The Mandaluyong City local government had a meeting on Wednesday, May 25, with stakeholders to discuss various programs and initiatives that will improve the lives of its citizens, particularly the youth.
In a set of photos posted on her Facebook page, Mandaluyong City Mayor Menchie Abalos spearheaded the event together with the Mandaluyong Council for the Protection of Children and other city government heads and employees.
According to Abalos, the meeting aims to create programs that can help improve the city government's service to the public as well as to strengthen the current initiatives being undertaken amid the Covid-19 pandemic.
The 2023-2025 Strategic Planning and Program Implementation Review also tackled the updating of Mandaluyong Children’s Welfare Code as well as mainstreaming and innovating services for the Local Council for the Protection of Children (LCPC).
Mandaluyong City has been recognized as one of the most child-friendly and child-conscious local government unit (LGU) in the country. It is also well known in actively promoting a healthy parent-child relationship among its citizens.
In February, the city, together with municipal government of Boac, Marinduque signed a sisterhood agreement to improve the LGUs' coordination and relationship in building a better society for their constituents and promoting a child-friendly city and municipality.
The agreement led to Abalos giving Boac, Marinduque Mayor Armi Carrion copies of Mandaluyong City’s Book of Ordinances which include Mandaluyong's Code of Parental Responsibility
“We’d like to share these laws which you can draw inspiration from, especially our Code of Parental Responsibility. Here in Mandaluyong, the parents are penalized when a child is at fault because we believe that parents are the foundation of a family and they have the full responsibility over their children,” Abalos said.
In September last year, Mandaluyong City was duly recognized by the People Management Association of the Philippines (PMAP) for its efforts in helping indigent families and creating programs for the benefit of children with special needs by awarding it the 2021 National Exemplar-People Program of the Year (PPY) in Public Sector for its Project TEACH (Therapy, Education and Assimilation of Children with Handicap) program.
The LGU said that Project TEACH is the community-based rehabilitation program of the city aiming to extend free services and intervention to children with special needs of indigent families. It was launched in 2007 and was institutionalized as a city government program during the term of former mayor and former Metropolitan Manila Development Authority (MMDA) Chairman Benhur Abalos.
The program has benefited 1,270 children with disabilities, largely from indigent families.
In 2016, Mandaluyong City was awarded as the 2015 Most Child-Friendly City in the National Capital Region (NCR) after the Regional Committee for the Welfare of Children (RCWC), an inter-agency committee under the Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD) conferred the Seal of Child-Friendly Governance where the city garnered a 95 percent score in the Child-Friendly Local Governance Audit (CFLGA) conducted in 2015 by the RCWC-NCR team composed of focal persons from different government agencies and non-government organization and spearheaded by the Department of Interior and Local Government (DILG).