Kevin C. Peterson

Kevin C. Peterson is founder and executive director of The New Democracy Coalition, a non-partisan and non-profit organization that focuses on civic engagement in Massachusetts and across the United States.Mr. Peterson studied philosophy and politics at Boston University and is currently a Senior Fellow at the Center for Collaborative Leadership at the University of Massachusetts in Boston. He has also served as a senior researcher at the William Monroe Trotter Institute in Boston. Mr. Peterson has served as a Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the Urban Studies Department in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He has published academic journal articles, book reviews and opinion editorials on the subject of civic engagement and politics. He has appeared on national programs such as Nightline, and National Public Radio. He has been quoted in The New York Times, The Boston Globe and Time Magazine in articles related to American politics. He is the former Politics and Grits on TOUCH 106.1 FM in Boston and has been a frequent guest on WGBH radio and Basic Black on Channel 2 in Boston. He is a contributing columnist at the Huffington Post and WGBH's Cognoscenti.In the 1990s Mr. Peterson was executive director of Part of the Solution, which registered tens of thousands of voters in the black and Latino communities across the state. He served as chair of the City of Bostons Election Reform Committee in 2005 leading the city to sweeping voting reforms. In 2008 he served as the national director for the Church of God in Christ recognizing the 40th Anniversary of the death of Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. in Memphis Tennessee. His civic work has been recognized by Governor Deval Patricks Administration, the Massachusetts Black and Latino Caucus, Congressman Michael Capuano, Senator John Kerry and former United States Senator Edward Kennedy. Mr. Peterson has lectured at many universities nationally and in West Africa in the counties of Mali and Senegal. He has served on the United States Department of State Speakers Program in Africa. Mr. Peterson served on the board of directors of the National Voting Rights Museum and Institute in Selma, Alabama. He lives in the Dochester neighborhood of Boston with wife Karen.Photo Credit: Ken Rivard