Service
Work in service of community.
Every portfolio item — across categories — flagged as Qualifying Examination service: Local Kine AI workshops, Health Equity Tracker talks, co-authored posters, and honorarium presentations.
ETL Cohort Hub Portfolio Pipeline, Part 2
The technical build here is the smaller half of the story — the harder part was closing the gap between "I know how to do this" and "someone with zero technical background can actually finish it without me in the room." Most of the real fixes came from watching an actual classmate get stuck, not from re-testing my own assumptions.
Designed and built a portal-embedded wizard that lets non-technical cohort members generate their own QE-compliant portfolio site prompt — no code, no cost, backed by Google Sheets instead of a database they'd have to learn.
Designing a Private, Cross-Cohort Community Platform, Part 1
K1 graduated into a real institutional gap, with no established infrastructure or settled precedent for what the cohort even was yet. Underneath the platform, this case study is really about the leadership calls that come with building for a still-forming community — who gets access, what counts as consent, and how much structure the moment actually called for.
K1 is the first cohort of the Ed.D. in Educational Technology Leadership to graduate under Kean University's acquisition of NJCU — a transitional moment with no established infrastructure for cohort identity, alumni connection, or shared academic tracking. Rather than defaulting to a spreadsheet or a static Google Site (the pattern used by prior cohorts, C1–C13), I set out to build a living, access-controlled web application: a private hub for directory, academic calendar, and coursework tracking, with a path to eventually connect graduates across cohort years.
Building a Zero-Cost Grant Monitoring Microservice
With our three team roles confirmed funded through FY27, I began transitioning into a grants-facing capacity alongside my UX engineering responsibilities, taking on the early infrastructure work that a dedicated grants professional would otherwise own.
Rather than monitoring dozens of foundation websites manually or investing in a grant database subscription that tracked historical awards rather than live open calls, I scoped and built Grant Watchdog: a lightweight automation tool that watches the live web pages of curated funder targets for changes, flags potential new opportunities, and generates a plain-language report the whole team can read.
Social Responsibilities Round Table Talk
From Data to Action: How Open-Source Health Data Platforms Democratize Research and Empower Community Advocacy
Open-source platforms like HET democratize research, transforming health equity from an academic concept to a community tool
Claim What Is Yours: A Trauma-Informed Content System for a High-Stakes Writing Task
Claim What Is Yours was a personal initiative I built to address a gap I'd lived through directly: veterans navigating VA disability claims — particularly for conditions tied to military sexual trauma — face a writing task that is procedurally demanding and, for many, close to impossible to approach directly. I designed a four-part content system (a free introductory guide plus a core guide with two companion modules) to walk survivors from "I don't know where to start" to a completed claim package, using AI tools as a structured writing partner along the way.
Description The core design problem wasn't information delivery — the VA's process is documented; it's the access gap between knowing the steps and being able to sit down and do them. I addressed that in a few specific ways: Staged disclosure architecture. Rather than asking a reader to write their most difficult account first, I sequenced the material so the hardest writing task (the formal MST stressor statement) comes after three lower-stakes "shadow work" exercises — third-person narration, a before/after contrast, and a behavioral-markers inventory — each one building material the reader can carry forward into the harder document, so no one starts at the hardest point. Structured AI-prompting as a writing scaffold. I wrote reusable, fill-in-the-blank prompt templates for every major document in the process (personal statements, nexus letter requests, buddy letter asks), each engineered to produce output in the reader's own voice rather than a generic or clinical one, and each paired with explicit guidance on what to check in the output before using it. Explicit safety and data-literacy guidance. Because the audience would be using AI tools for the first time, often around highly sensitive material, I included direct instruction on what not to disclose to an AI platform, how to evaluate a tool's data practices, and clear crisis-line signposting throughout — treating tool literacy as part of the content's job, not an afterthought. A tiered information structure. Free → core guide → bonus modules, so a reader in crisis could access something immediately useful at zero cost, with a deeper system available for those ready to go further.
Designing CHARLIE — Translating Federal Health Data into Community-Ready Insight
CHARLIE (Community Health Analytics & Responsive Learning Intelligence Engine) is a mobile-first, AI-powered platform I independently designed and built in 2025, over a fixed pre-accelerator program period, to translate federal public health data into plain-language insight for non-technical users — building on a concept a colleague originally proposed in a different technical form.
I took an idea a colleague originally developed — proposed to an outside AI grant program in a resource-intensive, fine-tuned-model form that ultimately wasn't funded — and independently designed and built an entirely different implementation using Bubble's no-code platform and Anthropic's Claude API directly. Completing Bubble's Immerse pre-accelerator program gave the project structured mentorship as I refined it; once the program period ended, the ongoing cost of running an unfunded, solo-maintained no-code app outpaced what made sense for me to sustain, and the engineers who maintain HET itself have since carried the API-integration approach forward into HET's own infrastructure. I chose Anthropic's Claude API specifically because, in a health equity context, algorithmic bias can determine who gets diagnosed, treated, or overlooked — making AI-provider selection itself a trust and equity decision for the users I designed for.
AMA-SHLI MJAF "Data is Power" Session
Allyson Belton, MPH, Director, Education and Training at SHLI and the AMA-SHLI Medical Justice in Advocacy Fellowship team invited me to lead a learning session on data as an advocacy tool, timed deliberately: fellows had just come off an intersession assignment defining their research questions, anticipated data collection needs, and methodology for their capstone projects, and this session was meant to sharpen that thinking before they locked in a direction.
A learning session for AMA-SHLI Medical Justice in Advocacy Fellows on the Health Equity Tracker (HET) — why we built it, a Cobb County vs. Fulton County case study on how historical policy still shapes health outcomes today, and how to translate HET data into arguments that land with communities, policymakers, and providers differently.
Voicing the Data: Partnering with ElevenLabs to Make Health Equity Guides Accessible
In October 2024, the Health Equity Tracker team was accepted into ElevenLabs' Impact Partner Program, which gave us a complimentary year of their Creator plan — 100,000 voice-AI credits a month — in exchange for featuring their logo and tagging them once on social media. We used it to add narrated audio to our "How to Use the Data" guide series, starting with a Gun Violence-focused walkthrough of HET's core visualizations.
A partnership with ElevenLabs' Impact Program brought AI-generated narration to the Health Equity Tracker's "How to Use the Data" guides — starting with a Gun Violence–focused series walking users through each visualization type, using real Georgia data on Black male gun homicide rates to make the how-to concrete.
HIV Health Equity Leadership Development Program
Ben Hammond, Eric Warren, and I presented together as the Health Equity Tracker team for the fifth month of the HIV Health Equity Leadership Development Program — a Gilead Sciences-funded program run in partnership with Xavier University of Louisiana. The session, officially titled "End the Epidemic: Examining the health equity implications of health systems, policy, and data gaps for people living with HIV," used the same "Data is Power" framing SHLI builds into its learning programs, but this time aimed squarely at how HET's HIV-specific data could sharpen the fellows' own policy advocacy work.
A team session for the HIV Health Equity Leadership Development Program: Ben and Eric walked fellows through the Health Equity Tracker's origin and HIV-specific features, and I led an interactive activity connecting the tracker directly to the fellows' own homework and policy advocacy projects, followed by breakout room report-backs.
Community Safety Working Session: Addressing Gun Violence with Atlanta Prevention Advocates
Funded by a grant from the Annie E. Casey Foundation, this was a working session, not a one-way presentation: Ben Hammond, Eric Warren, and I brought unreleased gun violence data reports and a brand-new Policy Hub prototype to a room of Atlanta-area violence-intervention leaders, researchers, and public health partners, and asked them to shape it before we built any further.
A working session previewing the Health Equity Tracker's first gun violence data reports and a new Policy Hub — a public-facing resource I designed to translate crisis data into plain-language context. Community violence-intervention leaders and researchers gave live feedback that directly shaped both.
Health Equity Policy Quad Caucus Session
The National Hispanic Caucus of State Legislators (NHCSL) invited the Satcher Health Leadership Institute to present at the Quad Caucus Health Equity Policy Session during the 2024 Spring Executive Committee and BBA Meeting in Atlanta — a follow-up to Prof. Daniel Dawes' 2021 briefing to the Quad Caucus on COVID-era data gaps affecting communities of color. The session brought Hispanic, Black, Native American, and Asian American/Pacific Islander state legislators together with SHLI leadership to explore how the (by then significantly expanded) Health Equity Tracker could inform state-level health equity legislation.
Kim joined Ben Hammond and Eric Warren (all virtual) to present the Health Equity Tracker segment of the session, following presentations from SHLI's Kennedy-Satcher Center for Mental Health Equity and the "End the Epidemic" HIV policy project. The team walked legislators and Business Board of Advisors partners through the HET's expanded chronic disease, HIV, and behavioral health data, closing with a moderated Q&A. Introductory remarks were delivered by legislative leaders including Rep. Angela Romero (UT), Sen. Mary Kunesh (MN), Del. Kris Valderrama (MD), and Rep. Laura Hall (AL).
Rebuilding NYC Borough Pass — Engineering Around a Vendor We Couldn't Fully See Into
Not tied to a specific course — professional volunteer work via Rita XYZ, a volunteer-run creative/technology/design collective offering apprenticeship-model project experience. Engagement ran November 2023–January 2024, during Kim's tenure as Technology Director (started February 2023).
Led engineering, as Rita XYZ's Technology Director, on a full Webflow rebuild of NYC Borough Pass — directing two engineers to build a purchase experience, CMS, and accessibility layer around Bandwango, a third-party vendor system the team had very limited visibility into.
Google's Product Inclusion & Equity Summit — Health Equity Tracker Demo
Google hosted its inaugural Product Inclusion & Equity (PI&E) Summit, bringing together ~400 leaders from tech, arts, entertainment, nonprofits, and academia. The summit aimed to foster conversations on building with equity at the forefront of product creation. The Health Equity Tracker (HET) was selected as one of the featured demos on the event floor.
Kim traveled to Sunnyvale as part of the HET team to demonstrate the platform to summit attendees. The summit centered "Product Inclusion & Equity" as the ongoing work of building belonging by centering marginalized voices at every phase of product creation. The HET demo showcased how the platform had evolved since its 2021 launch and exemplified equity-centered product design in practice.
WiUX Conference Speaking Engagement — "Stay Woke, Be an A11y"
Women in UX (WiUX) at the University of Washington invited Kim to speak at their 7th Annual Conference on May 8th, 2021. The theme, "Learning Through Design," aimed to address how design can be iterative, inclusive, and drive social impact. WiUX sought speakers who could bridge professional expertise with lived experience to inspire 300+ virtual attendees.
Kim delivered a 15-minute keynote on accessibility and inclusive design, followed by 10 minutes of audience Q&A. Drawing on her background as a sociologist, former foster youth advocate, military veteran with a service-connected disability, and LGBTQIA+ person of color, she reframed disability not as a personal problem but as a reflection of human diversity that strengthens design practice. She presented the concept "Solve for One, Extend to Many" (inspired by Microsoft's inclusive design framework) and shared practical tools (a11y checklist, WAVE evaluation, Self Defined) to help designers implement accessibility in workflows.
General Assembly Software Engineering Immersive Lightning Talk on Accessibility
General Assembly built lightning talks into the SEI curriculum as a chance for students to teach the cohort something outside the syllabus. This was my first time ever giving this talk — to the classmates and instructors I'd spend twelve hours a day with until graduation — before I brought an expanded version to Women in UX at the University of Washington two months later.
A first-run lightning talk to my General Assembly SEI cohort on accessibility and inclusive design, drawing on my background as a sociologist, disability advocate, and Navy veteran. The response gave me the confidence to bring a fuller version of this talk to Women in UX at the University of Washington that May.
Probation Officer Safety Training
In 2017, while serving as a Probation Officer/Presentence Investigator for Kauaʻi's Adult Probation Office, Kim was selected as one of two certified trainers for the island — responsible for delivering Natural Response Control Tactics: Level 1, a curriculum developed by the Community Corrections Institute (CCI), alongside CCI's companion training, Safety in Community-Based Supervision. Hawaiʻi's probation officers do not carry firearms, unlike the majority of U.S. states, making mental preparation and physical control tactics — not weapons — the primary line of officer safety in the field.
Kim co-trained the entire Fifth Circuit Judiciary — both the Adult and Juvenile Probation Departments on Kauaʻi — across a multi-day program covering threat recognition (the "3-5 rule," color-code awareness, OODA loop), use-of-force liability (including case law such as Davis v. Mason County), secondary trauma and officer mental health, and hands-on defensive tactics: stances, blocking, chokehold and grab escapes, ground fighting, and disarming techniques against edged weapons and firearms. The program closed with a live Safety Simulation Training exercise, using actors, a designated safety officer, and video-recorded debriefs to test officers' threat assessment and response under realistic stress conditions.