Kevin C. Peterson is the founder and executive director of The New Democracy Coalition, a non-partisan and non-profit organization that focuses on civic literacy, civic policy and electoral justice in Boston, Massachusetts and across the United States. Mr. Peterson, who grew up in North Philadelphia, 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 is a minister who has earned a Master’s Degree of Arts and Urban Ministry at Gordon Conwell Theological Seminary, where he twice served as a Pierce Fellow. He sits on the board of directors of Cooperative Metropolitan Ministries and the Foot Soldiers Park in Selma, Alabama. An ordained minister, Rev. Peterson, has received an Honorary Doctorate in Humane Letters from the Wayland Baptist Theological Seminary, an institution founded before the end of slavery. He is an associate minister at The Metropolitan Baptist Church in the Dorchester section of Boston. He humbly fashions himself “as a political theologian, focusing on applied social ethics and racial justice in the public square.” He values the importance of public policy as an ameliorative tool in the interest of civic equity.

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He has published numerous academic journal articles, book reviews and opinion editorials on race, culture and politics. He has appeared on national programs such as Nightline, and National Public Radio. He has been an editorial contributor to the Huffington Post, The Boston Globe, The Boston Herald, The Nation and the Philadelphia Inquirer. He has hosted a radio program called Politics and Grits and currently writes for MEDIUM.COM. Mr. Peterson has lectured at universities nationally and in West Africa in the counties of Mali and Senegal. He has served on the United States’ Department of State Speaker’s Program in Africa. Mr. Peterson served on the board of directors of the National Voting Rights Museum and Institute. He has received numerous awards and recognition, including citations from the U.S. Congress, Massachusetts Governors Deval Patrick, Gov. Charlie Baker, The Urban League, and Mass Peace Action. February 24 is Kevin C. Peterson Day in the City of Boston. He is proud mostly of receiving the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. Award from the Eliot Church in  Roxbury, Mass.