Our students tackle genuine financial challenges faced by Filipino families and communities. These projects demonstrate practical applications of stress management techniques with documented outcomes.
These capstone projects addressed real financial stress issues in Benguet communities. Students worked directly with families to implement sustainable solutions and measure their effectiveness over six-month periods.
A comprehensive stress management program designed for families struggling with informal lending cycles in La Trinidad. Combined traditional counseling methods with digital budgeting tools to break the debt-stress spiral affecting 180 households.
Digitized traditional "paluwagan" savings groups with automated stress monitoring features. The platform helped 45 groups maintain consistent savings while providing early intervention for members showing financial anxiety symptoms.
Hear from students who transformed their academic research into meaningful community interventions.
Working with actual families changed everything about how I approached financial stress research. You can't just study it from textbooks – you need to understand the cultural context, the family dynamics, the daily pressures these people face.
The hardest part wasn't building the app – it was earning trust from savings group leaders who'd been managing money manually for decades. But once they saw how technology could reduce their administrative stress while keeping their traditions intact, everything clicked.