Board Biography: Ken Thompson

Ken Thompson
Program Officer, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
Seattle, WA

Ken Thompson is a Program Officer at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, in Seattle, Washington, where he leads a team focused on increasing educational attainment rates, from the early years through college, for students in the Seattle metro region. He has worked in a variety of positions at the Foundation since 1998, including managing the foundation’s research team, and as designer and manager of its Community Access to Technology efforts in Washington State from 2001-2007.

He has Masters degrees from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (Performing Arts) and the University of Washington (Library and Information Science). Ken has previously served on the Pride Foundation’s Shareholder Activism Committee, and helped to start the statewide LGBT organization Equal Rights Washington in 2005, serving on their board of directors for three years, and in his concluding year served as Board President. In those three years, ERW helped to pass Washington State’s employment non-discrimination law, and later began passing a series of laws which lead to full domestic partnership rights, and eventually full marriage.

Ken lives in Seattle with his partner of more than a dozen years. As part of a binational couple living with only temporary legal status in the US, he is an advocate for swift solution for the struggles of the 40,000+ same sex binational couples currently living in the US fighting to have their relationships recognized for immigration purposes, as well as all the couples already in exile from the US.

Last Updated: 4-23-13

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