Celine Qin is a youth advocate and community leader based in Sacramento, California. She is proud to be nationally-recognized as a winner of Princeton University’s Prize in Race Relations and an Alexander Hamilton Scholar. At 13, she founded The Reclamation Project @ 916, a grassroots organization spearheading youth-led movements for systems-change, equity, and liberation, and has since mobilized 65,000+ community members across numerous youth-led campaigns, as well as raised and reinvested $150,000+ to community aid, social justice programming, and youth leadership development and socio-political organizing. Celine’s expertise has enabled her to provide crucial perspective as the Lead Youth Advisor to Asian American Liberation Network, resulting in the procurement of $600,000 in state-level funding towards AAPI-serving, youth-led social justice.

Bio Statement:

A serial-dreamer and risk-taker, Celine additionally founded both the California Youth Power-Building Fellowship and the National Social Justice Education Coalition, providing a cumulative $30,000+ in scholarships, social-change grants, mentorship resources, and liberating education to youth of color throughout local California communities and 23 states nationwide. In addition, she is a statewide leadership board member and legislative advocate of the California Student Board Member Association, a coalition of youth advocates representing the rights of California’s 6.2 million students. Celine is the current Student Board Trustee of the Elk Grove Unified School District, serving as the voice for over 63,000 students across 68 schools in Northern California’s largest school district, in one of the most diverse regions in the United States. She also serves as the Racial and Economic Justice Chair of the Sacramento County Government Advisory on Youth, establishing the first ever racial and economic justice focus pillar in its 20 year history. She proudly represents 300,000 young citizens in advancing the life outcomes of historically under-served youth populations. Celine has worked with representatives of the California Department of Justice, California Department of Public Health, United States Department of Treasury, United States Department of State, United Kingdom Parliament, and facilitated roundtables with leaders across Europe, discussing strategies for youth civic engagement from the grassroots to international scale. Coming from a first-generation, low-income family, Celine values fearlessness, healing and resilience, and the breaking of paradigms, painting a contemporary culture beyond fragmented narratives and enlivening intergenerational hopes and dreams.

Who am I when the world shakes? I was born to prove my livelihood unconquerable. I was born hungry for agency in a type of world that exists to take it. I was born parched for answers in a system dissipating the richness of a political peoplehood, culture, and resistance. I was born for leadership. I owed myself control to process my uprisings and downfalls. I would demand it, and I wanted to be the one to make it happen.

By the time I became a teenager, the broader meanings of an Asian-American woman existence began to solidify. In the same energy, I immersed myself in the work and prose of Grace Lee Boggs, the Young Lordes and Panthers, Angela Davis, Yuri Kochiyama, Ocean Vuong, Anuradha Ghandy, and Joan Didion. I equipped essay writing and poetry as my catharsis and propelled action watching fragments of my, and countless others’, human experience take the form of sentences, criticisms, and revolutionary reimagining. I knew I was born not one to question shyly within boundaries, but to uproot them altogether in my journey of searching and curiosity. And naturally, that would mean creating entirely new frameworks of my own.

Today, I vow myself to create without defined borders. I break trajectories assumed onto youthhood, for myself, my people, and fellow systems-impacted youth who know firsthand what it means to receive pain and struggle to find oneself in an unfathomably difficult society. I learn every day to stretch the meanings of love.

I found my world in public policy, activism, and community organizing—building connections on the grassroots and touching lived experiences with transformative diligence. I found my world in a perpetual pursuit for knowledge and solutions. I found my world in unwavering solidarity and self-discovery. I found my world in fearlessness.