Kimberly O. Dennis

Kim Dennis is currently a philanthropic advisor to DonorsTrust, a donor-advised fund she co-founded in 1999 and has chaired since its founding. She served as president of the Searle Freedom Trust for 29 years until its closure at the end of 2025, per Dan Searle’s intent. For five of those years, she also directed the National Research Initiative, a Searle-funded program of the American Enterprise Institute. 

Kim first began working in the grantmaking arena in 1980 as a staffer for the John M. Olin Foundation and later became the first executive director of the Philanthropy Roundtable. In addition to her chairmanship of DonorsTrust, she serves on the boards of the Beth and Ravenel Curry Foundation, the Arthur N. Rupe Foundation, the Philanthropy Roundtable, the Clemson University Foundation, the Snow Institute for the Study of Capitalism at Clemson, and the Property and Environment Research Center. She is an emeritus trustee of the American Enterprise Institute.