“If you grew up poor, you grew up dreaming, you grew up tough. If you grew up poor, you grew up thankful. But mostly you grew up too quickly.” 

This quote came to mind as I was interviewing Ruth Yu-Owen in the serenity of her bespoke two-storey home in metro Manila. The floor-to-ceiling louvered walls on the first floor peeks out into her verdant Zen garden. The lofty setting, I quickly realised, is simply symbolic of her remarkable achievements despite and because of her humble beginnings. 

“My family wasn’t well-off. Money was tight, so tight that my parents couldn’t afford to send me to college,” reminisces Ruth. “Mom asked her widowed sister if she could help send me to school. My aunt agreed. It changed my life forever.”

She took up Accounting at the Ateneo de Zamboanga, where she spent many happy years on campus. The part-Tausug and part-Chinese was born and bred on the Zamboanga peninsula located in Mindanao, the second-largest island in the Philippines (after Luzon). 

“No one should apologise for being poor. It’s not a curse. You can change it. Through education, you can uplift yourself and change your life,” emphasises Ruth. She is proof that the Jesuit education she received from Ateneo has been and is transformative in improving her life and reinforcing her belief that she could be an instrument in serving the less privileged. 

I tried to capture Ruth’s essence whose lean and lithe frame emits a surging ebullience that’s quite extraordinary. Possessing an electric personality, Ruth is a dynamo, a generator bursting in energy. She just goes “boom!” – spreading cheer, positivity and wisdom in everything and everyone she touches. 

This yoga practitioner currently leads two organisations that she takes pride in: her day job in renewable energy company Upgrade Energy Philippines, and her advocacy passion Connected Women. 

“I love both my jobs because if it’s not something I love to do, I won’t do it,” she declares. 

Stairway to success

From the life challenges and failures she hurdled to landing her jobs, Ruth carved her own path and persevered to achieve the changes she sought. At the age of 29 she became the youngest vice president at Smith Bell Shipping, an international ship agency company. When she lost her job at Smith Bell, she started her own company, PhilCarbon and is now President and CEO of a subsidiary company, Upgrade Energy Philippines (UGEP).

“I’m still a work in progress. I still have unfinished business… goals that I have yet to reach,” says Ruth. “But, yes, I’d like to think that I’ve reached a stage in life where I’m better equipped to help achieve a sustainable future for some of the less privileged communities and a sustainable future for our environment.” 

All the wisdom nuggets are a culmination of her “been there, done that” personal journeys. 

Work doubly hard to make things happen. Ruth was a working student, a nursery teacher at St Joseph School in the morning, and pursued her university BS in Accountancy degree in the afternoon. She chose to do tutoring on the side to earn some pocket money during breaks instead of hanging out with friends. 

“When I was younger, I would try and do everything, giving my 100% to all that I commit myself to. Try and please everyone and, of course, this ended up pleasing no one! All of these have left me exhausted physically, emotionally and mentally. I’ve now learned not to sweat the small stuff. Save your energy for what is really important in your life,” she says.

Embrace failure. Ruth flunked her first board exams for Certified Public Accountant (CPA), confessing that she spent more time with her boyfriend than studying for the exams. “I failed my family, my mom especially, and I failed myself.” It was a wake-up call. She only had herself to blame so she got up, dusted herself and moved on.

Suck it up, even in difficult jobs. Without a CPA licence, she couldn’t practice or start a career in accountancy. To survive, Ruth took a job filing and doing administrative tasks. She wanted to flee from day one, thinking she didn’t belong there. But she couldn’t – wouldn’t – surrender so she bit the bullet and kept doing similar tedious jobs, including selling encyclopedias door-to-door. She doesn’t regret this early phase in her life for it has made her tenacious and set character-building foundations for future endeavours, something she didn’t know yet at the time. 

Be patient. Twenty years of devoting her professional life in an international shipping company did not secure her job future. She found herself without a job overnight. She did what seemed to be the most sensible thing at the time: set up her own company. 

 “You get fired, you put up your own company. Easy, right? No, it’s not easy. It’s very, very hard… I’m sure most of you know that when you’re starting a company, your income is low. You worry about salaries, rent, bills, and you’re the last one to get paid. There were days I didn’t want to get out of bed, and if I did, I felt that I needed to climb right back to bed and stay there,” she confesses. 

This experience taught her a lot about patience. It was tough, but her patience paid off as evidenced by the invaluable recognition and respect she earned in the renewable energy industry in the Philippines and overseas.

Do what you love. Ruth started PhilCarbon (solar, wind power) because it was something she loved.  

“I’m not an engineer. I’m an accountant, never practiced, but I own a company that is one of the pioneers in this field. How did that happen? Don’t ask me… I don’t know. What I know for sure is I love what I do. I’m passionate about it. I wake up everyday and say to myself, ‘I love my job’...” She spearheaded UGEP that built the largest rooftop solar in the Philippines and many other rooftop solar around the country of commercial and industrial scale.

Ruth advises aspiring entrepreneurs to always give their 100 percent in everything they do. “There will be failures, but there will also be success. Failures are part of life. Don’t give up. Let your failure fuel your will to succeed.”

There’s joy in giving. Growing up poor, it’s hard for Ruth to be a bystander when seeing someone suffer and not do anything about it. 

The benefactor and fundraiser says: “Don’t wait to be invited to make a difference. Always help when you can, one person or one worthy cause at a time. Before you know it, you’re helping so many people. It’s a ripple effect; you follow your heart and intuition.

“My mom showed me that it’s better to give than to receive.” Generosity is a trait Ruth lives by to this day, something her mother, a native of Sulu (Mindanao), would be proud of. Despite what little they had “mom always gave something to others… like she would cook a simple pancit (noodle dish) and feed those she deemed needed it most.”

Ruth finds personal fulfilment in helping improve lives of underserved Filipinos, such as helping send 50 scholars to school, an effort driven by local organisation La Hermandad Zamboanguena which she’s a member of. She volunteers for humanitarian medical, feeding and tutorial missions in Sulu whenever she’s called in. 

Moreover, Ruth helped kickstart Siu Hua Yu Pan Cada Dia in Zamboanga, a food drive named after her sister who died in a vehicular accident in her early 40s, to feed indigent students in her hometown. She provided the seed money, then asked friends to join her through donations to keep it going. 

“Every opportunity I have, I ask people, especially the younger generation, if they want to be happy in life. The answer is always ‘Yes’! I tell them that having a house, the latest gadgets, a new car and tons of money may bring you happiness. But then it may be for a short while because then you would want more! However, when you channel your energy towards helping other people in whatever small ways you can, especially those that need your help the most, it’s when you experience real happiness, meaningful joy.”

Reinvent yourself. Don’t be afraid to try something new, to get out of your comfort zone. Decades after she botched CPA exams, worked dreary jobs and got fired from the company she worked for years, Ruth is still standing. She learned from her mistakes, moved on, left no stone unturned until she found her purpose and passion in her current two jobs that allow her to encourage sustainability and advocacy. 

“We don’t have to build more power plants. We just have to be more efficient,” says the President of UGEP, where she helms renewable energy and energy efficiency initiatives. Her 20-plus years of experience in this field earned her the posts of Energy Committee Co-Chairperson of the European Chamber of Commerce, Chairperson of Energy Committee of the Management Association of the Philippines and also Vice President for External Affairs for the Philippine Energy Efficiency Alliance (PE2). 

Ruth was in her early 50s when she stepped into the technology arena. She co-founded Connected Women (CW), a technology-driven social impact startup in the Philippines, to help create income opportunities for these women. The goal: train thousands of disadvantaged Filipino women in the simplest form of Artificial Intelligence Data Annotation (AIDA) so they can work from home. They go from zero income to USD10/day.

“I have reinvented myself! Who knew I’d be in tech? Isn’t that cool?” she giggles. 

Indeed, what Ruth is doing is pretty cool. But what is even more cool is ‘why’ CW upskills and trains disadvantaged women “… so that we don’t have to send our mothers overseas and be nannies to their employers’ children while leaving behind their own kids in the care of other people…” referring to hundreds of women OFWs (Overseas Filipino Workers) employed as domestic helpers.    

On top of that, there are over seven million Filipino women out of the local workforce due to family obligations – raising children, doing house chores, sometimes looking after elderly parents etc. Once the kids are grown up, these women want to be gainfully employed but feel unfit because of lack of skills. CW gives them a chance. 

As an advocate of gender equality – the fifth goal in the United Nations Sustainable Development – CW matches female entrepreneurs from all over the world with Filipino women looking for remote work through a tech platform that utilises a unique proprietary algorithm to ensure a precise match. CW has been recognised as Champion for e-Employment at the World Summit for Information Society (WSIS) Forum held at Place des Nations in Geneva, Switzerland on April 9, 2024 as well as UN Women’s Covid 19 award in 2021. Founded in 2016, CW has about 170,000 members to-date.

Have a life.  Apply the same passion you put in at work to take care of your health and wellbeing. It’s all about time management. Ruth is big on self-care – body, mind and spirit. Healthy living allows her to do her best every day. 

On a typical day, 6:00 a.m. to 9:30 a.m. are Ruth’s “me” time. Within these golden morning hours she meditates with Bob, her Welsh husband, have breakfast, work out some more (alternating golf, weight training, Zumba, Pilates on designated days). She’s big on meditation, which she believes is a major reason she doesn’t get shaken or rattled easily (even when she’s caught in Manila’s notorious traffic jams). 

“Believe it or not, daily meditation keeps my sanity,” says the enthusiast of Art of Living, a stress-elimination and self-development practice based on rhythmic breathing technique, meditation and yoga. 

“The thing about Art of Living is the emphasis on Seva, which means service to others. The more service you give the deeper your meditation gets. So it’s no longer about you, it’s more about how you respond to situations around you. That’s my most favourite part of myself – being kind, being compassionate, being of service to others…”

By 9:30 a.m. she switches to work mode, dividing her time between PhilCarbon/UGEP, CW and functions (where she talks about her work and advocacies when given a chance). 

It's lights out by 10:30 – 11:00 pm on most days and up again before 6:00 am! 

She likes to eat healthy with daily staples comprising protein shakes, fruits, veggies, eggs, salads, soup.

“I have one shot of single espresso but I drink tea, ginger tea the rest of the day. I also get my energy from meditation and healthy food. Both help sync my body and mind in facing my day,” she chirps. 

Keeping the lessons

There’s nothing she would change in her past, she says. “Those things happened for a reason. I made sure I never lose the lessons and apply them to this day.” 

Another quote popped in my head as our interview was wrapping up: “Painful and unfair things happen to everyone. Losers brood on it. Winners use it to learn and grow.”   

Ruth Yu-Owen does not apologise for her humble beginnings and for her mistakes. She used both as stepping stones to survive, to succeed – and now fuel her to live in significance by paying it forward.  

Debbie | ws

(Images courtesy of Ruth Yu-Owen)

Connected Women | Upgrade Energy Philippines | PhilCarbon | Ruth Yu-OwenLinkedIn | IG @yuowenruth | United States Energy Association | Women of the Future Award Southeast Asia | Empowering Echoes | Asia Women’s Summit | Bloomberg Thought Leaders