MAKATI CITY, Philippines — Beauty pageants may pit aspirants against each other for the coveted crown, but they also provide a platform for women to band together and work on common goals. This was what happened when a group of queens from different organizations gathered together to celebrate Women’s Month.
“If women unite, there is strength,” actress Patricia Javier, crowned Noble Queen of the Universe in 2019, said in her organization’s “Queens Meet Queens” event held at Torres Farm and Resort in Naic, Cavite, on March 6.
Javier now also serves as the pageant’s national director for the Philippines, and international director for the global search after Nobel Queen of the Universe Ltd. Inc. (NQULI) founder Eren Noche appointed her to the twin posts in December last year.
During the day-long event, queens from Javier’s Noble Queen of the Universe organization mingled with beauties from other organizations mounting pageants for mothers and married women—the Queen of Hearts Foundation (QOH) and the Mrs. Philippines International Organization (MPI).
Javier’s pageant batchmate, 2019 Noble Queen International Maffi Papin-Carreon, also attended the event as a representative of the new international pageant for mother-and-daughter tandems, the Woman of the World competition, originally scheduled in the first quarter of the year.
Carreon and her mother Philippine juke box queen Imelda Papin are ambassadors of the new pageant.
Female awardees of the Philippine-based World Council Excellence Awards also participated in the event, which also saw two of the group’s honorees as speakers—Philippine Commission on Women Chair Sandy Montano and Philippine Institute of Traditional Medicine Director General Annabelle Pabiona-De Guzman.
Noche said NQULI plans to hold the event every year. “We support each other. We are not competitors, we uplift each other,” she said.
QOH Founder and Chair Mitzie Go-Gil, herself an international beauty titleholder, expressed her gratitude for NQULI’s invitation, and shared that Javier once joined her foundation’s charity mission in Davao. “I’m so happy we all got together,” she said.
Since its establishment three years ago, QOH has been mounting charity and relief missions around the country. “We’ve already conducted 300 missions nationwide,” Gil shared.
MPI Founder Maan Cueto-Aris said she first sought to serve as a bridge that will bring Filipino mothers and wives on the global pageant stage. But she said her group will now begin to work on giving back to the community. “This activity will be the beginning of our collaboration. I love collaborating with different organizations,” she said.
The event saw the queens engaging in light moments with one another, sharing gifts and joining painting sessions. They also participated in a parade around the resort, to the delight of the guests young and old.
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