The Belonging She Built

When I set out to meet the people behind this industry, one name kept coming up. We met at a hotel lobby over too many cups of coffee, and two hours in, talking about faith, we had a goosebumps moment. What struck me most was that she spoke only of her people, never herself. It took me months to understand why the belonging she'd built for others was the one thing she'd spent her life without.

When I first went out to meet the people behind the organizations shaping this industry, I started in Iloilo. One name kept surfacing in conversation. Anj Espinosa, founder of the Ilova Community, a place she built to bring virtual assistants together, to share knowledge, to teach from her own experience, and to give others a platform to shine.

Along with her husband Roe, she agreed to meet my team and I for coffee at the Marriott lobby. My first impression was of the energy that came off the two of them, bright, warm, unmistakably in love with the work they did. As we talked, one thing stood out immediately: Anj spoke about the people in her community, not about herself. Two hours and many cups of coffee later, we hit a moment I still remember, the conversation turned to faith, to how God sits at the center of everything each of us does, and the whole table felt it. Goosebumps.

She invited me to speak as a keynote at the first Ilova conference on Guimaras Island, and it was there I saw what she had actually built. A room of happy, positive virtual assistants from wildly different backgrounds, and the way people gravitated toward the group. What surprised me most was learning that many of them were meeting face to face for the very first time. They moved like old friends. That is not an accident; that is a culture someone deliberately makes. And as I came to know Anj over the conversations that followed, on what became a long walk down a shared boulevard, I understood where that culture came from. She had spent her life on the outside of belonging. So she built it for everyone else.

The belonging she gives away so freely is the thing she grew up without.

Anj comes from a broken family. Her parents separated when she was five, and the fracture went deeper than one household; she came to feel that everyone in her bloodline, generation after generation, carried the same brokenness. She grew up the black sheep, the one on the margins, and when hardship came, it was hers to carry alone. "Looking back," she told me, "I believe my difficult experiences shaped me more than my successes. Every setback, disappointment, and failure taught me resilience and gave me the determination to keep going. If I had chosen to quit during those moments, I wouldn't be where I am today."

She says it plainly now, but the moments behind that sentence were not plain at all. She is a survivor of sexual assault, a wound she carries with a quiet strength, and one that would later shape who she chose to fight for. She has never had a parachute, no family safety net, no one to fall back on. Everything she has, she built while falling and learning to fly at the same time.

Her dream, back then, was the sky. She wanted to be a flight attendant, to see the world, to travel; she studied tourism management with that horizon in mind.

Then, at seventeen, she got pregnant, and the horizon changed. College fell away. The world that judges a young mother closed around her, and she felt it. "When I got pregnant, they didn't give me a chance," she said. She became, more than ever, the black sheep, the cautionary tale. But she made a decision in that season that would define everything after: she would not depend on anyone. She would carry herself.

What looked from the outside like the end of her prospects was, in her hands, the beginning of her resilience. She didn't get the life she'd planned. She built a different one, from scratch, with a baby on her hip and no roadmap at all.

At eighteen, she walked into a call center, and into a different kind of hard.

She was the youngest person on the floor by more than a decade, surrounded by colleagues in their thirties and forties. Her English wasn't strong yet, and she was bullied for it, a teenager already carrying a child and a household, now enduring the daily sting of being the one who didn't fit, again. She stayed anyway. She worked three companies over roughly ten months, because the goal was simple and non-negotiable: earn enough to support her little family.

show up when showing up was miserable. The call center wasn't her destination. It was her forge.

In 2019, the last call center she worked for shut down. She had no idea what a "virtual assistant" was. She only knew she wanted to work from home, close to her child.

So she did what she has always done. Out of curiosity, she started researching, and then she taught herself everything, from scratch. "I had no mentor, no formal training, and no roadmap," she told me. "Just persistence, curiosity, and a willingness to learn. That unexpected opportunity completely changed the direction of my life." She found, in the virtual world, the very thing tourism had promised and taken away: not the sky, but freedom. The freedom to build a real career and still be present for her children.

She built her agency into a seven-year enterprise. Her husband, a virtual professional too, built alongside her; early on they imagined being business partners under one roof, and eventually made the wiser call to run their own companies side by side. Two people who'd started with nothing, constructing a life brick by brick, and proving that the black sheep could build something the flock never did.

It has not been a clean ascent, and she was honest with me about the parts that still ache.

The hardest seasons weren't the technical ones; they were the human ones. As Ilova grew, so did criticism, misunderstanding, and disappointment, moments that made her question whether to keep going. "Not everyone will understand your intentions," she said, and she has learned to keep moving anyway. More painfully, she carried the betrayal of a business partner who wrongly accused her and refused to pay her for work she'd done. She had to absorb the loss and move on, which is its own kind of grief, the grief of trusting and being wrong about it.

She holds all of this without bitterness, and I think faith is the reason. "My faith reminds me that leadership is ultimately about serving others," she told me. "I try to lead with integrity, humility, compassion, and consistency, because I believe success means very little if you lose your character along the way." For Anj, God is not a footnote. He is the center, the thing that held when people didn't.

Here is where her whole life converges into a single act of creation.

As she met more virtual assistants in Iloilo, she saw something familiar and painful: talented people working in isolation, with no real community, no place to ask questions, celebrate wins, or simply be understood. There were online groups, but little genuine support. She recognizedthat loneliness, because she had lived a version of it her whole life. "That's when I realized Ilova wasn't just about creating another community," she said. "It was about creating a place where people could belong, learn together, and grow together."

She didn't wait for permission or resources. "If everyone kept waiting for someone else to take the first step, nothing would ever happen," she told me. "Leadership isn't about having everything figured out. It's about being willing to move forward so others have something to build alongside." And when she runs a training session, the real curriculum isn't technical. "More than teaching skills, I want people to believe in themselves. Confidence is often what holds people back. If someone leaves believing they are capable of succeeding, then I know I've made a real impact."

The woman who was told she didn't belong now spends her days telling other people that they do. On Guimaras, watching strangers become friends in an afternoon, I finally understood that Ilova is not a business. It is Anj handing others the thing she had to build for herself.

Ask Anj what she's really doing, and it isn't about listings or clients or even Ilova. It's about a chain she is determined to break.

Family is everything to her, and her deepest fear is rooted there, that the brokenness she inherited, generation after generation, might simply continue. She has decided it will not. "I want to inspire families to stick together," she said. She is out to break the cycle of generational trauma, to be the one in her bloodline who changes the narrative, for her own children first, and then for anyone watching. And the survivor in her has turned her pain outward into purpose: she has been searching for local causes serving victims of sexual abuse, determined that what happened to her become fuel for protecting others. She leaned into faith, into her marriage, into a good group of friends, and out of that foundation she built a new story, not just for herself, but as a template she wants others to know is possible.

I asked her what she'd say to the virtual assistant who feels invisible right now, and her answer could just as easily be addressed to the seventeen-year-old she once was. "Don't confuse being unseen with being insignificant," she said. "Some of the most meaningful work happens quietly behind the scenes. Keep learning, keep serving with excellence, and keep showing up even when no one is applauding. Your consistency today is building opportunities that you may not be able to see yet, and your work matters more than you realize."

I think back to that first coffee at the Marriott, to a woman who, given two hours to talk about anything, chose to talk about her people. I know now that she wasn't deflecting. She was showing me the whole point of her life. Anj Espinosa was the girl no one caught, the black sheep with no parachute, the teenage mother the world wrote off. She could have spent her life proving she belonged. Instead she built a place where no one else would have to wonder if they did. That is the rarest kind of leader, the one who turns her own exclusion into everyone else's home.

Anj Espinosa is the founder of the Ilova Community and the owner of a boutique virtual operations agency in Iloilo. If you or someone you know has been affected by sexual violence, support is available through local and national resources.