’s not just about money. Yes, money keeps the foundation going and programmes running but it doesn’t change lives.”
What changes a life, he adds, is something far less tangible and far more difficult – mindset. “If you grow up there, you think this is your future, that this is normal. We try to show them – it’s not, that there are alternatives.
“This requires us to be on the ground, to be their coach, their friend, their community – to be present. You’ve got to be there. You cannot do things from a distance,” he says.
The foundation’s staff stays close to the communities – they teach, they coach, they follow up, and they don’t give up.
Ram: The boy who thought it was normal
For Ram Banzuela, that “not giving up” saved his life. Growing up in Tondo, he didn’t think of it as poverty. He thought of it as normal. “I thought this is life – scavenging for plastic and copper wires, recooking and eating leftovers. It was about survival.”
At 16, he enrolled as a student in Young Focus and got a glimpse of another possible path. But something happened in his late teens that led him into a dark space.
He and his father had collected copper wires – carefully, painstakingly – hoping to sell them for food. “You took the cables, and you either burned them or stripped them out by hand, to get to the copper wires. You get more money if you strip them, and we had spent days doing this.”
Then the barangay authorities confiscated them. Later, he and his father discovered they had sold the wires. “That was what we were hoping would feed our family for the next days,” Ram, who has three siblings, recalls.
That moment, as well as other disappointments, sent him into a spiral. “I dropped out of school, I was ashamed of my parents, ashamed of my friends in Tondo. I didn’t want to have anything to do with them. But the coordinator at Young Focus never gave up, she visited me once a month.
“I remember my father, who’s a jeepney driver, asking me then to learn to drive the jeepney because he had given up on me going back to school. That’s when I realised I didn’t want that; I wanted something different.”
Today, at 31, he heads the Career Development Programme at Young Focus and will take over the day-to-day running of the foundation when Paul and Ann retire, sometime this year.
“Young Focus changed my life,” he says, adding with a smile, “I met my wife at Tondo, she was also a student.”
In fact, after graduating from Young Focus, Ram found a job as a guide for Tribe Adventours, a tour company offering mountain hikes. “I loved the work there, but when Paul called me and offered me a role at Young Focus, I did not hesitate.”
He remembers the first time he stepped outside Tondo as a volunteer, and he saw tall buildings in Manila – it was like seeing another world for the first time. “That’s when you start asking, why are we living like this?”
He knows Young Focus has a long road ahead. “When you look at Tondo now, it’s almost like nothing’s changed since I was a kid, so you do question what impact you’ve made. I met some kids the other day and I asked them what they would get for the plastic bottles they were scavenging, and they said, 10 pesos. That’s the same as when I was doing it.”
Success though is to be found in the individual stories of those who have found better lives and there have been many. “It’s important to celebrate those wins,” he says.
Bridging the chasm between students and jobs
As the leader for the Career Development Programme at Young Focus, he prepares students for the world beyond the school.
Because he knows firsthand that the gap isn’t just academic, it’s psychological. Students who have never seen an office cannot imagine working in one, so he takes them there and introduces them to companies.
He helps them practice for interviews, and he fights prejudice – because being from Tondo still carries stigma. “There are graduates who don’t get jobs because of where they’re from.”
Young Focus builds partnerships with organisations such as Chevron and Oracle for internships and first jobs.
With Paul preparing to step back and Ram stepping forward, Young Focus is planning to expand its activities beyond Tondo – to an area called Cavite. Paul says, “We have a small centre there now, and we want to see what else we can do – can we bring the Tondo model over there?”
The most powerful example, Paul says, is when students like Ram become leaders. “I first saw Ram speak at a college camp in 2013 and I said, this kid has potential and I must keep my eye on him.”
Says Ram, “It’s about shifting the question from ‘how do I survive and put food on the table’ to ‘what can I do with my life’.”
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