By Emelina S. Almario
This piece is part of a series of short essays commemorating Adarna House's 45th Anniversary. In this second article, Emelina S. Almario recounts how answering the call to lead during a time of crisis became a turning point not just for Adarna House, but for her own life.
It was 1986. The year Adarna operations turned for-profit when the Children’s Communication Center was reorganized as Adarna Book Services was also the year when its survival was most threatened. The staff got smaller and smaller as employees left for greener pastures elsewhere. By the time it relocated to 34-C Scout Esguerra in 1992, its in-house authors and illustrators had been replaced by freelancers who were paid through project-based professional fees rather than salaries. Sales were conducted through freelance sales representatives who were paid through commissions. Adarna books were already available at National Bookstore, and during this time, Jun Cabochan also visited to explore selling Adarna books in Pandayan Bookshop, which he was planning to set up. Rio continued to keep watch over the company—in fact, the transfer to the Scout Esguerra office was made so it could be beside the office of Filipino Magasin (FilMag), which he headed.
During this time, I started to get involved in Adarna operations through external book development projects, which had become a new source of income for the company. I took on multiple tasks for some of these projects as writer/editor/project manager. These came easily to me, and I enjoyed the work. I remember being involved in Filway’s Philippine Students’ Almanac and the regional profiles for the Instructional Materials Development Corporation, and reporting to Adarna on Saturdays for these.
Baclagon, G. R. (2024). Filway’s Philippine almanac Gerry R. Baclagon Filipiniana History . Carousell Philippines. Retrieved 2025, from https://www.carousell.ph/p/filway-s-philippine-almanac-gerry-r-baclagon-filipiniana-history-coffee-book-table-preloved-htf-1325171871/.
Even with its meager resources and rather bleak future, Adarna was still able to plan on buying its own office space. And that’s what it did in 1996. With the help of Tek, Mike Bigornia’s wife, as a real estate agent, Adarna bought the front unit, 73-A, of a row of apartments on Scout Limbaga. That purchase marked the start of my growing involvement and, above all, a sense of accountability and responsibility for Adarna operations and its small crew. It was clear to me that if I did not step in, company operations could further shrink and its existing employees could lose their livelihood. The Adarna phase of Rio’s life was clearly over; someone had to come in to take his place. Otherwise, Adarna would literally die. With what Adarna had become, it was difficult to find an outsider to come in. I was the safest bet. I had enough love in my heart for reading to want to work on children’s books. I had enough earnings from my other commitments to not demand a fat salary. Above all, I could not shake away my sense of responsibility for the employees who had decided to stay on.
I recall the company had five employees at that time: Ramon Lopez as officer in charge, Tina Bonanciar as secretary, Ric Adolfo as finance officer, Max Cena as driver, and Arnold Victorino as messenger/janitor. Annual revenues amounted to around Seven Million Pesos (Php 7,000,000.00). It was difficult to see a future for an organization whose growth had begun and been driven by its close association with the Marcos administration. Still, we were able to get our act together. Ramon, who had started his career in Adarna as a janitor, was now acting as officer-in-charge. It was he who decided on what titles would be printed during the year, usually between seven and ten, and how these would be brought to the market. I brought in Celia Garcia, the auditor of an NGO that I had headed, Kabalikat ng Pamilyang Pilipino, and somehow, Adarna managed to find a new equilibrium with a respectable net income for its very modest needs. Our books were still on newsprint paper, and we relied mostly on old, reliable titles. Occasionally, Rio would decide on a new title and work with the artist and illustrator, but he had clearly lost interest in the company. We still saw ourselves as bringing books to lower-income children in public schools. If we were able to enter private schools, it would only be because these schools needed token local children’s books to complete their libraries.
Looking back, Adarna could have survived on pure inertia in that apartment unit we had proudly bought and promptly aligned with our company name as we amended our Articles of Incorporation to change our name from Adarna Book Services to Adarna House. We could have stayed the way we were, proudly showing off our books in the showroom designed by my newly graduated architect daughter, Asa. This was actually what I thought the limits of my involvement would be as I juggled my time between full-time employment, freelance consulting, and Adarna.
But then, two things happened. My second daughter, Ani, accompanied Rio and me to the Bologna Children’s Book Fair. I was enchanted just seeing the Philippine flag flying among the flags of countries participating in the book fair and hearing our country called Filipinas when we registered. I guess it was a more defining moment for Ani. After that experience, she decided to forego her budding corporate career and blazer wardrobe at SGV and instead work for Adarna. Right there and then, I decided to devote more effort to Adarna, knowing that the rate of return on my involvement would go beyond Rio and me. At about this time, I also found out that someone in the office was engaged in dishonest transactions with money going directly to him and not to Adarna. In spite of this management neglect happening over several years, the company had somehow survived. There I was, positioning myself as the guardian of the crew that remained, and one of them was stealing the company blind. Clearly, I had to take a more proactive stance in managing Adarna. I had to change my initial going-in position of management from a distance.
I was in my early fifties at this point. I wasn’t exactly coming to the table without lessons learned from previous workplaces, of which there were quite a few. I have worked in academe, government, the corporate private sector, freelance consulting, and development work. Somehow, I could rely on these previous experiences to inform how I would now take the helm at Adarna. However, the management playbook I would use to guide me had no clear chapters; learnings were not scaffolded to avoid mistakes. It was more like a bag of tricks that I had to explore each time I hit a critical incident at work. I entered Adarna with a management style and workplace values that had largely been shaped by 7 years of Maryknoll College and 12 years of SGV/Andersen Consulting.
My 7 years of working in Maryknoll College were on top of all the years spent there in nursery, grade school, high school, and college. Those 7 years were initially spent as a faculty member, then as an educational administrator. As academic dean at Maryknoll College, I reported to an American Maryknoll sister, Sister Miriam Thomas, O.P., whom I consider my first mentor. She openly handled all issues at the administrative board level, showed that respect had to be a hallmark of all relationships, and was democratic and always kind in her dealings. My direct supervisor was Sonia Ner, who became a good friend and who had such a cavalier attitude about facing our problems during the years of student activism. I so admired her spirit: there was nothing we could not solve together. At Maryknoll College, there was a hierarchy but no bureaucracy since we were constantly shifted around to take on various positions, forcing us to learn how to innovate, how to start from scratch, how to get along with everyone, and how to manage a participative process.
From SGV, where I spent 12 years, eventually becoming a national partner, I saw meritocracy at work. Whoever contributes the most through hard work and a good mind gets the incentives and the recognition. And to a large extent, we were all colleagues, calling everyone, even the founder and chair, by his first name. The message was: the playing field is level, you have to earn your gravitas. But you were given the needed support through a slew of training, from project feasibility to market research to finance for non-accountants. I didn’t realize how all these workshops were preparing me to develop the helicopter view required to manage Adarna.
In hindsight, I now know that what I also had going for me was a skill I had learned without realizing it. I was good at creating teams and getting people to work with each other for a common goal. Whether I learned this during my student council days or from my literature degree, this skill was recognized in all my workplaces as a trademark of my management style. The new challenge: creating a team in Adarna.
The story of Adarna House continues in upcoming essays. Like and follow us on Facebook and Instagram to catch the next release.