Tanya Coke

Tanya Coke "is a program development consultant for major foundations and social justice nonprofits in the United States. She is currently working with the ACLU to help develop strategies to address the impact of the drug war on communities of color.

"From 1998 to 2002, she was a director of the Criminal Justice Initiative and later Counsel to OSI's U.S. Programs, where she designed the foundation’s signature initiative to reduce incarceration in the United States. Tanya also founded OSI’s Gideon Project, a grantmaking program focusing on death penalty abolition and improving indigent defense.

"Tanya is a graduate of Yale College. She began her career as an anti-death penalty advocate with the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, and later served as Acting Director of the Poverty and Race Research Action Council (PRRAC). Tanya graduated with honors from New York University School of Law in 1994, where she was a Root-Tilden public interest scholar and Editor-in-Chief of the Law Review. After law school, she clerked for the Honorable Pierre N. Leval on the Second Circuit Court of Appeals. Tanya thereafter practiced as a trial attorney in the Federal Defender Division of the Legal Aid Society in Manhattan, where she defended clients in drug, immigration and other federal cases. She is a recipient of the Reebok Human Rights Award (1988) and the Distinguished Recent Graduate Award from NYU School of Law (2004)." also see


 * Member, Human Rights Watch U.S. Advisory Committee