Michelle MiJung Kim (she/her) believes “every day, we have an opportunity to choose who we want to be and live our lives in alignment with our values.” As a queer immigrant Korean American woman entrepreneur, activist, speaker, writer, and author of the upcoming book, The Wake Up: Closing the Gap Between Good Intentions and Real Change (Fall 2021), Kim’s life work embodies her ethos. Starting her career in both the tech and management consulting industries, she witnessed the fear and insecurity experienced at the top levels of management and their inability to embrace transformational change from within so that DE&I efforts aren’t merely a “checked box.” Her experiences led her to become co-founder and CEO of Awaken, a leading provider of interactive equity and inclusion education programs, where she and her team of majority BIPOC educators have consulted hundreds of top-level organizations in the corporate, non-profit, and governmental worlds to spark meaningful, actionable, and long-lasting change for the betterment of their entire workforces.
In her book and her lectures, Kim shares foundational principles that go deeper than today’s mainstream concepts of “diversity and inclusion” to help management, leaders, and employee groups enact true allyship and change. Not shying away from controversial or uncomfortable topics such as “cancel culture” and the unspoken yet widespread inadequacy many feel when trying to embrace DE&I efforts, Kim’s approach is relatable, educational, prescriptive, and powerful. She has been a lifelong social justice activist and has served on a variety of organizations such as the San Francisco LGBTQ Speakers Bureau, San Francisco Human Rights Commission’s Advisory Committee, LYRIC nonprofit’s Board of Directors, and Build Tech We Trust Coalition. Kim currently serves on the board of Asian Americans for Civil Rights and Equality (AACRE). Her work has appeared on world-renowned platforms such as Harvard Business Review, Forbes, The New York Times, and NPR, she’s been named Medium’s Top Writer in Diversity three years in a row, and most recently, selected by LinkedIn as one of the “Top Voices in Racial Equity.” An in-demand speaker, she’s given talks at Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Twitter, Boston Consulting Group, the Commonwealth Club, Upwork, and Stanford University, among many others.
