Kathleen King
Kathleen King is a mission-driven child advocate, public policy leader and strategist committed to ensuring an America inclusive of all children and families. Kathleen brings to ChildFocus a particular expertise in child health policy and in driving child-centered policy change in a holistic, multi-disciplinary way.
Kathleen joins ChildFocus after nearly 15 years at the Children's Defense Fund where she most recently served as Policy Director and led the development and implementation of CDF’s national policy and advocacy strategy to advance and implement child-focused laws and policies to ensure all children access to the resources, opportunities and supports that enable them to thrive. She has experience working on a wide-range of issues impacting children and families, including child poverty, health care, hunger and nutrition, housing and homelessness, child welfare, early childhood education, K-12 education, youth justice, gun violence prevention, and immigration, across all branches of the federal government, including administrative and regulatory advocacy to ensure effective policy implementation. She served as a member of CDF's Senior Leadership Team and coordinated national policy and advocacy efforts with CDF's State/Regional offices, direct service programs, and with mission-aligned peers and coalitions. For more than a decade before that, Kathleen provided key leadership for CDF's health policy portfolio, during which she developed a particular expertise in issues related to Medicaid, CHIP, and the Affordable Care Act; coordinated campaign and implementation work; and managed a multi-state child health school-based outreach and enrollment effort.
Kathleen lives in Washington, D.C. with her husband and their two daughters. She grew up outside of Chicago and is a graduate of Brown University with a degree with honors in Community Health and Latin American Studies. While living in Providence, R.I. Kathleen worked for Health Leads (formerly Project HEALTH), supervising a team of volunteers to staff a Help Desk at Hasboro Children's Hospital to connect low-income families with critical social and economic resources. Kathleen went on to establish the first Help Desk site in Chicago at the Friend Family Health Center on Chicago's South Side, piloting a new service model that provided clinic families with information and referral services as well as on-site advocacy which was later expanded to additional community health centers within the University of Chicago Hospital network. Kathleen also spent time providing policy and research analysis for the Healthy Schools Campaign.
Kathleen enjoys being outside, particularly when it includes running, hiking and skiing. She is an avid reader, likes to cook and loves a travel adventure.