Kevin Coker Selected as the 2023 Recipient of the Richard E. Herman Leadership Award
Itasca, Ill. – We Raise Foundation is pleased to announce that Kevin Coker has been selected as the 2023 Richard E. Herman Leadership Award honoree. The Leadership Award recognizes the commitment and service of one leader interrupting the cycles of poverty, violence, and inequality in the United States, whether through their professional work or as a volunteer.
Coker serves as the chief attorney and CEO of Restoring Justice in Houston, Texas. Restoring Justice provides holistic, client-centered legal representation and social services to people who cannot afford an adequate lawyer, free-of-charge. As CEO, Coker provides leadership, strategic direction, and resource development for the day-to-day operations of the organization. As an attorney, he zealously represents marginalized individuals in state court who otherwise could not afford adequate representation.
“I am incredibly honored to receive the Richard E. Herman Leadership Award,” said Coker. “This award gives me hope that Restoring Justice’s work to end mass incarceration can keep going even if it means impacting just one more person, reconnecting one more family, or inspiring one more community. This leadership award has nothing to do with me and everything to do with faith that God’s promise is real. I am motivated to continue pursuing justice in the name of Jesus Christ because of We Raise’s commitment to freeing people from poverty, violence, and inequality. This commitment is directly in line with Luke 4:18 where Christ proclaims freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to set the oppressed free.”
Prior to joining Restoring Justice, Coker worked four years as a public defender with the Metropolitan Nashville Public Defender’s Office in Nashville, Tenn. He is a graduate of Gideon’s Promise’s CORE 101 public defender training program and has returned to Gideon’s Promise as a faculty member and regularly speaks on topics such as indigent defense, mass incarceration, and disparities within the criminal legal system.
Coker’s passion for social justice was developed while he was a student at Morehouse College in Atlanta, Ga., where he earned a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science in 2015. He went on to earn a Doctor of Jurisprudence from Vanderbilt Law School in Nashville in 2018.
As recipient of this award, Coker will receive a cash award of $4,000.
The Leadership Award was established in honor of Dr. Richard Herman, We Raise Foundation’s fourth president (2006-2015), a passionate supporter and encourager of young adult Christian leaders.
About We Raise Foundation
Motivated by the belief that freedom is grace in action (Galatians 5:1a), We Raise Foundation partners with Christian nonprofit organizations and emerging leaders working at the intersection of poverty, violence, and inequality. We have a preference for funding solutions within the areas of education, workforce development, and criminal justice and employ a unique approach to our investing by coupling program funding with a variety of robust value-added services that empower our grantees to grow their solutions. As a result of these value-add services, every $1 that donors invest through We Raise multiplies into more than double the benefit to the organizations we support. To learn more, please visit weraise.org. You can also find We Raise on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
