iVolunteer Philippines has, in the past, recognized its bravest and wisest of members through its yearly Champion Awards or at its many events. This year, we want to continue by telling the stories of some of iVolunteer’s most prolific leaders; sharing the highs and lows, the pain and the glory that have built these captains into who they are today.

Cai Salvacion grew up in Davao City, in the heart of Mindanao, a part of the Philippines she might tell you is unlike anywhere else in the country. Davao has a curfew. Liquor stores stop serving at 1am. Everything closes around midnight. For a city, it’s remarkably quiet. But to Cai, that quiet was just the backdrop to a remarkably rich and diverse upbringing.

Her father is from the Mandaya tribe, an indigenous people of Mindanao. Her mother is a native of Cebu. Her parents were social workers, teachers, and activists, and from a young age, they brought Cai along to relief efforts and outreach activities in the mountains. She wasn’t exactly a volunteer yet. She was just a kid tagging along. But the seeds were planted early.

When Cai moved to Cebu City for college, she studied biology, did field work at mangrove sites and river banks, and eventually took up graduate-level classes in environmental biology. Then she stopped, two years in, without finishing her thesis. She’d had an awakening. “Why am I doing this?” she asked herself. The honest answer was that she’d been chasing the achievement more than the calling. What she actually wanted was to be closer to people, not rivers. Looking back, she thinks she probably should have taken social work.

Her first real act of volunteering came in those early Cebu days, when a group of classmates organized tutoring sessions for children at a public school. Cai, new to the city and without friends, figured she’d join. It worked out. She found community, purpose, and a pattern that would define the rest of her life: when something needs doing and nobody’s stepping up, Cai steps up.

After graduating, she entered the Business Processing Outsourcing (BPO) industry and, somewhat to her own surprise, was promoted to team leader. She credits her volunteer work for that. “When you apply for a job with no work experience, your volunteer work is what you have,” she says. And one thing volunteering had given her was humility. She’d worked alongside doctors who spent their volunteer hours cleaning animal shelters, not practicing medicine. When a doctor is elbow-deep in kennel cleanup beside you, that can be a humbling experience.

In 2015, Cai joined Island Rescue Organization (IRO), a nonprofit animal shelter network in Cebu. She started as a volunteer, which meant working adoption events, cleaning shelters, and attending fundraising events. Eventually, she worked her way up to the Vice President role in 2018. IRO runs multiple shelters across the region, including a hospice facility for retired older dogs, a halfway home for dogs awaiting adoption, a cattery for cats with disabilities, and a main shelter that houses over two hundred dogs at any given time. The core team is small, about seven members with three officers. There are no paid positions. The dogs still need feeding every day, regardless of what else is going on in anyone’s life.

Staffing, Cai will tell you, is the hardest part of running a volunteer-driven organization. It’s not that people don’t want to help. Post a call for volunteers online and you’ll be flooded with applicants. The challenge is keeping them. “We’ve realized we have to give people a real role, not just tasks,” she says. That insight came, in part, from her own experience. When she joined IRO, they handed her a social media role immediately, even though she had no background in it. She taught herself video editing, learned Canva, figured it out. Being trusted with ownership kept her there. She’s been there for nearly a decade.

When Cai isn’t volunteering, she’s likely at home, resting. Her definition of rest involves either doing laundry or returning to the world of Sanctuary. Cai is a seriously dedicated Diablo player. She’s been at it since Diablo 2, which was also the foundation of her marriage. She and her husband, a Manila native she met in Cebu, bonded over a shared copy of the disc. They’ve been together sixteen years; they started with cleansing the Den of Evil, and now they shred demons in defense of Westmarch.

Cai’s path to iVolunteer came through a volunteer summit at UP Los Baños back in 2021, where she was representing the Philippine Eagle Foundation. She was seated next to Judith, who was there for iVolunteer. Cai sat through their ten-minute presentation and was genuinely amazed. She had never encountered an organization focused not on a single cause, but on volunteerism itself as an advocacy. “I thought I was doing it right,” she says. “I’d been volunteering since I was a kid. But when I got involved with iVolunteer, I realized there’s a formal way to do this.” Since joining iVolunteer, Cai has achieved a director role in Mindanao, where she oversees operations, builds partnerships and organizes events to this day.

On the bigger frustrations, Cai doesn’t hesitate to call out corruption, the need for better civic education, and the persistence of human cruelty, not just from world leaders making decisions in closed rooms, but from ordinary people being unkind to strangers on the internet. “We’re how many centuries old,” she says, “and I still can’t believe we’re fighting each other. Some global decisions are made by just a few men in a room, at the cost of lives. It’s sad that we’re still at that point. Maybe it’s cliché, but why can’t we have world peace. In the Philippines specifically, I think more about corruption, and the need to prioritize education, not necessarily college education, but social awareness. With what’s happening in our country right now, we really need more informed voters.”

It’s been a long road for Cai, from a quiet, low-key city in the south, to a life full of rescued animals, meaningful friendships, and whatever Westmarch needs from her this week. Her story is one of quiet consistency, showing up for the dogs, the kids, the communities, the causes, and the people around her, not because anyone asked her to, but because that’s simply who she is. That is the kind of person iVolunteer is built by, and built for. Any of us can choose such a path. Every path begins with a first step. Take yours at www.ivolunteer.com.ph, and we’ll see you along the journey.