Cesar Garcia
Cesar Ramon Garcia is a Chicano community activist, legal advocate, and social entrepreneur transforming how communities define safety, dignity, and accountability. A formerly incarcerated leader, Garcia builds tools and policies that shift systems from punishment to possibility.
His journey began in 2000 as a graduate of the YouthBuild MAAC Project, where he was elected California’s representative to the National Young Leaders Council and joined the San Diego School-to-Career Council to direct Workforce Investment Act funding to youth programs.
Garcia is the creator of SCENE — Safety, Community, Empowerment, Network for Everyone — an abolitionist tech platform and emerging social enterprise that integrates community reporting, pattern detection, and policy-linked interventions to replace surveillance with solidarity. His grassroots campaigns, including organizing against “Cop City” San Pablo, have paired public mobilization with transparent data tools and educational outreach, earning him coverage in Prism Reports.
A proud UC Berkeley graduate with a B.A. in Sociology, a minor in African American Studies, and an Ethnic Studies: Race & Law minor, Garcia is a leader in the Underground Scholars Initiative, a statewide network for incarcerated and formerly incarcerated students. As a Community Scholar with Just Cities, he co-authored the Fair Chance Housing Ordinance, adopted in Alameda County and Berkeley, ending housing discrimination against justice-impacted residents.
Garcia has also made statewide impact in higher education policy. As the first formerly incarcerated student advocate for the City Scholars Program at San Diego City College, he advanced district-wide efforts to expand resources and opportunities for justice-impacted students. Earlier, his work with Jewish Family Service of San Diego helped scale one of the nation’s most effective humanitarian shelter programs for asylum-seeking families, which has now served over 100,000 people.
At UC Berkeley, Garcia led the Discovery Project: Interrupting Lethal Structures, exposing systemic bias in city surveys and co-creating a public accountability board now featured by the School of Computing & Data Science. In 2026, he was selected to present at the Decolonization & Global Justice Conference in Oregon, facilitating a participatory workshop on abolitionist technology and community safety.
Garcia has contributed immensely to nonprofits and institutional programs throughout his life as an organizer. His vision is for SCENE to be his lasting organizational contribution — a model of community empowerment, safety, and liberation that outlives him and serves generations to come
