The Center for Philippine Studies has engaged in some projects. In 2013-15, it implemented a curricular project to ingest peace education and peacebuilding, with a grant from the US Institute of Peace (USIP). The project has been successfully completed, in cooperation with three campuses of Mindanao State University, in the Philippines.

In 2019, it obtained a grant from the Department of Education Fulbright-Hays Group Projects Abroad. This program, titled “Mapping Language and Culture in the Philippine South” (also called internally as Project Magsayod) seeks to train K-12 teachers, faculty and students on the Cebuano language and area studies focusing on the southern Philippines (Cebu and “Muslim Mindanao”) for five weeks during the summer.

The participants, drawn from Hawai’i and California, will be immersed in basic Cebuano language (Level I) in partnership with the University of San Carlos, Cebu City during the summer 2020.  The program will also include an area studies component to understand the cultural context of the Cebuano language through lectures and field visits in Cebu and surrounding areas.

The project director is Dr. Federico V. Magdalena, an affiliate faculty at the Asian Studies Department, as well as the Deputy Director of the Center for Philippine Studies at the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa.

However, the project’s implementation has been canceled twice (2020, 2021) due to the Covid-19 pandemic, which adversely affected the US and the Philippines as well. The GPA project will hopefully be implemented in summer 2022 in Manila (for an orientation) and in Cebu (for the main GPA program).