Birmingham-Southern College honored the 2019 Alumni Award Recipients during the festivities of homecoming weekend. The Distinguished Alumni, Outstanding Young Alumni, and Rising Star awards recognize graduates who have achieved outstanding success in their chosen professions. The awards were presented at the Alumni Awards Brunch on Saturday, Oct. 19 in Bruno Great Hall of the Norton Campus Center.

Kindred Motes ’12’s interest in a career focused on human rights was formed early on, but it began to take shape in a Hilltop classroom. In Dr. Ed LaMonte’s civil rights and justice course, Motes felt a responsibility for the communities he was part of and an urgency to advocate for social justice.

His commitment to the field grew with the opportunities and discussions he had as a BSC student. Sometimes those took the form of debates in the English department, other times as conversations in the Alabama State House as BSC’s Collegiate Legislature team captain. He also participated in multiple study abroad trips, and his time in Europe ultimately led him to earn his master’s degree in international relations at the University of Essex in Britain.

“BSC is where I first started to realize that my career options were wider than I’d ever considered. The College pushed me to expand the limits of what I thought was possible when it comes to advocacy, policy, and human rights,” Motes says.

As the award-winning director of digital strategy at the Vera Institute of Justice in New York City, Motes oversees digital media, impact partnerships, and social media campaigns and manages growth and engagement initiatives for the organization. He often travels across the country, building relationships with advocates, organizers, and public figures to highlight the work Vera does to fight pressing social injustices. His work has grown Vera’s audiences by more than 1,000 percent in just three years.

Since graduating from BSC, Motes has worked with peace, justice, and poverty initiatives and was recently nominated and confirmed to the Board of Directors of the American Civil Liberties Union of Alabama. While in graduate school at Essex, he worked at human rights organization REDRESS and represented the organization at the Global Summit to End Sexual Violence in Conflict, chaired by UN Ambassador Angelina Jolie and UK Foreign Secretary William Hague.

Among many of the specific social issues to which he’s dedicated his career, Motes has a deep personal interest in smaller communities that get left behind in the changing economy. He grew up on a family farm, which gave him a firsthand view of the lack of investment in small town America as well as the incredible people there who are too often overlooked.

“Not everyone can move to New York or Chicago, or even to Atlanta or Birmingham,” Motes says. “I want to know how we can invest in a system that helps improve the lives of everyone. For me to be where I am today, quite a few people invested in me – and that allowed me to attend BSC.”

This story was published in the Fall/Winter 2019 issue of ’Southern, BSC’s alumni magazine.

If you have ideas for our next issue of ’Southern, please email [email protected]. We always welcome stories about outstanding people from the BSC community.