The kitchen of Renz's childhood was unremarkable, it was the same open-fire traditional stove at its center that millions of other families used. She watched the women she admired cook over flame and was drawn in early, long before she was supposed to be. Waking up to the sting of breakfast smoke was familiar long before it was something she thought to question. So was the asthma. It was just another fact of life, managed and accepted, until the family stopped cooking with open fire years later and it quietly disappeared. Nobody made a big deal of it at the time. Renz would spend the next two decades figuring out why that bothered her.

But it was not the only thing she was paying attention to. Over the years, she could see a broader picture taking shape: health gaps, women who worked hard in conditions that gave very little back, and a community whose potential was quietly being worn down by the accumulation of small, unaddressed problems.

What she did with that awareness said a lot about who she was becoming. She was frustrated. The problems around her were real and visible, and yet life seemed to carry on as though they were simply the way things were. At 15, convinced that change had to start somewhere official, she ran for Chairman of the Sangguniang Kabataan, the local youth council, and won. What she found inside was more complicated than she expected. The problems were even deeper than she had seen from the outside, and the machinery of change moved slowly. She was listening. She was also, for the first time, learning the difference between wanting things to change and knowing how to change them.

A scholarship changed the trajectory of not just Renz's life but her family's. It was the kind of opportunity that arrives once and does not repeat itself, and she knew it. Anyone who knows Renz knows she has never been one to do things the easy way, so naturally the program she chose was built almost entirely around computers, a technology she had barely touched since her family never had one. She worked through every gap, figured it out one late night at a time, and graduated. Then she did something that surprised even her: she got very good at it.

Good enough, in fact, to land a position at a Japanese software engineering firm. It was there that she added another unlikely skill to her growing collection and learned to speak Japanese. The woman who had grown up without a computer was now writing code in one language and holding meetings in another.

Her career was, by most measures, a success. She had done exactly what a scholarship and hard work were supposed to deliver. Then the pandemic arrived, and with it a particular kind of stillness that made the usual markers of progress feel beside the point. Renz found herself asking not about job titles or next steps, but about who she was and what she wanted her work to actually do in the world.

That question led her home. What she had seen over the course of her own life was that when Filipinos are given a genuine opportunity, they do not waste it. She had lived that truth herself, and she had watched it play out in the people around her again and again. What was missing was the conditions. Nayon was her answer to that gap. Her technical training, her project management experience, and her first-hand understanding of what rural life actually looked like all came together around a single conviction: that communities like the one she grew up in deserved more. Project Buhay, Nayon's clean cooking program, was a natural place to start. She knew that problem from the inside, literally, in her lungs. But it was never going to stop there. It was a door into something larger: youth leadership, childhood nutrition, women's economic power, community-led development. The same threads she had been watching unravel since childhood, now something she finally had the tools to help weave back together.

That belief shows up in how she builds her team. The people around Renz at Nayon tend to share something with her: roots in the kinds of communities the work is meant to serve, a first-hand understanding of what those problems actually feel like, and a quiet drive to do something about it. It is not a hiring strategy so much as a recognition. When you have lived the problem, you approach the work differently. The frustration that sent a 15-year-old running for local office never went away. It just found better company.

Nayon today is the shape of that philosophy made real. Born from the provinces, grounded in kapwa, and built on the belief that the people with the fewest resources are often the ones with the most to offer when given a genuine chance. Renz used her own life as the roadmap, every program a thread she had been pulling at since childhood. What she is building now is a feedback loop, a process where community members gain tools, confidence, and capability, and then become the ones who start the cycle for someone else.

Ang gagmay nga simula, dako ang mahimong katapusan.
‍(Small beginnings can lead to great endings.)

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