By Virginia Jasmin Pasalo

 

IN the NGO community, an umbrella organization is a big organization large enough to manage the interests of its member NGOs, who, individually, could not access funding on their own because they lack the necessary financial and operational documents required by the funding agencies. The umbrella organization coordinates activities, shares resources, and works together with its member organizations to protect common interests and monitors the execution of projects for which funding was extended.

For NGOs working for the same advocacy, the arrangement provides the member organizations a unified voice, a stronger one, and a more solid identity when dealing with governments, international NGOs and other powerful institutions. This is true for human rights organizations, women organizations, trade unions and people’s organizations.

However, some umbrella organizations often provide for their own interests first, assisting only member organizations with unquestioned loyalty, especially when it comes to the allocation and disbursement of funds and the implementation of projects. In this case, the one who carries the umbrella has the power to protect whoever it wants to, and to deny its protection at will.

In Rain, a painting by Rafał Olbiński, the human form is integrated with the umbrella, but presents the umbrella as the cause of the rain, and not to protect the man holding it. Olbiński’s painting echoes both René Magritte’s and Salvador Dali’s interpretation of the umbrella.

In “Les Vacances de Hegel,” (Hegel’s Vacation” or “Hegel’s Holiday”), René Magritte shows an umbrella holding up a glass filled with water. The glass of water can’t be seen from under the umbrella, but the fact is, it is there. A slight movement can tip the glass and the water it carries starts to drip. If and when the umbrella is put down, the water in the glass, kept “secret” under the umbrella pours out.

Salvador Dalí used umbrellas as a motif in several works, subverting their usual function of protection, “replacing it with rain or other unexpected elements, symbolizing Surrealism’s departure from logic and traditional symbolism.” In his lithograph Anti-Umbrella with Atomized Liquid, a figure is under an umbrella that creates rain instead of providing protection.

This brings me to Sarah Discaya’s 42M Rolls-Royce which she fancied because it came with an umbrella, buying it with money she got from Department of Public Works and Highways (DPWH) for flood control projects, while the project sites swim in deep mud and stinking flood waters. Like Magritte’s umbrella, the situation was contained from 2016 up to the time she decided to run for mayor an had the interview with veteran journalists Korina Sanchez and Julius Babao featuring her lavish lifestyle. Until then, it was contained. Until Vico Sotto, the mayor-elect of Pasig and advocate for good governance, tripped over her umbrella. Now, she swims in the flood of hate from a population tired of corruption in government, which made her a poster model, defocusing attention from the other guilty parties in the Senate and the House of Representatives.

Still, bring an umbrella when going out these days. Some umbrellas do protect. Just be the one to hold yours. Trust your experience, always.

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