This is a space for what’s on the horizon for me. I want to build these with others whether through shared exploration or parallel work. Some of it may change, as it should. But for now, this is what’s next.
Funding futures. Capital is not just a resource, but a language that signals what is valued, who is believed, and which futures are worth investing in. Grantmaking, ESG, and CSR offer different grammars for this language, each with their own constraints and possibilities. I’m curious about how these domains might be used—carefully and responsibly—to fund what matters, to hold institutions accountable, to lay the groundwork for long-term change. I don’t see this as a clean path, but a terrain I want to learn to navigate: one where discernment and structural awareness feel just as important as strategy. I’m still early in this exploration, and I’m looking for ways to enter not just with ambition, but with integrity.
Gatherings in Cebu. As I prepare for graduate studies and later pursue a life in policy, product management, research, and pipeline and talent development, I keep circling back to a quiet desire: to gather people in the in-between. Early-career peers who are still figuring out what they care most about, who they might become, and how their work might meet the world’s unmet needs. I think about hosting something—informal, intentional—a kind of third space where we can reflect on cause priorities, map out our edges, and trace the contours of T-shaped careers oriented toward impact. Not to finalize trajectories, but to sit with them. To think in good company, about problems that are urgent but underfunded, tractable but overlooked—and how we might move toward them with more clarity, together.
Tending innovation ecosystems. Beyond what precedes this, I am also thinking a lot about how ideas are incubated, how infrastructure gets built, how certain places become sites of emergence while others are left waiting. Lately, I’ve felt the pull of venture building, not just as a phase in my trajectory, but as a way to get intimate with the machinery behind innovation: capital flows, founder mythologies, regulatory rhythms, the long tail of what gets funded and why. I want to understand this from the ground up—first with startups in Cebu, but reaching outward toward how science, policy, and the private sector speak to one another across Asia-Pacific. I keep returning to this question: where are we in the global supply chain—from chips to labor—and what might technical governance look like when it's rooted not in abstraction, but in geography and in the friction of the real? I don’t know where this will take me, but I want to be close enough to feel how it moves.
Research in dialogue. I’m in search of spaces—especially across North-South and South-South gatherings—where research isn’t just presented, but situated, and where novelty, contribution, and shared benefits are held in conversation rather than tension. I want to write with others and share work with peers from inception to articulation—questions we’ve lived with long enough for us to leave a mark, not just on the page, but on us. I’m drawn to rooms where epistemic authority is still being rebalanced, where the Global Majority is not cast as subject matter but recognized as a center of world-building and theory-making. And I want research to move not just upward through institutions, but outward toward the communities and futures it hopes to serve.
On My Trajectories
On Ventures
Unjournal. I want to reimagine what research can become beyond the well-behaved paper. Something that honors rigor—citations, theory, deep methodological care—but resists the sterility of traditional scholarship. I want to build a space where form is part of the argument: where stories, maps, audio, data, and speculative fragments live side by side, not as embellishment, but as epistemic tools. A publication that holds space for knowledge made at the edges—about Asia, yes, but also about the world refracted through its shifting margins. Not scholarship as performance, but as something inhabited. Embodied. Situated. I’m not there yet—but I want to build toward it, and with others who feel this restlessness too.
A Life Board. I've been thinking about what it means to design a life with others, not just through scattered check-ins or milestone updates, but through consistent, intentional reflection. I’m beginning to imagine a small circle of people I could meet with regularly to talk through the big arcs—career shifts, creative risks, emotional weather, long-term dreams. Not as mentors, but as co-conspirators: people who amplify your ambitions, tell you the truth, and stay curious about the person you’re becoming. I want to curate this space deliberately—a blend of accountability, imagination, and emotional safety. A place to raise the ceiling of self-belief. A place to be seen clearly, and still encouraged to stretch.
Conservation between islands. Back in Negros, conservation felt alive. I was part of efforts that didn’t just protect ecosystems; we built community around care and restored a sense of collective stake in place. But since moving to Cebu, I’ve felt a quiet absence. The environmental consciousness here feels more diffused, the discursive space thinner, civil society efforts harder to find, or maybe simply less visible. I miss being in the rhythm of that work. I miss having people to do it with. I want to find or help build a community here that treats conservation not as an extracurricular, but as a way of seeing and acting in the world. Something local, practical, slow. Something that begins again, wherever we are.