In fall 2024, John Kim was elected to serve on The California Wellness Foundation’s Board of Directors. Since joining Catalyst California (then called Advancement Project Los Angeles) in 2002, Kim has been lifting up the voice and needs of low-income communities of color to transform systems and expand opportunities for all. Through the innovation of new tools and the building of multi-racial coalitions, he has overseen the development of critical movement infrastructure used across the state and directly engaged in campaigns to redirect billions in public and private dollars.
He was initially hired as the Founding Director of the Healthy City Project, which established the model of what online, GIS mapping technology could do to support grassroots advocacy, governmental and philanthropic strategic planning, and service referrals. The technology was leveraged by thousands of users to inform budgetary and programmatic decision-making in fields spanning community health to education while also transforming how California approached decennial processes like the Census and redistricting. The breadth of the technological innovations and advocacy-focused mission of Healthy City was featured in publications such as The Economist and Fast Company and inspired dozens of similar initiatives across the state.
He was then promoted to Managing Director of Advancement Project Los Angeles where he anchored the strategic planning process to transform it into a statewide organization and partnered with leadership to nearly triple its budget and staffing. He also supported the Founding Co-Directors in launching a wide range of new initiatives from early care and education/K-12 financing, gang intervention/prevention, and police reform. He was eventually promoted by the Board of Directors to a full Co-Director of the Advancement Project alongside Molly Munger, Connie Rice, Penda Hair, Judith Browne Dianis and Steve English in 2008.
As the organization continued to grow, he was appointed the sole Executive Director of the California office in 2014 where he oversaw a second major strategic pivot for the organization from its positioning as an independent, “elite” policy shop to a much more interconnected, and accountable movement institution. And in 2022, he partnered with Executive Director of Advancement Project National, Judith Browne Dianis, to restructure the offices into two stand-alone organizations and rebranded the California office as Catalyst California.
Since the strategic pivot the organization has seen a tremendous growth in the number of initiatives that were co-designed in solidarity with movement partners from around the state, with an accompanying growth in the annual budget. Examples include:
- The design and launch of the STUDENT EQUITY NEED INDEX campaign alongside the Community Coalition and InnerCity Struggle, which now directs over $700 million per year of the Los Angeles Unified School District’s budget (on top of the base allocation to all schools) to the highest-need school sites. This is now one of the largest models of a permanent budget equity tool anywhere in the country.
- RACE COUNTS, a first-of-its-kind initiative that examines racial disparity, performance, and population impact in each of California’s 58 counties and its largest cities. With his visionary leadership, RACE COUNTS engaged hundreds of community stakeholders across the state and was featured in The New York Times and CityLab, as well as radio and print media across the state.
- COVID RESPONSE AND ARPA (American Rescue Plan Act) – In the first few months of the pandemic, Catalyst California partnered with nearly 20 local community organizing groups to be the first to publicly map and set the narrative around the racial disparities in the initial spread of COVID. he was quickly asked by county leaders to anchor a multi-sector workgroup that immediately oversaw the equitable distribution of personal protective equipment and millions in funding to community-based in the most impacted neighborhoods in the County. This work eventually led to a coalition fighting for and winning $1.9 billion in federal ARPA funding to be allocated to those same neighborhoods using an equity-based data framework built by Catalyst California and our partners.
Beyond his work at Catalyst California, he has been appointed to several boards and commissions at the local, county and state levels:
- California Budget and Policy Center
- California Calls
- Inaugural member of the California Racial Equity Commission
Prior to his work at Advancement Project, he was both a youth organizer and cultural worker/performer in traditional Korean drumming in the East Bay, focusing mostly on building multi-racial alliances and visibility and power for underrepresented communities in the Bay Area. While serving as the Executive Director at the Korean Community Center of the East Bay, he was recognized by KQED Channel 9 as the 2001 Local Hero of the Year Award, and by then-Oakland Mayor Jerry Brown with the proclamation of a “John K. Kim Day.”
He began his organizing/movement work as an undergrad at UC Berkeley and was able to complete a BA degree in Interdisciplinary Studies Field (focused on Music Cognition and Aesthetics) and nearly completed a second Bachelors in Psychology.