Jane Kim
Jane Jungyon Kim is an American attorney and politician, and the first Korean American elected official in San Francisco. She represented San Francisco's District 6 on the Board of Supervisors between 2011 and 2019. She is a member of San Francisco's Democratic County Central Committee. She is executive director of the California Working Families Party.
Prior to her election to the Board of Supervisors, Kim was a member and then president of the San Francisco Board of Education. In 2016, she ran for the 11th California State Senate District, but lost to Scott Wiener in a run-off election after finishing first place in the primary. She was a candidate for mayor in the 2018 San Francisco mayoral special election, finishing third with 24.03% of the first-round vote.
She was the California political director and national regional political director for Bernie Sanders' 2020 presidential campaign. In 2026, Kim announced she would run in the 2026 California Insurance Commissioner election.
Early life and education
Jane Kim was born in Manhattan on July 9, 1977, to South Korean parents who immigrated to the U.S. from Seoul in 1971.Kim grew up learning both the English and Korean languages. Her mother owned a store selling women's clothing. Her father joined Kiss Products, a global cosmetics company, while she was in college. At age 14, Kim began studying taekwondo, eventually earning a black belt. She was involved with community activism, especially the issue of homelessness. While attending Spence School, a New York prep school, she stopped reciting the Pledge of Allegiance in her teens—she rejected the Pledge words "with liberty and justice for all," because she saw that LGBT people were not treated equally.
Kim graduated from Stanford University with a bachelor's degree in political science and Asian American studies. She settled in San Francisco and attended UC Berkeley School of Law. Kim earned a J.D. degree and was admitted to the State Bar of California in 2009.
Career
After graduating from Stanford, Kim worked as a Fellow at Greenlining Institute in San Francisco and then as a youth community organizer at Chinatown Community Development Center. Reverend Norman Fong, who interviewed her, took a risk in hiring Kim as she was not Chinese American and did not speak Chinese but “she won him over.” Kim successfully led a youth volunteer and leadership program in San Francisco Chinatown for six years. Through her community organization efforts, she met power broker Rose Pak.In 2005 Kim was elected president of San Francisco People's Organization, made up of many notable San Francisco activists and organizers. SFPO worked against several California ballot propositions in November 2005, and assisted with health care and affordable housing measures for San Franciscans through 2006.
San Francisco Board of Education
In 2003 while campaigning for Green Party mayoral candidate Matt Gonzalez, Kim observed that Asian Americans were not well represented in San Francisco politics despite the size of its population. In 2004, she decided to run for the San Francisco Board of Education. In a field of 12 candidates seeking four seats, Kim came in seventh place; her bid failed in part because she was a member of the minority Green Party and did not have the backing of the Democratic Party. In 2006, Kim mounted a stronger campaign and she came in first in a field of 15 candidates seeking three seats. Kim was the top vote getter in every district except Marina/Cow Hollow, West of Twin Peaks and Castro/Noe Valley. In 2007, she became the first Korean American elected official in San Francisco. Kim's election was part of a more liberal shift in the school board joining Fellow Green Mark Sanchez, Eric Mar, and Kim-Shree Maufas.In 2006, the school board took up the issue of whether to continue the 90-year-old Junior Reserve Officers' Training Corps program in San Francisco high schools. The board voted to phase out the JROTC program over two years. In December 2006, previous to taking office, Kim learned about a death threat against her that was sent from a JROTC cadet to his friend on Facebook. The cadet had also used MySpace to threaten a high school girl who argued prominently against JROTC. Kim spoke to the cadet herself and reported that he sincerely regretted his actions. Kim took the position that the JROTC program should not be hosted by San Francisco as long as the U.S. military continued its "don't ask, don't tell" policy. In June 2008 Kim and Norman Yee submitted a proposal to accept JROTC programs as optional after-school activities, without giving students physical education credit toward graduation. In October, Kim proposed an alternative program called Student Emergency Response Volunteers that would train students in emergency preparedness and disaster relief. The bid to remove or replace JROTC failed in a 3–4 vote held in May 2009.
In March 2008, Kim and Sanchez traveled to Israel as members of the U.S. Green Party to investigate whether the party should continue to support the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions program targeting Israel for its occupation of Palestine. Kim complimented a youth village program near Haifa, recommending its director be brought to San Francisco to help train educators.
Kim re-registered with the Democratic Party in 2008 after Barack Obama was elected president.
In 2010, she was elected president of the Board of Education. As board president, Kim had to negotiate statewide budget cuts that resulted in a two-year shortfall of $113 million for San Francisco schools. She authored and led the first district-wide Restorative Justice Program to address the disproportionate suspension and expulsions of African American students and won a pilot to establish ethnic studies classes in all San Francisco public high schools. Kim stated that the program will “be a cost savings to the district if we’re able to retain more students” and that there is “flexibility to find funding” in a budget of $400 million.
San Francisco Supervisor
Kim had lived in various neighborhoods of San Francisco, including Polk Gulch and the Sunset. She moved to District 6 in 2009 and subsequently ran in the San Francisco Board of Supervisors election to fill the seat being vacated by Supervisor Chris Daly. District 6 includes Union Square, Tenderloin, Civic Center, Mid-Market, Cathedral Hill, South of Market, South Beach, Mission Bay, Treasure Island, Yerba Buena Island, and Alcatraz. Kim announced her candidacy in January 2010, then she kicked off her campaign in June, at a party attended by former mayors Art Agnos and Willie Brown, as well as the President of the Board of Supervisors, David Chiu, who knew Kim from having shared housing for more than two years. Kim ran against several candidates, including Theresa Sparks, who was endorsed by mayor Gavin Newsom, and liberal Debra Walker, who was endorsed by the Democratic Party and most labor unions. When Brown contributed $5000 to the Kim campaign, some of her progressive supporters questioned whether Kim was being supported by a political machine. Kim's campaign was seen as having the approval of Rose Pak, but the California Democratic machine of the 1960s and '70s was "dormant".Kim won the race for supervisor in an upset victory. When she was sworn in she became the first Korean American supervisor in the nation. She told KoreAm magazine that without the backing of labor unions and the media, and with her own Democratic Party endorsing her opponent, the only strategy she had available was the "old-fashioned" one of visiting as many constituents as possible. This was called Kim's "Fifty-Nine Precinct Strategy" because of the many neighborhoods of the district that were targeted. Less support came from the Korean community, who participated little in the election, than from Chinese American supporters, especially senior citizens in Chinatown, and a broad base of San Francisco youth.
Pledge of Allegiance
Kim stood up during the Pledge of Allegiance at Board of Supervisors meetings but refused to recite it in keeping with the decision she had made in her youth. Within a few weeks of being sworn in, her silence gained the attention of local and national news media. She said in 2011 that the words "liberty and justice for all" were not yet a reality for many in the United States including communities of color, the LGBT community, immigrants and women. Kim said she was committed to "helping our nation achieve those ideals." On July 10, 2013, following the Supreme Court decision in United States v. Windsor, declaring unconstitutional the federal Defense of Marriage Act, Kim recited the Pledge along with the other supervisors. Kim said that, for her, DOMA had "symbolized th inequity" of American justice.Twitter tax break
Twitter is an online social networking service that was headquartered in District 6 on Folsom Street when Kim took office. In January 2011, Twitter announced it was considering moving a few miles south to the city of Brisbane because the company was expanding and needed ten times more space. Mayor Ed Lee indicated that he wanted Twitter to stay, so Kim led a team made up of mayoral staffers and Supervisor David Chiu to quickly shape a proposal which she sponsored in early February: Twitter would benefit from a six-year payroll tax exemption on net new jobs if it moved into the neglected and distressed mid-Market Street neighborhood of Kim's district. Talks centered on the company moving to the old Furniture Mart, a large Art Deco office building vacant since 2008. Kim's tax break proposal would apply to any large company willing to settle in the economically depressed area. Observers felt that this, Kim's first proposal as supervisor, signaled a break with her previous progressive record, to show a pro-business aspect. Former supervisor Chris Daly was critical; he said the plan could not help the city's budget shortfall, a serious problem resulting in jobs and services being cut. Agreeing with this assessment, Local 1021 of the Service Employees International Union also opposed the plan. Other businesses expressed anger that they would be unable to take advantage of the tax break. The city Controller's Office reported that the difference between Twitter leaving entirely or moving to mid-Market with the tax break was possibly worth $54 million in added revenue spread over 20 years.In April 2011, the Board of Supervisors voted to approve the payroll tax exemption plan. Two weeks later, Twitter signed a ten-year lease on the Furniture Mart building. The Twitter tax break remained a defining issue in the San Francisco mayoral election of 2011: Incumbent Lee supported the exemption while challenger John Avalos criticized it. Lee retained his seat in the election. By June 2012, Twitter had settled 800 employees into the new location renamed Market Square, and Kim was invited to visit. She posted a photo of Twitter's new "micro health kitchen". Other tech companies such as Spotify and Yammer took advantage of the payroll tax exemption plan.