Siena Castellon
Neurodiversity Advocate, Author and Founder of Neurodiversity Celebration Week and Quantum Leap Mentoring
Siena Castellon is a neurodiversity advocate, who is autistic, dyslexic, dyspraxic and has ADHD. When she was 13, Siena created www.qlmentoring.com, a website that supports students with special educational needs (SEN). Most recently, she launched Neurodiversity Celebration Week, which aims to encourage schools to flip the narrative from focusing on the challenges and drawbacks of being neurodivergent to focusing on their strengths and talents. The website – www.neurodiversity-celebration-week.com – provides free SEND-related resources for teachers and schools to download. More than 500,000 students from over 760 schools around the world took part in Neurodiversity Celebration Week 2020. Siena’s neurodiversity advocacy was featured in a new Netflix Carmen Sandiego series showcasing Fearless Kids Around the World and on BBC Breakfast and BBC Bitesize, as well as in New Scientist and Autism Parenting Magazine.
Siena is also the author of The Spectrum Girl’s Survival Guide: How To Grow Up Awesome and Autistic. Her bestselling book contains the type of information and practical advice she wished had been available when she was growing up. In April 2020, Siena launched a successful crowdfunding campaign to donate a copy of her book to every girls’ state secondary school in England.
Siena has won many national awards for her neurodiversity advocacy and websites, including the European Diversity Award, the 2018 BBC Radio 1 Teen Hero Award, the Diana Award and the British Citizen Youth Award. She plans to study physics and maths at university.
Useful links and information
“Never be ashamed of being different: it is this difference that makes you extraordinary and unique.”