This article originally appeared in the fall 2025 issue of Res Gestae.
When Kate Kendell (JD ’88) was a young teen, her parents got a Time-Life book in the mail about the law and how it operated in everyday people’s lives. The volume fascinated Kendell, who recalls reading it from cover to cover.
“It sparked something in me because it talked about how to handle disputes and showed the law doing things for good,” she recalls. “Then when I was in high school, I started to learn more about civil rights struggles and past movements for civil rights. It felt like the natural gravitational pull was to do something in law.”
She graduated from Weber State University with a degree in political science and English and applied to Utah Law. To her dismay, she wasn’t accepted.
Sharing a “serendipitous” start
“Karen McLeese worked in admissions at the time and advised me to retake the LSAT. I did that and got a much better score. Then I called her every single day after I applied again to see if I had gotten in, ask if I needed to do anything else, and tell her how excited I was,” Kendell recalls. “I know I got in based on my grades and LSAT, but I think Karen also found my excitement and passion contagious.”
Even more than 40 years after receiving her acceptance letter, Kendell remembers connecting with McLeese and is grateful she persevered.
“Sometimes we don’t understand the power we have to exceed our reach a bit by risking vulnerability and showing our desire for something that really matters to us. I’m glad I kept in contact in Karen, because it set the stage for everything that followed,” she says. “She and I ended up chatting throughout law school, and she made such an impact on me as a young law student. My acceptance to Utah Law was serendipitous, and it set me on a path that has been very personally rewarding.”
As the first person in her family to attend college, let alone achieve a graduate degree, Kendell says she felt she needed to pinch herself every day because she couldn’t believe she was living out her childhood dream.
“I loved learning, loved my professors and classes, and loved reading case law. My oldest daughter, who was six at the time, was fascinated by the tort cases. The semester I took torts, the cases were her bedtime stories,” she says. “I took Constitutional Law from Professor Ed Firmage, which was the best grade I got in law school. John Flynn had a huge impact on my life. Debora Threedy, Terry Kogan, and Lee Teitelbaum, who was dean for a period of time, all made an amazing impression upon me. I learned a tremendous amount from every professor and felt they cared about their teaching and their students.”
Though some of her friends were less enthusiastic about their law school experience, Kendell was “ecstatic the whole time,” she recalls.
“I was intellectually engaged and felt so grateful and privileged to be in law school,” she says. “It was one of the greatest experiences of my life.”
Leaning into LGBTQ law
Soon after graduating from Utah Law in 1988, Kendell began working as a litigation association at VanCott Bagley (now Fabian VanCott), which was then the largest firm in Utah. While she had many mentors during the three years she worked there and gained experience litigating divorce and bankruptcy cases, Kendell wanted to live more authentically and find a position that allowed her to do so.
“Oddly enough, I wasn’t really ‘out’ in law school. I had some close friends who knew and some who were gay themselves, but I wasn’t public about my relationship with my partner at the time. I think there were some rumors or folks who had suspicions, but it was the late-1980s,” she recalls. “But over the years, I was having a harder and harder time staying in the closet.”
She was reading the Utah Bar Journal in 1990 and noticed an announcement on the back seeking the first staff attorney for the ACLU of Utah. Kendell closed the magazine, leaned back in her chair, and thought, I want that job.
To her amazement, she got it—and the position was transformative.
“I was able to marry the legal acumen and training from VanCott with feeling like I was really making a difference for people who were more on the margins and more vulnerable in society. The ACLU was taking on powerful institutions, and it was catalytic to my future career,” Kendell says.
About three years later, she met the woman who would later become her wife at an ACLU conference. Kendell moved to San Francisco to be closer to her and also become the legal director at the National Center for Lesbian Rights in 1994.
Looking back, Kendell notes she had a “privilege” to hide her sexual orientation when her colleagues of color couldn’t. Recognizing this made Kendell more keenly aware of how race then and still now “suppresses opportunities for talented Black and brown lawyers and law students.”
“The decision not to say anything was partly self-preservation and partly the ability that I could ‘pass’ and hide this about myself, even though it was an essential part of who I was,” Kendell explains. “However, it set me on a career that shifted to civil rights work. Hopefully I’ve made up for lost time by essentially being a very-out, ‘professional’ gay for over 30 years.”
Building a career in civil rights
At the National Center for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Rights (NCLR), Kendell followed her passion for greater impact in the LGBTQ community. She served as legal director for two years and then executive director for 22 years, guiding the organization through what she calls the “most breathtaking period of gains for the LGBTQ community.”
“This was the early 1990s through 2018. Marriage was contested and then won. The place of LGBTQ people in civic life was hidden, then peeking out a little bit, then in full force. There were one or two LGBTQ elected officials, and now dozens,” she recalls. “Obviously, AIDS and the horror and ravages it took on our community will never be forgotten for those of us who lived through it. But it also pushed people to fight, come out and be more visible, and that is what moved so many of these things forward. I got to be on the front lines, and I was awestruck every day.”
After more than two decades of service, Kendell felt it was time for someone else to take the reins at the NCLR. She worked for a short time in court reform and then served as interim chief legal officer at the Southern Poverty Law Center for nearly two years.
While working as chief of staff for The California Endowment, a foundation that improves health and racial equity across the state, Kendell got a call from the CEO of the Gill Foundation, Brad Clark. He was planning to step down after 10 years in his role.
Pressing forward at her dream job
“The Gill Foundation is one of the preeminent national funders of LGBTQ issues in the country, and I knew all their previous CEOs. They did such amazing work, not just in terms of financial support, but as a strategic partner in bringing leaders together to help strategize key moments in the movement,” she says. “Brad wasn’t really calling to see if I was interested in the job; he was just calling to let me know. But I couldn’t stop thinking about the opportunity. Though I loved my job at the California Endowment, I can’t watch what’s happening nationally to LGTBQ people, especially transgender individuals, and sit on the sidelines while so much damage is being done.”
She called Clark back to tell him she was interested in leading the foundation. May 7, 2025, was her first day as CEO.
“It felt like a dream come true when I got the job, and that has been manifested every single day. I am home, I am back in a community, and I’ve received a great welcome from former colleagues, donors and friends,” she says. “I feel the weight of the responsibility, but I also feel like this is what I’m here for. We so desperately need to meet this perilous moment, and I wake up every single day with that goal. I want to make a difference.”
Reflecting on her career, Kendell is proud of the way her work at NCLR, where she spent the bulk of her time, transformed the political landscape for the LGBTQ community.
“We changed family law for LGTBQ individuals and same-sex couples and their families. We made it safer to raise children. We played a critical role in winning marriage equality. We ended conversion therapy in multiple states. We won protections for trans kids. We won huge immigration victories for those coming from countries in which they had suffered immense harm and torture,” she explains. “Those are all important, and all are now under attack. So I will try to do what I’ve always done: fight with all I can from a place of integrity, care, and transparency.”
With just a few months under her belt at the Gill Foundation, Kendell is looking forward to the work ahead.
“I want us to staunch the damage that’s happening in our communities, especially the most vulnerable populations, and to build back the institutions that protect those subject to attack. I want people who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer to feel safe again in their communities,” she says. “These will be my benchmarks of success. We are not going back.”