Light the Way: The Campaign for Berkeley

Growing up in Kerman, Calif., population 15,000, wasn’t easy for Christina Piña, who self-identified as queer. Piña, who uses the pronoun “she,” suffered abuse from family, local youth, and a Catholic priest who, at a church retreat, “threw holy water at me, trying to get the devil out of me,” she says. “It caused a lot of emotional trauma.”

But in Fresno County, where less than 20 percent of all residents and less than 10 percent of Latinx residents have a bachelor’s degree, academically talented Piña dreamed of becoming an attorney. One summer in high school, she chose “to talk to no one. I focused on summer school and an internship and began to realize it didn’t matter if I was queer," she says. "It was time to start being myself.”

During Piña’s senior year, when officials wouldn’t allow her yearbook photo quote to say, “Yes, I dress nice. I wasn’t in the closet this long for nothing,” she got an ACLU attorney to reverse the decision. And in class, she outperformed her peers, became one of the 2017 school valedictorians, and was admitted to UC Berkeley.

“I saw higher education as an escape from the harsh realities at home,” says Piña, the first in her Mexican American family to attend college. “I visited Berkeley and saw how different it was, how open everyone was, and I said, ‘I want to go to a school like this.’”

Today, Piña, a sociology major, is not only thriving at Berkeley, she’s simultaneously the president of Central Valley Scholars, a nonprofit she founded in 2019 to help prepare historically underserved and oppressed students in the valley to attend prestigious universities nationwide. In an area where the counselor-to-student ratio can be more than 500 to 1, and students often aren’t taught how to navigate critical and complicated tasks associated with the college application process, Central Valley Scholars offers workshops, scholarships, and application assistance.

In 2021, the Westly Foundation awarded Central Valley Scholars a $40,000 prize for its talent, creativity, boldness, and humanitarian spirit in solving a community challenge. Student engagement had already increased 781 percent in a year — from reaching 97 students in 2019 to 837 in 2020. The grant will help the organization extend its reach even further.

“This grant is huge for Central Valley Scholars,” says Piña, giving them "the financial stability to better develop our existing programs, increase student engagement, and develop new projects to further support Central Valley students.”

Read more about Piña in Gretchen Kell’s article at the Berkeley News Center.

This article was updated in May 2023 to reflect Piña’s lived name, Christina. She had previously gone by “Michael.”