Kei Kawashima-Ginsberg is the Newhouse Director of CIRCLE. She has led CIRCLE for the past decade, leading CIRCLE’s growth in impact by building a passionate and diverse team of staff who interact with civic life from both multi-disciplinary and intersectional lenses.  Kei’s scholarship seeks to expand pathways to civic learning and engagement through partnership-based and field-building research initiatives as well as applied research-to-practice projects, such as CIRCLE’s partnership with the Illinois Civics Hub, and Educating for American Democracy, and Youth Leadership Learning Community.  Kei’s approach to research design and orientation for partner-led impact is highly influenced by her academic background in Clinical and Community Psychology and Social-Emotional Learning. 

Before joining CIRCLE, Kei worked with young people and families at a public high school, an emergency room, and a community health center as a clinical psychologist in training. Working with people who faced numerous structural challenges and struggled with mental, academic, and legal hurdles as a result made her want to explore work that sought to correct systems that created those challenges in the first place, which attracted her to CIRCLE.

As a leading voice in the youth civic engagement field, Kei is frequently featured in major outlets such as The New York Times, The Atlantic, National Public Radio, C-SPAN, Channel 1, and NBC. Kei is a recipient of the Jobs for The Future Distinguished Fellowship for Student-Centered Learning (2016-2018),  and serves as a board director at March For Our Lives and Rhizome, both of which are youth-founded and led civic organizations. She previously served on the board of Generation Citizen and Democracy Works.  Most recently, she played a major role in development of the Our Common Purpose, a commission-report from the AAA&S, and the Educating for American Democracy initiative.  She earned her Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology from Loyola University, with an emphasis on positive youth development and community psychology. Learn more