Kim Smith
Kim Smith is the founder of the Pahara Institute. She is widely recognized as an innovative and entrepreneurial leader in education and was featured in Newsweek’s report on the “Women of the 21st Century” as “the kind of woman who will shape America’s new century.” Immediately prior to the Pahara Institute, Kim was co-founder of Bellwether Education Partners, a nonprofit organization working to improve educational outcomes for low-income students.
Earlier in her career she served as a founding team member at Teach For America, created and led an AmeriCorps program for community-based leaders in education, managed a business start-up and completed a brief stint in early online learning at Silicon Graphics. She co-founded and led NewSchools Venture Fund, a philanthropy focused on transforming public education through social entrepreneurship, where she helped to catalyze a new, bipartisan, cross-sector community of entrepreneurial change agents for public education. Kim has helped to incubate numerous education and social change organizations and has served on a range of boards.
As CEO of Pahara, Kim had the vision in 2014 to create a beautiful and inspiring campus to provide a home and ongoing sense of place for leaders working in service to young people. Through partnership, this vision ultimately became Lone Rock Retreat.
She has a BA in political science from Columbia, and an MBA from Stanford, and lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her husband and two daughters.