By Mila Glodava
With Metro Infanta Foundation celebrating 25 years this year as a tax-exempt, nonprofit organization, it’s a great opportunity to look back on a few details about the Foundation. Let’s start with the Foundation logo and a recap of who created it and what it means.
Colleen Smith, a friend for many years, a member of the MIF board, and an award-winning journalist and published author, conceptualized the logo. Her long-time friend and colleague, graphic artist Nancy Benton executed it.
Here’s how Colleen describes the logo:
The Metro Infanta Foundation logo incorporates the bamboo and a seashell, two elements reminiscent of life in the Philippines. On the islands, bamboo grows abundantly, and the poles frequently are used to construct building foundations. As such, in the logo the bamboo represents the building up of the Metro Infanta Foundation and symbolizes our growth.
The logo displays the bamboo both as separate shoots and as a group of reeds to illustrate the truth that while we are individuals, we also are connected by our roots. And together, we can unite to create vital growth.
The seashell depicted in the logo brings to mind the Philippine islands that benefit from the ocean as a natural resource both beautiful and bountiful. In its original state, embodying an animal of the sea, the seashell serves as a shelter, a home.
In our logo, the seashell serves to remind us of our homeland in the Philippines. Framed within the seashell and beyond the cluster of bamboo, the sun hovers above the shoreline on the horizon, evoking a view from the Philippines and the sense of the Metro Infanta Foundation as an organization with a vision.
Side Note: Colleen and I met while serving on the design committee of the Archdiocese of Denver Convocation on the Laity. As colleagues, we have collaborated on a variety of communications projects over the course of our long friendship. In 1995, Colleen joined nearly 200 delegation of youth clergy and chaperones from the Archdiocese of Denver in World Youth Day and Pope John Paul II’s visit to Manila.
