Kim Wright-Violich is an experienced business leader with a track record of founding and building highly successful businesses, designing platforms and products for investors, and pioneering some of the earliest impact investing initiatives in the U.S. As a Managing Partner at Tideline, she co-leads the firm’s strategy, investor relations, finances, and client engagements. She also serves as the Chair of BlueMark, a Tideline company that specializes in impact verification services for investors and companies.

Before Tideline, Kim was the founding CEO of Charles Schwab & Co.’s donor-advised fund (DAF) and charitable trust offerings, bringing turnkey charitable asset management and philanthropic services to investors. Under her 12 years of leadership, Schwab Charitable grew from a start-up to over $5 billion in donor deposits, serving over 50,000 donor-investors and their wealth advisors and processing $500 million in grants annually. While at Schwab Charitable, the first national DAF to offer an SRI investment option, Kim pioneered custom asset management of individual DAF accounts, allowing for the introduction of alternative assets, including impact investments. She also launched a first-of-its-kind eight-country guarantee microfinance fund to be offered on a donor-advised platform.

Kim also helped direct an effort among national DAFs to inform regulations defining and governing DAFs, including the related provisions of the Pension Protection Act. She has served on the Advisory Board on the book New Frontiers in Philanthropy, edited by Dr. Lester Solomon, a Professor at Johns Hopkins University and Director of the John Hopkins Center for Civil Society Studies. As a member of the Board of Directors of CFP, Kim successfully advocated for the first impact investing educational initiatives and inclusion of impact investing questions in the CFP certification examination. She taught impact investing and strategic philanthropy at the Haas School of Business at the University of California at Berkeley and lectured on governance at the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University.

Kim was named one of the 50 most influential women in the US in wealth management by Wealth Manager magazine in 2009 and was regularly named one of the 100 most influential women in the Bay Area. She has served on a variety of private company and non-profit boards and often takes the role of Audit Committee Chair based on her finance and accounting experience. Kim currently serves as CEO for Echidna Giving, which directs $50 million in grants annually to girls’ education in the developing world. Kim earned a BA in Human Biology from Stanford University and an executive SEP from the Stanford Graduate School of Business. She also completed post-graduate work at the Mass Media Institute at Stanford, and coursework in governance at Harvard Business School.