Andres Celin: Natural Born Organizer

In my junior and senior years at Central High School, I was very active in youth organizing, particularly for climate and voting rights. Sometimes this would include rallying students to participate in marches or testify in front of the school district board. Someone who I would always see on these occasions was Andres Celin and the members of Youth United for Change (YUC), a non-profit dedicated to helping students advocate for public education-related reforms and molding the next generation of leaders.

Andres was a leader organizer for YUC, but he was not always involved in activism. Born in Colombia, he studied cultural anthropology and minored in economics at Haverford College.

He believes his studies made him politically aware but did not become politically active until fishing his studies. Celin was involved in multiple social justice marches but became disillusioned with activism due to his perception of these protests having a white upper-middle-class nature.

A few years after graduating in 2011, he got involved in the Hispanic community in Philadelphia through working for Congreso de Latinos Unidos, a non-profit that seeks to help people in predominantly Latino communities achieve self-sufficiency through the vast amount of services they offer.

Andres thought that this was a better way to directly tackle inequalities in the city but recalls what he learned from this experience.

“Working close to the child welfare system, it's a sort of dark underbelly of city politics in a lot of ways. Children being taken away from their homes and how parents are treated just shows the immense trauma in the hardest-hit neighborhoods. I was hitting a wall thinking about how to solve similar issues and then I was approached about the idea of leading an organizing effort.”

This opportunity was with YUC and Celin had reservations because he was not originally from the area and prior disillusionment. After a series of blunt conversations with the executive director and knowing that he would be able to help build the organizational structure of his programs, he was ready to join.

Photo of Andres Celin courtesy of Al Dia News.

A lot of trial and error came with this new role but Andres built a strong relationship with the student members and understood where they were coming from. He was dealing with teenagers from Kensington area high schools, so was considerate of the instability they were experiencing and wanted to help them make change in the community they saw every day.

He recalled the proudest campaign he ran from beginning to end as an organizer with YUC.

“Kensington Health Sciences Academy was put on the chopping block by the School Reform Commission because of low test scores. We knew we needed three of the five votes on the board so we got many students and teachers from the school to testify in front of them at every public hearing. We collaborated with Councilmember Gym on this fight and it was important to have advocates close to the powerful machine.”

Andres says that the testimonies that were delivered to the commission were electric and made members and staffers from the Mayor’s office want to meet with the student advocates and find ways to preserve the school.

A rough transition for most activists is moving from the grassroots, where you have control of your lobbying efforts, to the hall of government which is slower and more bureaucratic in nature. For his Masters in Public Affairs at the University of Pennsylvania, Andres needed a related internship and he chose to complete this with the Office of Councilmember Helen Gym. The two built a great professional relationship through their fights to improve public education. He would stay part of the staff in the role of outreach director.

This exposure to city government cemented his intention to run for office himself. Much of the work that Andres did with YUC was centered in the Kensington neighborhood, which is located in the 7th councilmanic district. This seat was formerly occupied by Maria Quiñones-Sanchez but after she decided to run for mayor, her former chief of staff Quetcy Lozada assumed the role.

She stated that she was more pragmatic than her former boss and Andres felt that the district needed a more progressive voice. Ultimately he lost the race but captured more than 40 percent of the vote. The first-time candidate shared what this experience was like and what he learned from this process.

“There was a progressive bloc running and it was sad to see that most of us did not win. I did not think I was the right person to do this but I wanted to see what was possible in the seventh district.”

The former candidate went on to claim that running successful progressive campaigns were more achievable when the race was citywide. The difficulties he encountered with his district council run were breaking through the conservative voting tendencies of disaffected Black and Hispanic voters, and the influence that Ward leaders have.

Andres’ observations can be validated by seeing the current makeup of the city council. Of the 10 district seats, only one is occupied by a progressive Democrat with the 3rd district and Jamie Gauthier. Crime was also made the central issue by the media in this local election year. With progressives being seen as soft on crime and communities of color experiencing most of the violence, these demographics chose candidates who were going to be more aggressive on the issue. This means increasing police presence in neighborhoods and doing away with Mayor Kenney administration policies. This has been happening since the primary election, Councilwoman Lozada voted against preserving safe injection sites across the city and mayor-elect Cherelle Parker has said she would call upon the National Guard to try to contain the open-air drug market in Kensington.

Ward leaders in Philadelphia tend to be establishment figures in the local Democratic party and have already made up their minds as to who they will endorse, leaving them unlikely to entertain a meeting with an insurgent left-wing candidate.

Another difficulty that Andres encountered was trying to build name ID in the other parts of the district.

“I had a lot of relationships in Kensington, where I worked in, but the Seventh District expanded beyond neighborhoods where I had a lot of organic relationships. I was building relationships for the first time in these other areas and I was not seen as a sort of known political persona.”

Since his run for office, he is now a consultant at a firm called Anavi Strategies. There he had been involved with everything from policy research to strategic planning for large and small non-profit organizations. Andres has not ruled out another run for office but the one thing that is certain about his future is that he does not plan to stop advocating for his community.