Reigning Miss Universe R’bonney Gabriel has confirmed her participation at New York’s biggest Filipino Event! The stunning Fil-American beauty will grace the biggest Filipino Independence Day Parade outside of the Philippines organized yearly by the PIDCI.
A few years ago three Filipina International Pageant winners participated at the parade which made it a very special event for avid pageant fans. Miss Universe 2015 Pia Wurtzbach, Miss World 2013 Megan Young and Miss International 2016 Kylie Versoza flew in to join the festivities.
The Philippine Independence Day Council Inc., more popularly known by its acronym PIDCI, is a nonprofit organization incorporated on February 14, 2002, best known for the biggest Philippine Independence Day Parade outside the Philippines, which is held first Sunday of June along Madison Avenue, together with an all-day Street Fair and Cultural Festival. These events are attended by about 100,000 predominantly Filipinos and Filipino-Americans from the New York tri-state area and Pennsylvania, visitors from neighboring states, and California, and Canada.
The Philippine Independence Day Council, Inc. (PIDCI) is an umbrella organization of Filipino American associations based on the East Coast. It is principally dedicated to promoting the cultural heritage and traditions of the Filipino people through the celebration of the Philippine Independence Day, hence, the name. But there is more to PIDCI than its name implies.
Since 1972, Filipino American organizations have come together to plan, design, and prepare for an all-day parade, cultural show and street fair in New York City that showcase the sounds, the spectacle, the history and the cultural heritage of the Filipino people.
In 1986, the Philippine Consulate in New York started to take an active part in the preparation for the celebration. In 1989, it formed a committee to take charge of the parade. The parade turned out to be a huge success. It was later widely considered a regular annual project of many Filipino organizations, and a red-letter mainstay in the calendars of many Filipino American homes. Such was the impact and success of the Philippine Independence Day Parade that predictably everyone wanted to take part in it one way or another.
This led the Filipino community to realize that the Independence Day celebration itself had become a point of unity and cooperation among Filipinos. The requirements of sustaining this activity were enormous. But the potential benefit of a more unified Filipino community was obviously worth the effort towards institutionalizing the Philippine Independence Day celebration. Thus, the idea of establishing an organization dedicated to the promotion of Filipino cultural heritage through the Independence Day celebration and to the empowerment of the Filipino community was conceived.
PRIDE & PULCHRITUDE 