Name: Kirin Kumar
Pronouns: he/him
Title: Director for Climate and Disaster Resilience
Email: [email protected]

Kirin Kumar joins Northern California Grantmakers as Director for Climate and Disaster Resilience. Since 2019, Kirin has served as the Deputy Director of Equity and Government Transformation at the California Strategic Growth Council, within the Governor’s Office of Planning and Research. In that role, Kirin oversaw a portfolio of capacity building, racial justice, and climate change research initiatives that support community resilience and transform government to enable an intersectional and community-first approach to tackling the climate crisis. As a state grantmaker, Kirin oversaw a $25 million upstream portfolio, funding movement building organizations, tribes, local governments, and coalitions of multi-sector partners to shift power and increase regional capacity to advance climate justice. Translating lessons learned from partnering with communities on the ground, Kirin has led several statewide efforts to shift policy and practice to remove barriers to access, including California’s first ever advanced pay pilot policy and formal cabinet-level commitments to capacity building investments as central to the state’s climate change agenda.

Prior to his role with the Strategic Growth Council, Kirin was the Executive Director of WALKSacramento (now CivicThread) a regional transportation and health equity nonprofit. In that role, Kirin worked to weave health and racial equity into local land use planning policy, facilitate community-led planning, and increase the region’s competitiveness for critical infrastructure funding.

Kirin received a degree in Environmental Policy and Planning from UC Davis. He lives in Sacramento and when not working, can be found exploring California’s parks and wildlife, overcommitting to ambitious recipes, and honing his pandemic inspired woodworking hobby.