Kim Smith
Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer, Bellwether Education Partners
Kim Smith
Kim Smith is co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of Bellwether Education Partners. 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." After being a founding team member at Teach For America, she went on to found and lead an AmeriCorps program for community-based leaders in education, as well as a business start-up, and worked in marketing for online learning. After completing her MBA at Stanford, Kim co-founded and led NewSchools Venture Fund, a venture philanthropy firm focused on transforming public education, where she helped to create a new, bipartisan, cross-sector community of entrepreneurial change agents.
Kim has helped to incubate numerous education and social change organizations and served on a range of boards, which currently include: NewSchools, Education Sector, and Giving Assets. She has authored a number of publications about the entrepreneurial education landscape, including “What Is Educational Entrepreneurship?” in Education Entrepreneurship: Realities, Challenges, Possibilities, “Social Purpose Capital Markets in K–12” in The Future of Educational Entrepreneurship: Possibilities for School Reform, “Creating Responsive Supply in Education” in More Than Just Schools: Rethinking the Demand for Educational Entrepreneurship and “Innovation in Education: Problems and Opportunities.” Kim is based in the San Francisco Bay Area, where she lives with her husband and two daughters.