March Membership Spotlight: Kim Burgess
Are you still wondering who your fellow Net Impact Seattle members are, what they do for a living and what plans they have for their careers? Well read on and find out more about our featured member of the month, Kim Burgess. After you’ve read more about Kim, don’t stop there. Send an email to niseattle@gmail.com and let us know that you want to share your story too.
What do you do and why did you join Net Impact?
I currently work on vaccine access & delivery projects at PATH (global health nonprofit). I also work with Museum Without Walls (MWW) as a Program Associate. At MWW, I take students on Civil Rights history tours through the American South where they hear stories first-hand from leaders and activists of the Civil Rights Movement. I lead students in discussions on racism and intolerance, politics and civic engagement. I am also working on a Holocaust history program that will take place this summer.
Before moving to Seattle, I worked with United Way of New York City. I had the chance to work on some exciting partnerships with Wall Street companies, and saw first-hand how an impact could be made in the community through smart business investments and cross-sector collaboration. Through this experience, I began to explore the field to learn about different strategies and approaches that companies were taking to care for our communities and environment.
I joined Net Impact because I wanted to continue learning about innovative Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) initiatives and to connect with people who shared that interest. I then decided to join the Net Impact Seattle Board because I wanted to be a part of providing opportunities for people like me to learn about CSR and about how to be more effective in the workplace and in life.
What have you caused to change or participated in changing that you are very excited about?
At United Way, I worked hard to move our organization’s relationship with some of our corporate partners from a simple philanthropic exchange where we connected once a year during the employee giving campaign, to a deeper relationship of mutual learning and partnership where we explored together how to leverage our strengths to address issues in the community that were priorities to all of us. This work required risk-taking, imagination, negotiation and persistence, but it moved us outside the box, and allowed us to support more young people and provide financial stability to more families. Nonprofits and government cannot tackle our critical community needs alone, and I get excited when businesses lead in this area and cross-sector partnerships really work!
In leading students through the Multicultural Scholars Program with Museum Without Walls, I have played a role in deeply changing the lives of young people. Because we bring students from Mercer Island High School (suburban) and Franklin High School (inner-city) together for this program, they not only learn about Civil Rights history and get an understanding of how our country has become what it is today, but they also come away with an understanding of themselves and each other and an ability to communicate and love each other across what can at times feel like a daunting cultural divide. One 16-year-old struck me when she wrote on her program evaluation, “I used to think white people were better than me, but now what I know – what I really know – is that no one person is better than the next.” Another girl from Mercer Island High School recently came back to Museum Without Walls to be a summer intern after going away to college and creating her own major in Human Rights because, as she said, the Multicultural Scholars Program sparked her passion for the subject. “We sat in a room, just a few steps from where Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in 1968 and Rev. Samuel Kyles told us what it was like to be on the balcony with him that day–to hear the gunshots ring out and to see his good friend and hero fall.” The students do not walk away from that the same, and neither do I.