Kimblyn Persaud Founder & Executive Director of EPIC of MoCo

Kimblyn Persaud has lived in Montgomery County for more than 25 years, with 16 of those years in Wheaton. She lives by the motto "The service we render others is the rent we pay for our room on earth"—Sir Wilfred Thomason Grenfell, Missionary Medical Doctor.

This belief and focus on community led her to numerous volunteer opportunities and community leadership roles. She served the Wheaton community as President of the Wheaton Regional Park Neighborhood Association, and Co-founder of Save the Wheaton Library, and Co-founder of the Wheaton Coalition. She was a member of The League of Women Voters, the Zoning Advisory Panel as a Community Representative, and the Junior League of Washington, DC.  Kim was a member of the Women's Democratic Club and Chair of the non-partisan ballot initiative Nine Districts for MoCo. Currently, she founded the citizen-led grassroots effort, EPIC of MoCo – Empowering People In Communities of MoCo.

As a community activist living in an underserved immigrant community, Kim Persaud has had a front row seat on how laws passed by the County Council have negatively affected everyone's quality of life. She has witnessed how overcrowded housing leads to rat and roach infestation for a whole community and how unsafe living conditions and illegal parking spills over to create unsafe streets. She witnessed how these concerns were falling on deaf ears of our elected county officials. That propelled her to work on the Term Limits ballot initiative, which passed overwhelmingly in 2016 by nearly 70%.

Knowing what it's like to not have a seat at the table is what drove Kim Persaud to Chair Nine Districts for MoCo, a non-partisan effort focused on creating nine smaller Council districts.  Achieving what was once called “an unholy alliance” -- an historic and diverse coalition of bi-partisan community activists, business leaders and labor groups, that was able to move the County Council to create two additional districts, going from five districts to seven. Her work on Nine Districts for MoCo illuminated the disconnect between the County government and its Residents, which moved her to create EPIC of MoCo – Empowering People in Communities of MoCo, is a 501c3, whose effort is to pick up where the County failed, by informing and educating and supporting people and communities on issues that will impact them.