Keith Kamisugi
Director of Communications

Keith Kamisugi, EJS's director of communications, is responsible for the organization's media relations, new media strategies, IT and telecom. He was previously a consultant to EJS.

Keith brings to EJS more than 10 years of public relations experience, including positions as a regional spokesman for Verizon Communications, account manager for technology PR agency Niehaus Ryan Wong and serving a diverse portfolio of companies as an independent consultant. He also served for four years on the executive staffs of Hawai'i governors John Waihee and Benjamin Cayetano.

He has presented talks on public relations, online strategies, politics and business for numerous organizations, including: University of California at Berkeley, Stanford University, University of San Francisco, Golden Gate University, The Anderson School at UCLA, Asian Pacific American Law Students Association, Marin County Youth Commission, staff of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, the Public Relations Society of America, the Asian American Bar Association of the Greater Bay Area, Greenlining Institute, EEOC Quad Council and the California Pan-Ethnic Health Network.

Keith's legal and nonprofit public relations background includes consulting law firms such as Minami Tamaki LLP on PR and marketing related to class action and civil cases, the Asian Law Caucus on voter education, the Coalition of Asian Pacific Americans political action committee, the Asian American Journalists Association (AAJA) and UNITY: Journalists of Color, Inc.

His efforts involving journalists of color include managing communications for several AAJA national conventions and serving as communications director for the UNITY 2004 convention, which was attended by more than 7,000 journalists of color in Washington, D.C. He also helps coordinate the community media training workshops for the San Francisco Bay Area and Los Angeles chapters of AAJA. Keith received AAJA's national award for Member of the Year in 2004, the only non-journalist/media professional to receive that recognition.

In addition to the EJS website, he has developed and managed dontspeakfor.us, evapaterson.com, forpeopleofcolor.org, and sites affliated with the campaigns of Senator Barbara Boxer and former presidential candidate John Edwards.

Keith has served on the boards of numerous nonprofits and now serves on the board of the San Francisco Japantown Foundation and as a trustee and board secretary for Chinese for Affirmative Action, one of San Francisco's leading APA civil rights organizations. He also runs hapihour.org, a seven-year-old community happy hour series that benefits APA community organizations in the San Francisco Bay Area and Los Angeles.

He previously served as president of the Honolulu Japanese Junior Chamber of Commerce (where he founded the Young Business Roundtable) and on the boards of the Asian American Theater Company, the Japanese Cultural and Community Center of Northern California and the Hawai'i Chamber of Commerce of Northern California.

He was also a past chairman of the Young Democrats of Hawai'i and was a member of Hawai'i's delegation to the 2000 Democratic National Convention.

Keith was born in Hawai'i and attended the University of Hawai'i at Manoa, where he served as student body president and as co-founder and co-chair of the University of Hawai'i Student Caucus, a coalition of organizations representing more than 44,000 students of the university system's ten campuses.

He also co-authors a column in the Nichi Bei Times, a Japanese American weekly newspaper.

Updated: June 2007