Kim Thompson

Kim supports capacity building efforts of grassroots groups, organizations and coalitions who desire to address equity through the formation of community land trusts and community-owned land. Most recently, she was executive director of the Community Land Trust of West Marin from 2012-2023. Before that she worked in California’s San Joaquin Valley to build healthy, equitable, and sustainable communities. She also lived in a Southeast Asian refugee neighborhood for years while directing a first-time program to educate refugee residents about their housing rights and led organizing efforts for improved living conditions and affordable housing policy in the city of Fresno. She’s contributed to smart growth initiatives and advocated for cleaner Valley air quality in her role to engage physicians in public health efforts; and has taught university courses on environmental ethics, cultural anthropology, and developed a touring course of major San Joaquin Valley issues. She earned a Masters of Divinity from San Francisco Theological Seminary, has graduate training in anthropology from UC Berkeley, and a certificate of Applied Anthropology from the Tamale Institute of Cross Cultural Studies, Ghana. Find out more about Kim on her LinkedIn page.

As a 2024 Spring Writer-on-the-Edge, Kim said:

It’s a great joy to work in the community land trust movement—one that resists defining land ownership as speculative and exclusionary—and redefines it toward community benefit and stability. What I love most is the stories of people and of a place; the spirit that comes through. My writing explores the places and people I’ve so loved—West Marin, California’s San Joaquin Valley, and East Texas, where my family goes back six generations. In the solitude of writing at the edge, there are sentences waiting to be born that may weave those stories together, rearranging me in the process, and creating another new kinship with the world.