Kim Miyoshi is a yonsei who has spent the past 25 years elevating youth voice and power and working with organizers in the Bay Area to win campaigns that advance BIPOC community solutions towards equity, justice, and self-determination. She practices at the intersection of visual-narrative strategy, power-building for impacted communities, and culture change.
She led a statewide juvenile justice campaign and a national corporate accountability campaign before moving to an organization that would become her home for almost two decades. Serving as Executive Director of Oakland Kids First (OKF), she coordinated a citywide coalition effort to renew and win another $72M in dedicated funding for youth services over 12 years; co-founded the Justice for Oakland Students community/labor coalition which passed the historic ‘Reparations for Black Students’ policy; and supported a youth coalition campaign that successfully lowered the voting age for school board elections in Oakland. Her work with OKF created a model that helped shift the field of education justice to include youth engagement and culture change organizing as core strategies for school transformation.
Drawing on her family’s history of mass incarceration and displacement during WW2 in Manzanar and Poston concentration camps, she co-founded Japanese American Families for Justice to support intergenerational healing and cultural organizing through actions to abolish ICE and end anti-Black racism. Kim is a hobbyist who enjoys doing graphic design, nail art, watercolor painting, DIY crafting, interior design, and modern calligraphy