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 California) 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.
Kim 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 California 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, Kim 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.
Prior to his work at Advancement Project, Kim 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 bachelor’s degree in psychology.