Kimberly was born & raised in Photo by Amy Seidman (2006)
Kimberly has many identities, as most cultural hybrids and women tend to have. Some of the hats she wears include Mother, Wife, Daughter, Sister, Aunt, Friend, Student, Educator, Applied Researcher, Communicator, Global Citizen, Immigrant, Cultural Broker, Social Justice Advocate, Environmentalist, Peace Activist, Writer, Hypnotherapist (!), Spiritual Warrior, Volunteer, and Active Community Member.
Born into a family of educators and social entrepreneurs, Kimberly started working with children and youth while still a youth in El Salvador. She quickly realized the power of raising advancing cross-cultural harmony and breaking down barriers of prejudice and racism by teaching monolingual children a second language. Starting as a bilingual spanish/english teachers' assistant for K-8, she was quickly promoted to lead teacher and over time received teaching credentials from the states of Arizona and California.
Since 1994, she has taught second language acquisition, culture and eco-awareness to infants, preschool, K-12, and college students. She has developed, implemented & taught curriculum & educational programs for Spanish immersion, ELL, Latin culture, social responsibility, including an international cultural immersion program for families and youth groups.
From 2004-2007, in response to some inequalities she witnessed in Costa Rica as Senior Program Director of a sustainble development & conservation organization and drawing on her training as an anthropologist and historian, she stepped away from the educational sector a bit and focused on training CEO's and board members of NGO's and corporations working in Latin America on how to integrate in a responsible and respectful way with their Latin American counterparts and the local communities impacted by their projects and business practices.
Thus, in addition to her experience in the educational sector, she has applied experience in the areas of socially responsible program development & management, cross-cultural communications, cultural brokerage, stakeholder engagement, cross-cultural marketing, & social pillar analysis for projects in the public, nonprofit and private sectors. Special focus on transnational triple bottom line businesses, educational communities (i.e. school districts), conservation/environmental nonprofits & international cooperation projects. Basically, she is called in to help them establish cooperative & sustainable cross-cultural relationships with their Latin American stakeholders by analysing their approach & then providing hands on support to help them communicate more effectively across linguistic & cultural barriers.
In 2007 she started a social enterprise, Instituto Conexiones, to continue this area of her work and has since expanded it to a range of educational programs and services related to advancing sustainable, peaceful and equitable globalization.
Upon becoming a new mother again she has been refocusing most of her energy on working with children again, thus she added a special program for children to the offering of Instituto Conexiones. The most recent addition, in pilot stage, is called "Mucho Mas! Spanish Immersion thru Art, Movement and More!" for children 1-10 years old.
Everything Kimberly does is strategically focused on helping connect humanity to each other, their environment & their inner selves. An eclectic and multi-disciplinary thinker, she does this through various applied channels, including helping people on an individual basis (she is a hypnotherapist at night). Her education, certifications, and work experiences reflect this wide range of work.
