Announcing Kirin Kumar as Director for Climate and Disaster Resilience
NCG is excited to announce Kirin Kumar (he/him) as its Director for Climate and Disaster Resilience.
As a part of the Strategic Initiatives team, Kirin is an integral member of Philanthropy California’s disaster response team. As both a former nonprofit director and most recently overseeing a $25 million state funding portfolio with the California Strategic Growth Council, Kirin brings experience investing in and supporting environmental justice organizations, tribes, local governments, and coalitions of multi-sector partners to shift power and increase regional capacity to advance climate justice.
Kirin will lead NCG’s climate and disaster resilience efforts focusing on transforming practice and investment while serving as a statewide data sharing and coordination hub when disasters occur. By moving philanthropic strategy for disaster response upstream towards resilience, the sector can center power and capacity building in communities affected by the impacts of climate change. The work includes policy, advocacy, and program development, philanthropic network management, public-private partnership coordination, as well as technical assistance to members.
"Kirin’s deep on-the-ground and systems-level experience will be instrumental in advancing the work on resilience and building community power which is key to changing the dynamics around disasters," said Vice President of Strategic Initiatives Steve Barton. "His insights and knowledge will be key in our efforts to expand philanthropic investment to communities that have been historically under-resourced to issues of climate change."
Kirin’s career has involved deeply collaborative work to better align sectors and catalyze systems change to ensure that our collective work to fight climate change centers the most marginalized Californians. His work has included formalizing and deepening the state’s commitment to capacity building, leading policy change efforts to remove barriers to access and align climate and health strategies, and partnering with movement building organizations to increase access to critical climate and disaster funding. When asked about his new role Kirin shared, “NCG’s growing climate and disaster resilience team represents an opportunity for California to align funders across all sectors supporting frontline communities. Doing this will ensure that communities not only have the funding to respond to disaster, but the resources, partnerships, and power to build long-term resilience and racial justice. Given the widespread attention on addressing climate change, philanthropy can play an important role in moving from economic models to reparative systems supporting communities to self-determine their own solutions.”
Kirin’s experience investing in and building partnerships between community-based organizations and funders, and translating lessons learned to shift policy and practice will directly support the progress of NCG’s evolving work. You can learn more about Kirin’s experience here.
Interested in meeting Kirin or have questions about how to partner with us in this work? Get in touch.