About Me.
Kemi Bello is a writer, storyteller, and stubborn communicator based in Oakland, California. She is deeply passionate about weaving strategic communications, research and data, and public policy towards the aim of social good.
Her personal writing has appeared in The Nation, Autostraddle and other publications, and she has placed numerous opinion editorials on behalf of organizations in outlets such as USA Today, The Hill, The Los Angeles Times, The Houston Chronicle, NBC Latino, and The Advocate. Kemi’s poetry performances have taken her to stages at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Galeria de la Raza, Litquake SF, and the University of Illinois, Chicago.
Currently, she works on the bridge connecting internal and external communications at the Partnership on AI, a technology profit working to advance responsible AI. As their first Partner & Internal Communications Manager, she splits her time between supporting ~100 industry, nonprofit, and academic Partner organizations in staying connected to PAI's programmatic work and working closely with PAI staff to support institutional knowledge management and increase employee engagement.
Prior to PAI, Kemi was the Brand & PR Content Marketing Manager at Magoosh, an online test prep startup working to level the playing field around college admissions. There, she worked to strengthen brand authority and awareness through increased thought leadership and rapid response PR, leading to opinion placements in Forbes and AdWeek and media mentions in outlets such as Inside Higher Ed and US News and World Report.
Prior to her work at Magoosh, Kemi was the first Communications Manager at the Immigrant Legal Resource Center, a national legal and policy advocacy organization, where she built communications infrastructure and provided ongoing internal, external, and executive communications strategy. In addition to serving as the ILRC’s communications lead in multiple statewide and national advocacy coalitions, she helped improve the accessibility and readership of various complex legal reports and resources as a co-author, designer, and resident megaphone while positioning staff attorneys as leading issue experts to the media and policymakers.
Kemi cut her teeth in digital and editorial strategy after joining the undocumented student movement in 2006, advocating for immigrant inclusive policies such as the DREAM Act, state-level educational policies, and comprehensive immigration reform. She went on to work collaboratively to co-found both a statewide alliance of campus-based student organizations and a national digital resource and action hub for undocumented young people, through which she created website information architecture, wrote blog posts and action alerts, drafted and disseminated petition-based campaigns via social platforms, lobbied legislators, and generally fell in love with the internet.
A former DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) recipient, Kemi has danced in a Boyz II Men-inspired workers’ rights flash mob, marched down Wall St South with a cumbia band, and ridden a bus named Priscilla through the Southern U.S. – all in the name of storytelling for good.
She is a proud alumna of the University of Houston (Go Coogs!), where she double majored in mathematics and economics. She knows way too many digits of Pi.
Nigerian-born and Texas-raised, Kemi prefers her tea sweet, her food spicy, and her music heavy on the drumbeat. She remains eternally humbled by the power, the potential, and the privilege of the written and spoken word.