Kim Dennis is chair of the DonorsTrust Board of Directors and serves as a philanthropic advisor. From 1996 until its sunsetting in 2025, Kim was president and CEO of the Searle Freedom Trust, a grantmaking foundation established by the late Daniel C. Searle to support public policy research. For five of those years, Kim also directed the National Research Initiative, a Searle-funded program of the American Enterprise Institute that expanded AEI’s work with outside scholars. Kim first began working in the grantmaking arena in 1980 as a staffer for the John M. Olin Foundation. Later, she became the first executive director of the Philanthropy Roundtable and co-founded DonorsTrust. Kim has served on the boards of the Arthur N. Rupe Foundation, the Beth and Ravenel Curry Foundation, the Earhart Foundation, the W. H. Brady Foundation, the Philanthropy Roundtable, the Property and Environment Research Center, the American Enterprise Institute, and George Mason University.
