The most obvious thing that Audrey Tan Zubiri, Tootsy Echauz-Angara, Em Aglipay Villar and Kathryna Yu Pimentel have in common is that they’re married to politicians—to Senate President Juan Miguel “Migs” Zubiri, Senator Sonny Angara, Senator Mark Villar and Senator Koko Pimentel respectively. But the women are far more than help-meets on their husbands’ political journey: the quartet are Senate Spouses Foundation Inc (SSFI) members. This non-profit organisation focuses on improving the lives of those less fortunate.
For 37 years, SSFI has been delivering socio-civic programmes such as home-building for the elderly, medical and dental missions, disaster relief operations and school outreach activities to vulnerable members of society. “It was originally known as the Senate Ladies Foundation, but now we have a lot of [female] senators, so we have to keep up with the times: it [became] the Senate Spouses Foundation Inc.,” says Zubiri, president of SSFI, formed in 1987. Today, Zubiri, Villar, Echauz-Angara and Pimentel, alongside 15 others, keep the foundation’s flame alive, continuing legacy projects begun by previous members and spearheading new ones, all for the love of the country.
“During the time of Senator Cynthia Villar [whose husband Manny Villar was a senator at the time], SSFI renovated the charity wards of the Philippines General Hospital, while during the time of Kath Pimentel’s mother-in-law [Lourdes de la Llana-Pimentel, whose senator husband was the late Aquilino Pimentel Jr], the Foundation built a home for the abandoned elderly in Bulacan,” Zubiri says, before sharing a line-up of the group’s ongoing and future projects: they are centred around mental health, surgical missions, education and disaster relief among many other causes.
“In 2022, we partnered with the National Center for Mental Health in Mandaluyong; now, we are building their emergency room complex,” she says of SSFI’s primary current project, which, as of January 2024, was 65 per cent complete.
