Kim Klein

Kim Klein’s journey to become a pioneer in teaching small nonprofits how to raise big money started in seminary where her field placement took her to one of the first domestic violence shelters in the country, La Casa de Las Madres, in San Francisco, CA. Starting by asking churches and synagogues to support the shelter, Kim realized that the taboo in our culture about talking about money made it hard to ask for donations. As a development director at the Coalition for the Medical Rights of Women, Kim helped them decrease their dependence on foundation funding by building a successful individual donor program.

Finding that very little information existed about how small grassroots social justice groups could raise money from their communities, she decided (in collaboration with her friend Lisa Honig) to start a magazine, the Grassroots Fundraising Journal. Kim wrote Fundraising for Social Change, now in its 7th Edition, in continuous print since 1985.

Kim has deep commitments to the core issues–environmental sustainability, racial and social justice, and economic equity–that are at the heart of the Mesa Refuge’s mission. In particular, she has been a passionate advocate for just tax policies and a return to the principle of building up “the commons,” our shared environmental and other resources that we should not rely on the free market and private sector to protect and supply.

Her political passion is helping people understand tax policy, and particularly to encourage nonprofits to work for fair and just tax policy. She was part of a team called “Nonprofits Talking Taxes” that developed and then implemented a training program for nonprofits which we took all over California. The purpose of it was to help nonprofit staff, board and volunteers understand the values that underlie taxes and to encourage nonprofits to take positions on ballot measures and to sponsor town halls and candidate forums for their constituents.

She and her partner owned a publishing company (Chardon Press) which became part of Wiley Publishers in 2001. Kim was a lecturer at the Haas School of Business and the School of Social Welfare at UC Berkeley until she retired in 2020. She lives with her wife and two cats in Point Reyes Station, around the corner from the Mesa Refuge.