NEWS RELEASE FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Feb. 4, 2016
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Virginia Interfaith Center for Public Policy
1716 East Franklin Street
Richmond, VA 23223
(804) 643-2474
www.virginiainterfaithcenter.org/
Virginia Interfaith Center for Public Policy selects new Executive Director
RICHMOND, Va. – Kim Bobo, a nationally known promoter of social justice who literally wrote the book on faith-based organizing, has been selected as the new executive director for the Virginia Interfaith Center for Public Policy, the advocacy organization announced today. She will begin work at the Center’s downtown Richmond office on Feb. 10.
Bobo, 61, from Chicago, founded and served as the executive director of Interfaith Worker Justice, the nation’s largest network of people of faith engaging in local and national actions to improve wages, benefits and conditions for workers. In that position she helped build interfaith groups and workers’ centers around the nation.
She was named one of 14 “faith leaders to watch” in 2014 by the Center for American Progress, and one of Utne Reader’s “50 Visionaries Who Are Changing Your World” in 2009.
“She is spiritually driven to do as much good for people as humanly possible,” said Frank A. McKinney III, the Chair of the Board for the Virginia Interfaith Center. “Kim exudes both enthusiasm and compassion for her chosen work, and has proven leadership abilities. She has a charismatic personality.”
Prior to Interfaith Workers Justice, she was national organizing director for Bread for the World and an instructor at the Midwest Academy, where she helped train hundreds of organizers and faith-based activists in thinking and working strategically.
Bobo is the author or co-author of several books, including: “Wage Theft in America: Why Millions of Working Americans Are Not Getting Paid – And What We Can Do About It,” the first book to document the wage theft crisis in the nation and propose practical solutions for addressing it, “Organizing for Social Change,” the best-selling organizing manual in the country, and “Lives Matter: A Handbook for Christian Organizing.” Bobo’s most recent book, “The Worker Center Handbook,” will be published in 2016 by ILR Press, an imprint of Cornell University Press.
She helped coin the phrase “wage theft,” which according to StopWageTheft.org includes examples like non-payment of overtime, not giving workers their last paycheck after a worker leaves a job, not paying for all the hours worked, not paying minimum wage, and even not paying a worker at all.
Born in Cincinnati, Ohio, Kim Bobo was raised in a conservative evangelical family. In 1974, while attending Barnard College, she met a number of activist figures who influenced her vision about how to best “love your neighbor as yourself.” While at Barnard, she joined Bread for the World, a group that fuses social-justice activism and religion.
Bobo was married for 31 years to Stephen Coats, an advocate for workers in Central and South America who died unexpectedly in 2013. She has twin sons, Eric and Benjamin, who are in college. Bobo has been the choir director and an active leader at Good News Community Church (UCC) for the last 25 years.
The Virginia Interfaith Center for Public Policy (VICPP) is the only statewide, nonpartisan, interfaith coalition of multiple faiths that focus on social, economic, and religious justice across Virginia. Founded in 1982 out of the Virginia Council of Churches, the Center’s staff has a strong relationship with the faith community and with the executive and legislative branches of state government. The Center has a history of engaging people of faith to find solutions to the challenges of poverty (including access to healthcare, the minimum wage, predatory lending, child hunger, and gun violence, among others), environmental stress and religious freedom.
VICPP’s Chapters and affiliate organizations are in all areas of the Commonwealth, including active chapters in Fairfax, Warrenton, Roanoke Valley, Hampton Roads and Richmond.
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For more information and/or a photo contact:
Neill Caldwell, Communications
Email neill@virginiainterfaithcenter or call (804) 332-1386