Who We Are and What We Stand For

Founding of JCI Manila From the Ashes of War, a Youth Movement is Born

Manila, 1947. It was just two years after the Second World War. In what was once touted as the “Pearl of the Orient’ was reduced to a wasteland heap of ash and rubble. Seventy percent of its utilities, factories, 80 percent of the southern residential district, and 100 percent of the business district was laid to waste. More than 100,000 innocent victims were slaughtered in a ferocious orgy of killing. Desolation and despair gripped the once-sprawling capital as countless lay orphaned, homeless and hopeless. The economy was in shambles, there was no water, no electricity and very little food.

Yet, it was amid such a bleak landscape, our history's darkest and bleakest atmosphere, which sparked the birth of the greatest youth movement in Asia... all with the trademark curiosity of one 27-year-old First Lieutenant of the Reserve Force Philippine Army and a successful realty entrepreneur by one Artemio Limtuaco Vergel de Dios, who went by his favorite moniker, “Temiong.”