Hi! I'm Stephanie B. Kim (she/her).

I've sat on every side of the table: as a funder distributing millions of dollars in grants, as a program director coordinating hundreds of organizations in the field, as a builder designing the tools and infrastructure that make large-scale, multi-partner initiatives actually work, and as the community partner on the receiving end of someone else's good intentions — a perspective I gained from my first job out of college coordinating international volunteer groups across communities in Mexico, including at the children's home where I lived for a year.

That range is what Good Work Collaborative brings to every engagement: we know what a program looks like from the perspective of the community-based organization doing the work, the funder paying for it, the coalition moving it forward together, and the company or group that wants to help but doesn't always know how.

My builder instinct showed up early. At Upwardly Global, I streamlined a fragmented candidate-onboarding process that was driving attrition, incorporating CRM tools before they were standard in the nonprofit sector. It's where I learned that building better systems was its own form of impact work.

That builder instinct has been the through-line in my career ever since: I'm the person brought in when there's a vision and the resources to pursue it, but no playbook for making it real.

At the Wharton Social Impact Initiative, I organized listening tours and community conversations to build the programming for our nascent organization at a time when the idea of a triple bottom line was still relatively new. I created and managed a consulting fellowship program that paired business school students with companies to think seriously about their social impact and role in their local community, with an eye toward programs that actually helped rather than just looked good.

Then, at a general election campaign in Philadelphia, I managed local canvassing operations for a Get Out the Vote initiative that culminated with over 1,400 volunteers in the final weekend before Election Day. My instinct for building what wasn't there, on a large scale with an audacious timeline, led me to create a canvassing and phone banking tracking tool that gave us the birds'-eye-view perspective to help us cover ground more strategically, efficiently, and keep volunteer packets moving between shifts.

Back in the Bay Area, I carried all of that experience into work related to the decennial census: first at CommunityConnect Labs, where I co-developed, took to market, and implemented multilingual, text-message-based chatbots for census education and field worker recruitment across seven states. Then, at United Way Bay Area, I was hired to build their $3.7M "Bay Area Counts 2020" census outreach campaign from the ground up, coordinating 7 counties, 18+ funders, and 150+ partner organizations through a once-a-decade count that ran during a pandemic, an active wildfire season, and a national reckoning on racial justice, all with an unprecedented, moving federal deadline. Tracking census self-response data in real time and issuing rapid-response grants to the neighborhoods needing additional resources planted the seed for what later became the Ecosystem Field Guide.

Whether it's a census campaign, a guaranteed income pilot, or a tool for mapping community organizations, the way I build is the same. I start by convening the people involved and listening for the full range of perspectives, voices, and goals, so that people feel heard and the work reflects what they shared. I keep equity at the center of the design and help diverse goals become a common vision. Then I stay for the harder part: turning that vision into real programming and concrete implementation.

I founded Good Work Collaborative after years of exploring, interrogating, deconstructing, and reconstructing what I want "Good Work" to mean in my life, my community, and this world. This concept of Good Work, framed below, is the foundation from which I show up for my clients, partners, colleagues, and most importantly for myself.

Thanks for reading — I hope we get a chance to do Good Work together.

Contact Stephanie   Read more about my census and civic engagement work →   Visit my LinkedIn page →