Celeste White and the Founding of Lux Forum: Civic Leadership Through Public Education

Celeste White founded Lux Forum, a Napa Valley thought-leadership organization, and serves as its president and Board of Directors chair. The organization hosts events and speakers focused on gratitude, reflection, and positive social change. Based in St. Helena, Lux Forum has positioned itself as a venue for public-facing discussion in a region whose civic identity has long been tied to agriculture, hospitality, and a dense network of faith-based and community organizations.

How Lux Forum Shapes Civic Conversation in Napa Valley

The organization’s stated mission centers on three concepts: gratitude, reflection, and positive social change. Its format is event-driven, with programming built around speakers and discussions rather than publication or advocacy. The aim is to create space for considered public conversation across topics that touch civic life, faith, education, and community.

A thought-leadership organization of this kind occupies a different position than a service nonprofit or an advocacy group. It is not delivering programs or pressing a single agenda. Its work is in the convening: bringing people together to engage with ideas that may not have an obvious venue elsewhere. The events function as a way to formalize discussion among community members across professional and civic sectors.

The organization’s geographic location in St. Helena matters to its character. St. Helena is a small city with a long civic tradition, and Lux Forum’s events draw on that context, situating their conversations in a place where community identity is already strong and where institutional and individual networks already overlap. The format leans on intentional curation of speakers and topics rather than a fixed editorial direction, which gives the organization flexibility to engage with the questions that feel most relevant in a given season.

Background Behind the Founding

White’s path to founding Lux Forum runs through higher education, regional entrepreneurship, and decades of civic involvement. She is a graduate of Westmont College in Santa Barbara, where she earned degrees in French and Sociology. She has served on Westmont’s Board of Trustees since 2011, a position that connects her continued institutional commitment to her own undergraduate alma mater.

Her name is listed on the College’s published Board of Trustees page.

Her broader professional record, including current roles and prior positions, is publicly available on her LinkedIn profile.

Her personal connection to Napa Valley runs deep. Born in San Francisco, she spent summers and weekends as a child on her family’s ranch and vineyards near St. Helena. She has been a longtime Napa Valley resident as an adult and has built her professional and civic life in the region.

Her professional record in Napa Valley spans several enterprises. She is the CEO and owner of Horse Rock Olive Oil, a small-batch estate olive oil brand based on the White family’s ranch near St. Helena. The brand operates at deliberately small scale: approximately 50 olive trees on the ranch produce two to three tons of olives per harvest, bottled in Glen Ellen, Sonoma Valley, and certified extra virgin. The trees survived the Atlas Peak Fire, a fact the brand cites as central to its identity and continuity.

She is also a co-founder of Stitches Medical, a privately held company focused on adaptive clothing and healthcare solutions, and of WearTootles.com, which produces specialized medical clothing for individuals with intestinal challenges. These ventures share an orientation toward purpose-driven enterprise rather than scale-driven enterprise. Each one addresses a specific population or need rather than a mass market.

Lux Forum sits within this same orientation: an organization designed for considered impact rather than broad reach. The founding of a thought-leadership organization extends a pattern visible across White’s other commitments. It is one more institution built for sustained engagement rather than for visibility.

A Record of Institutional Commitments

Lux Forum is one of several institutional commitments in White’s civic record. The Westmont trusteeship is one. Her past service as U.S. Pony Club District Commissioner, a role she held for 17 years, is another. The Pony Club work involved sustained mentorship of young people through horsemanship and leadership education, an extension of her own lifelong involvement with riding and the outdoors. She has also served on the Napa Valley Education Foundation Board.

Her philanthropic involvement spans organizations including The Salvation Army, Young Life, Hospice, Queen of the Valley Hospital, and Ag 4 Youth. She and her husband, Dr. Robert White, received The Salvation Army’s Nehemiah Award in recognition of their support for the Napa Culinary Training Program. The award represents the kind of recognition that follows sustained organizational support rather than single donations or short-term visibility.

What is visible across this record is consistency of involvement in faith-based, education, and community-service organizations rather than a single high-profile role. The pattern is one of sustained governance and service commitments across multiple sectors. Lux Forum’s founding extends that pattern by adding a thought-leadership venue to a portfolio already weighted toward governance and service. It is consistent with the broader orientation rather than a departure from it.

Lux Forum’s Place in Napa Valley Civic Life

For a region whose civic identity is closely tied to its agricultural and hospitality economies, the existence of an organization devoted to thought-leadership conversation represents a particular kind of contribution. Lux Forum’s character will be shaped by the quality of the conversations it hosts and the durability of the venue it creates. The pattern visible across its founder’s other institutional commitments is one of sustained engagement rather than short-term involvement. The forum’s continued work in Napa Valley reflects, in concrete terms, the broader thesis that informs White’s professional and civic life: that commerce, community, and service are not competing categories but related expressions of the same underlying orientation.

Information about Lux Forum’s events, current programming, and additional details about Celeste White’s work can be found at celestewhite.org/contact.