Meet The Team

Kim Johnson is a native Detroiter, educated in Detroit Public Schools. She is an active member of the Central State University Alumni Association and was inducted into the Alumni Hall of Fame in 2024. After receiving her Bachelor’s degree, she studied on the graduate level at Wayne State University, Central Michigan University and the University of Detroit Mercy School of Law.

Her professional career whether teaching or in the nonprofit industry has always centered around positively impacting Detroit’s youth through education, life skills, recreation and mentoring. In 2005, Kimberly received a vision and in the midst of recovery from a life-threatening tragedy; she began to turn the vision into reality with her young children laboring alongside her.

Mrs. Johnson is the Founder, President and CEO of Developing Kingdoms in Different Stages, also known as Developing K.I.D.S. It is a nonprofit organization in Detroit that serves over 1,000 youth annually through four programs that provide free, high-quality activities; Youth Development, Family Engagement, Workforce Development and Community Support. Having grown up in the city of Detroit, Mrs. Johnson knows first-hand of the struggles that youth face living in the inner-city. Her own experiences teaching in Detroit Public Schools and as a non-profit Director in southwest Detroit drove her to build a community-based organization that meets the needs of youth 5-18 enrolled in struggling schools and economically challenged communities.

From 2008-2019, Mrs. Johnson served in consultant and executive level positions that have created positive and long-lasting impact on city and state-wide systems that support youth educationally and during out-of-school time. A few of her significant accomplishments during this time have included the coordinated training of close to 500 youth development professionals, growing a youth-serving organization network from 10 to 150 organizations, the development and implementation of a re-granting program that distributed over $500,000 in grants to 78 organizations. For five years, Kim has served as the co-chair of the Summer Learning Table of and currently serves as a Steering Committee Member of 313Reads, a citywide collective impact coalition to support literacy access, equity, and justice in Detroit.

Since 2020, in addition to leading extraordinary growth and leadership of Developing K.I.D.S., Kimberly has spent more than a decade mentoring executive directors of grassroots organizations in Detroit. She is the Co-founder of BEDAD (Black Executive Director Alliance of Detroit), a network of senior Black leaders of nonprofit organizations in Detroit. Kim has served on a subcommittee of the Governor’s Student Recovery Advisors Council in the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. She is a member of state-level advisory and design committees for out-of-school time system building. Her most recent professional accomplishment is raising over $8M and serving as the owner for the construction project to open a 23,000 sq.ft facility for Developing KIDS that will open in the fall of 2024.

Within her church home of Mt. Hebron Missionary Baptist Church, Kimberly serves as the Youth Department Director and member of the Nurse’s Ministry. She has been an active member of Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Incorporated for more than 20 years. Kim has received national, state and local recognition and awards for her leadership and service to the community. Kimberly calls herself blessed and highly-favored to be the wife of Charles Johnson and the mother of three adults; La Tressa, Serena and Jamal Newberry, II.