CANVAS featured in Creative Responses to Sustainability: Green Guide for the Philippines
Graphic courtesy culture360.ASEF.org
The Asia-Europe Foundation, in partnership with the University of the Philippines Open University, published the 2025 Creative Responses to Sustainability: Green Guide for the Philippines. The tenth edition features eighteen cultural organizations that utilize their platforms to raise awareness about environmental issues. The Center for Art, New Ventures and Sustainable Development (CANVAS) is listed as an organization that instills art and nature appreciation in children.
“In Luzon, the Centre for Art, New Ventures and Sustainable Development (CANVAS) fosters an early appreciation for the relationship between art and nature. Their Tumba-Tumba Children’s Museum of Philippine Art is specifically designed to help children cultivate empathy, critical thinking, and an early appreciation for environmental relationships through Philippine visual storytelling.”
The Directory of Organisations details CANVAS’ response to sustainability challenges through art:
“CANVAS is a non-profit organisation that works with the creative community to promote children’s literacy, explore national identity, and deepen public appreciation of art, culture, and the environment in the Philippines. It was inspired by the 1980s animated short film “The Man Who Planted Trees,” based on Jean Giono’s eco-fable on one man’s lifelong devotion to planting acorns and transforming a barren landscape. In 2005, this story was adapted for the Philippine context in “Elias and His Trees” — CANVAS’ first book and its official beginning. Since then, CANVAS has thrived by sharing stories freely and gifting books to disadvantaged children, nurturing imagination and hope, with the belief that one story can spark a generation’s change.”
Read the Green Guide for the Philippines here.
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Since 2015, ASEF (Asia-Europe Foundation) has been publishing the series Creative Responses to Sustainability through its arts website, culture360.ASEF.org. This series of country-specific guides looks at arts organisations and artists’ initiatives that address issues of sustainability in their artistic practice in several countries of Asia and Europe. The previous guides focused on Singapore (2015), Korea (2016), Indonesia (2017), Australia (2018), Portugal and Spain (2019), the United Kingdom (2021), India (2025), with the spin-off in the series on the city of Berlin (2017).
A non-profit that works with the creative community to promote literacy and explore national identity, CANVAS publishes award-winning children's stories and donates the books to benefit children in public schools and poor communities throughout the Philippines. Its One Million Books Campaign promotes independent reading and creative thinking in Filipino children, while also exposing them to the best of contemporary Filipino art and literature. Twenty Years of Art and Stories details the organization’s work, from art exhibitions, book publishing and distribution, to partnerships CANVAS has had in the past two decades.
