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Postscript A Good Night’s Sleep

business and with fellow education advocates on how best to educate our people. Best
of all he truly cared for those with less in life, and he did what he could to make their
lives better.”

Lance Gokongwei recalled that when he graduated from the University of Pennsylvania
thirty years earlier, “The first person my father asked me to visit was Wash SyCip
because of the enormous respect he had for Uncle Wash. Wash SyCip has been a role
model for building a professional and world-class organization to our family and
group for many decades.”

More plaudits came from high government officials, business leaders, and the
diplomatic corps, all of whom had encountered Wash in respect of one laudable
initiative or other.

But there were millions more Filipinos whose lives Wash SyCip had touched and
changed—people who had never met him or maybe even never knew his name and
reputation, people without calling cards, people who went to school or to work in
rubber sandals if not barefoot, people on whom the future of the country rested as
much as it did on tycoons and taipans. These were the poor Filipinos whom Wash
dedicated the last decades of his life to, even as he sought to strengthen SGV—so the
Firm, too, could be better positioned to improve the Filipino future.

When Wash SyCip died, these poor people would have been orphaned. But they were
not, because the man who had funneled many millions of his and other donors’ pesos
into their development had made sure, like any visionary, to sustain his legacy of
excellence, discipline, and generosity into another generation of like-minded leaders.

Today a dedicated corps of social advocates, academics, managers, and family
members is keeping that legacy alive and moving it forward.

Basic education for better citizenship

One of Wash SyCip’s most fervent advocacies was the promotion of basic education.
As a public school product himself, he knew the transformational power of learning,
and in his old age he saw education as the crucial factor in developing a mature
electorate and a robust democracy.

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