Sailee Charlu

Sailee Charlu is a student at the Orange County School of the Arts and founder of the Habla Futures Initiative, a bilingual education movement uniting arts, research, and policy. At thirteen, she founded Habla Arte, a bilingual visual arts and public speaking program now serving thousands of students across 15 Title I schools in Orange County, Sacramento, and Dallas–Fort Worth, and built the Speak Art digital platform and a bilingual children's book, Curiosity and Me, to extend its reach. She later founded The Lit League, one of the first multilingual spoken-poetry programs for middle schoolers in the country. A four-year research study with UC Irvine's School of Education informed Resolution 03-26, which she authored and the Orange County Board of Education passed unanimously in 2026, and she continues working with state legislators to recognize translanguaging in California's Education Code. Sailee serves as Co-President of her school's California Scholarship Federation chapter, National Youth in Policy Director, and Orange County Arts Council Youth Poetry Ambassador. A National YoungArts winner in poetry and five-time National Scholastic Gold Medalist, she was named a 2026 Daily Point of Light Award honoree for her advocacy work.