Strategise, Engage and Lead Across Cultures

Celia built her career inside the systems you're trying to navigate. She has led work at the Victorian Public Sector Commission, the Victorian Multicultural Commission and the Department of Premier and Cabinet, and delivered results across the Not For Profit and consulting sector. She knows how government thinks, how communities respond, and where the two talk past each other.

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That experience taught her something simple: organisations rarely need more complexity. They need someone who can cut through it. Celia founded The Social Fabric to do exactly that. She brings cultural insight, strategic clarity and genuine community connection into rooms where those things go missing, and turns good intentions into work that ships.

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Celia has helped shape policies and programs that have made a real difference in the lives of Victorians, work that has helped people access government more easily and get better outcomes from it. She has also served as principal advisor to senior executives, helping leaders of major institutions navigate complex challenges at the highest level. She has led teams of her own too, and that combination is what makes her skillset rare: she understands problems from the grassroots all the way to the boardroom.

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Her governance experience runs deep. Celia is a Founder and Chairperson of the Vietnamese Australian Professional Network (VAPN), Board Director at Western Chances and the Bruce Wong Foundation, and has founded not-for-profit organisations of her own. She also co-founded the VPS Women of Colour Network, now a leading staff-led network across the Victorian Government, built to give women of colour in the public sector a platform and a stronger voice. Under her leadership, the Network went on to win an IPAA Leadership Award, recognition of the impact it had across the sector.

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Her peers and sector have recognised that impact:

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• Winner, Dame Elisabeth Murdoch Award, Premier's Volunteer of the Year

• Finalist, Australian Human Rights Commission Human Rights Medal

• Winner, IPAA Victoria Top 50 Public Sector Women

• Winner, 40 Under 40 Most Influential Asian Australians, Government Category

• Selected as 1 of 10 Australian delegates, Australia-Vietnam Leadership Dialogue 

Celia works where strategy meets community. She builds partnerships that hold, shapes policy that survives contact with the real world and runs engagement that leads to visible change. She builds solutions with the leaders she serves and the communities they answer to, because the best answers are simple, human and made together.

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She grew up in Melbourne's west, the daughter of Vietnamese refugees and she's a mum. Living between cultures made her a translator early, between generations, between systems, between what people say and what they mean. That skill now sits at the centre of her practice. She works alongside the people and communities she works with and brings them into the process from the very beginning so the outcome belongs to everyone who shaped it.

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Across all of it, she's become known as a connector, a trusted voice and a figure people turn to when the work actually needs to hold. If your organisation needs strategy that communities truly trust, talk to Celia.