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Kimberly Parker
Program Manager, Nevada County Economic Development Office
Kimberly Parker appreciates a good adventure. She’ll be enjoying the views of Napa Valley from her first hot air balloon ride later this year — a Christmas gift from her husband; she gave him a railbike tour.
Her sense of adventure and interest in new experiences led her from her upbringing in Ohio to now nearly four decades living in the Capital Region. It’s also what led her to shift from a 36-year career working in nonprofits to building the new Nevada County Economic Development Office from the ground up as its first program manager. Throughout her career, Parker says, she has felt an openness to learning new things.
Parker grew up in South Euclid outside Cleveland and attended Marietta College in Ohio before moving to San Francisco and then to Davis, where some friends were living, to figure out her next steps. Over the following decades, she worked for a number of organizations in Sacramento, including the California Confederation of the Arts, Sacramento Zoo, California Building Industry Foundation and Crocker Art Museum. In 2001, she was hired by the Sierra Nevada Memorial Hospital Foundation. In 2005, she became the foundation’s executive director.
During her tenure there, she was most proud of her philanthropic role, raising funds that “touched every corner of the hospital,” she says, including opening an outpatient center and increasing money for cardiac, cancer, stroke and other areas of the hospital. She also worked to recruit resident physicians to the rural community.
“That was incredibly gratifying because, as (in) so many parts of California and the country, there’s such a physician shortage,” Parker says. “We really identified how we could bring physicians into our community that would live and work here and, hopefully, after they finished their residency, decide they wanted to stay here.”
Another career success happened during the pandemic, when she helped get a testing site up and running immediately. The pandemic, though, also proved to be the most difficult time of Parker’s career. “I was at the hospital foundation for 22 years and got everything through COVID, and had made the decision that it was just maybe time to try to do something a little different,” she says.
But Parker found that building a testing site from scratch was not too dissimilar from developing a new county office, with the need to incorporate lots of competing input. One of the challenges, Parker says, is that when it comes to economic development “people have different opinions of what it is. If you ask five different people, they might give you five different definitions.”
“Rather than really dwelling on what’s not going to work, to say: Well, can we fix it? Maybe you can’t fix the whole problem, but can I fix this one little piece? And if I get there, can we fix the next piece?”
Now in its third year, the office has fully stepped into its role for the community, Parker says. In March 2024, the Nevada County Board of Supervisors adopted an Economic Development Action Plan. About a dozen organizations are now working on roughly 70 tasks under the plan. Parker says she has been proud to bring attention to the fact that two of the county’s greatest economic drivers are its tourism and its small businesses. The county is now working on a Recreation and Resiliency Master Plan. She’s also focused on highlighting the county’s arts and culture sector.
“There’s such a dynamic arts culture and recreation environment up here,” Parker says. “We have such wonderful amenities with our trails and our South Yuba River. Of course, Nevada County also includes Truckee, and I love working up in Truckee as well as the cities of Grass Valley, Nevada City. It’s just a wonderful environment.”
Parker says the rural environment suits her, and she appreciates that the business community she assists are also her neighbors and friends. In her free time, she enjoys playing pickleball and cooking, and then there are those adventures she shares with her husband.
As for her work and many career successes, she still tries to stay humble enough to keep learning and approach problems with a can-do attitude. “Rather than really dwelling on what’s not going to work, to say: Well, can we fix it? Maybe you can’t fix the whole problem, but can I fix this one little piece? And if I get there, can we fix the next piece?”
View the list of honorees from 2015 through 2025.
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