Kelli King-Jackson

A national network of funders supporting strategic, innovative, and effective solutions to homelessness

Kelli King-Jackson

Coach and Strategic Advisor, Love X Freedom

Funders Together Board Member

Kelli King-Jackson is a coach and strategic advisor committed to freedom for Black folx. As a coach, she prioritizes working with Black women and other women of color leading in white spaces. In her consulting work, she works to make the nonprofit, philanthropic, government, and corporate sectors safer for Black women.

Kelli is a deep listener and consistent champion for my clients. She believes we must all do the work of freedom at the personal, interpersonal, or organizational levels. As such, her work centers on liberating material, spiritual, and other resources needed for leaders of color to dream, strategize and create a just world. Kelli does this by asking expansive and incisive questions to understand and shake what holds us back. By connecting to the wisdom and talent embodied within us, she helps individuals and organizations to navigate complex systems and structures in ways that are rooted in wholeness, healing, and possibility.

Kelli is an ACC level coach with the International Coaching Federation and a 21/64 certified philanthropy advisor. She has worked in the nonprofit sector for over twenty years. Kelli currently serves on the boards of Funders Together to End Homelessness, Funders for LGBTQ Issues, and Bethel Houston UCC. Most recently Kelli was Vice President of Programs and Community Engagement at The Simmons Foundation (Houston, TX). Prior to joining the Foundation, she led a nationally recognized school-based health outreach initiative in Texas and consulted with BIPOC-led small nonprofits across the country.

Kelli is actively engaged in my local community often hosting discussions on upcoming elections, leadership, and ways to support local, Black-led organizations. She is a speaker, avid writer, and occasional crafter. As an introvert, time alone is her love language. Her favorite job is loving on my people.

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We joined Funders Together because we believe in the power of philanthropy to play a major role in ending homelessness, and we know we have much to learn from funders across the country.

-Christine Marge, Director of Housing and Financial Stability at United Way of Greater Los Angeles

I am thankful for the local partnerships here in the Pacific Northwest that we’ve been able to create and nurture thanks to the work of Funders Together. Having so many of the right players at the table makes our conversations – and all of our efforts – all the richer and more effective.

-David Wertheimer, Deputy Director at Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation

Very often a lack of jobs and money is not the cause of poverty, but the symptom. The cause may lie deeper in our failure to give our fellow citizens a fair chance to develop their own capacities, in a lack of education and training, in a lack of medical care and housing, in a lack of decent communities in which to live and bring up their children.

-President Lyndon B. Johnson, 1964 State of the Union Address

Funders Together has given me a platform to engage the other funders in my community. Our local funding community has improved greatly to support housing first models and align of resources towards ending homelessness.

-Leslie Strnisha, Vice President at Sisters of Charity Foundation of Cleveland

Our family foundation convenes local funders and key community stakeholders around strategies to end homelessness in Houston. Funders Together members have been invaluable mentors to us in this effort, traveling to our community to share their expertise and examples of best practices from around the nation.

-Nancy Frees Fountain, Managing Director at The Frees Foundation