Southern Intercollegiate Filipino Alliance (SIFA) is a non profit organization. As we are a growing organization, we are seeking sponsors to help host our events that we have throughout the year. Some of our events this year are leadership retreat, Adhika, Masskara Festival with Esports, and GoodPhil. We are about 5,000 members strong throughout Texas, and we are growing even during this time. Although most of our events are going virtually, we are still finding ways to keep the schools connected to each other even from afar, as well as keeping them engaged.
As SIFA, we strive to unite universities and educate individuals about Filipino culture. We aim to create an inclusive family, embrace the Filipino heritage, and inspire the community. Since SIFA has been founded, we have been assisting Filipino Student Associations (FSA) all over Texas in order to form connections.
Masskara Festival
The traditional Masskara Festival is held on the fourth Sunday of October in Bacolod every year. Mass means a ‘gathering’ and kara stands for ‘faces’. It was used by the city as a way to give locals and tourists a change to come together, party, and have fun given the circumstances at the time. This year we are holding a virtual E-sports tournament to celebrate the occasion. It will be a 3 day event, with a live stream happening October 25th. During this time, there will be lots of ways to help with promotion in between the games, and even leading up to the event.
Leadership Retreat:
The purpose of the SIFA leadership retreat seeks to inspire students to be imaginative, growth minded leaders, and to encourage active development individually and collectively through the Filipino American lens. The theme of this year is identity and story telling. With that, there will be various leaders in the community focusing their workshop on that theme. Due to COVID-19, we are doing this leadership retreat online, but would like additional help to make it an experience for the members that do decide to attend by providing things like shirts, stickers, and other merchandise for memories.This event is happening November 14-15th virtually.
Adhika
The translation of Adhika from tagalog to english means wish or desire. The purpose of this project is a week-long philanthropy event. It is to provide essential items to children in the Philippines through fundraising. Monetarily, our goal is about $5,000 to raise with all 14 schools collectively. This event is happening November 30th to December 4th.
GoodPhil
GoodPhil is a 3 day long event that happens in the spring. All 14 schools compete in cultural, modern, spirit, and various types of sports to increase connections by friendly competition. Due to COVID, we are still unaware if this will still be happening in the spring of this year.