Kim Williams-Pulfer, Ph.D., is an independent scholar and the principal consultant of KWP Research Strategies LLC.
Kim has worked as a researcher, educator, and community-based advisor for over ten years. She earned her Ph.D. in Philanthropic Studies with a minor in Caribbean Studies at the Indiana Lilly Family School of Philanthropy. From 2023 to 2024, she is an American Council of Learned Societies Fellow (ACLS), and from 2022 to 2023, she was also an ACLS Leading Edge Fellow.
Kim's research has been published in various academic journals and edited volumes, as well as practitioner and popular forums.
She has shared her insights at numerous research conferences and community and nonprofit training sessions, enriching the academic and professional community with her knowledge.
She has also taught and developed training and learning opportunities for various audiences, including nonprofit and philanthropic practitioners, community leaders, civic activists, and artists.
Kim's research and teaching interests also reflect her personal journey. Growing up in The Bahamas among community leaders, she was inspired to reconsider how identity, history, and its legacies shape philanthropy and civil society.
Her new book Get Involved: Stories of Bahamian Civil Society (Rutgers University Press, June 2024) combines her training, insights, and community-grounded research to explore the idea of 'philanthropy from below.'
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I was drawn to the study of philanthropy, civil society and the third sector because I sense its force in my own life and in my understanding of my identity, especially growing up in The Bahamas and as a Black woman.
Articles
Evolution not Revolution: Strategy, Learning, and Evaluation in The California Endowment’s Building Healthy Communities Initiative, The Center for Evaluation Innovation, September 2023
Uncovering philanthropy in the Caribbean, Identities Journal, August 2022
Liberating the Archive, Emancipating Philanthropy: Philanthropic Archival Layering as a Critical Historical Approach for Researching Voluntary Action in Marginalized Communities, VOLUNTAS: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations, September 2021
Muslim philanthropy and civil society in the Caribbean and The Bahamas, Philanthropy in the Muslim World, 2023
Reassessing philanthropic cartographies: the Caribbean lens, Global Studies in Culture and Power, October 2018
Securing a More Abundant Life: The Indianapolis Phyllis Wheatley YWCA, 1910s–1959, with Nancy Marie Robertson and Joseph L. Tucker Edmonds, Indiana Humanities
When Bain Town Woman Catch A Fire, Even the Devil Run: The Bahamian Suffrage Movement as National and Cultural Development, Voluntas: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations, June 2016
21st Century Strategic Planning: Design Thinking as a Supplemental Process, publicINreview, 2012
Past Projects
The Black Center: Tracing the Strategies and Capacity of African Diasporic Arts and Cultural Networks
ACLS Leading Edge Fellowships, 2021
Appointed to The Hurston/Wright Foundation for the project “Measuring Success and Charting Our Future.”
