Opportunity House

is a Pearl S. Buck International - PSBI program that has opened doors to life improving health and education programs for some of our world’s most disadvantaged children, families, and communities. Opportunity House programs in China, Korea, the Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam provide a hand-up, rather than a hand-out to those they serve. These children are disabled, ethnic minority, orphaned and/or refugee, stateless or displaced.

I learned of Opportunity House after reading about the APL Benefit and Allen Pineda Lindo (of the Black Eyed Peas) himself was helped by PSBIOH. I have decided to donate all Crop Dreams proceeds (minus PayPal Fees), to PSBIOH. I will also post a copy of the donation receipt. If you would like to make a donation directly to PSBIOH, follow this link.

There is so much in the collab kit, that I am having to play around with the previews to get it all in. I hope to post my first Preview Reveal 1st week of October.

If you are a quick page artist and would like to participate, please leave a comment or email me at cactusmango@gmail.com with a link to your gallery, so that I may review your work. I would like to add bracket quick pages or other hybrid quick pages to the kit.

Filipino American Heritage Month

Mabuhay Project's first collaboration charity kit called "Crop Dreams", will be released for sale next month, in time to celebrate Filipino American Heritage Month. I am very happy to be collaborating with two very talented digital scrapbook product designers based in the Philippines. They are Ma.Aimee Suarez and Lorie Manlapaz. You can read more about their work on their blogs listed to the left.

The photograph entitled "Piko" by the very talented Farl - is the color inspiration for our kit "Crop Dreams". Click on the pink tsinelas (slippers) to take you to his wonderful Flickr gallery.

Here's the color codes, in case anyone would like to contribute to "Crop Dreams":

3b3229
5d4334
918555
9ea48a
a3d26a
c1bdbc
f08dbc
f0607b

Welcome to the Mabuhay Project.

I envision Mabuhay Project to be a collaboration of Filipino Artists all over the world, creating works of art celebrating our diverse culture and to give back to our Kababayans in need, wherein all proceeds (minus paypal fees) will go to a different Philippine charity, organization, school, etc. Ideally, depending on public response and amount of artist contributions, we would like to be able to donate to a new charity each month.

Currently, I am working with two other Pinay digital scrapbook product designers, who are based in the Philippines: Aimee Designs and LorieM Designs. We look forward to releasing our first charity kit called "Crop Dreams" for sale at Kjoistudios.com, this October '08 - just in time to celebrate Filipino American Heritage month. We hope to donate proceeds for our collab kit to the APL Benefit. A.P.L. BENEFIT focuses exclusively on international works in the Philippines and Asia, for example, APL Benefit supports the Pearl S. Buck Foundation. It was envisioned by Apl.de.Ap (Allan Pineda Lindo), a Filipino-American founding member of the Black Eyed Peas, as a way for him to give back to his homeland.

If you would like to participate in the collaboration, please email me at cactusmango@gmail.com for details.

I also want to take time to write about Blog Action Day 2008. I have joined under my design blog cactusmango.blogspot.com Blog Action Day will unite bloggers all over the world on October 15th, to discuss the global issue of poverty. Please join the conversation here >