Evanston Poverty Lawyer, 55, Dedicated Life to Others

Shortly before he died of pancreatic cancer at age 55, Evanston poverty lawyer Bill Kolen dictated a letter to his colleagues from his room in a hospice care center. 

He talked about his three-decade career serving others and encouraged his coworkers to continue fighting, while his wife, Caryn Friedman, typed as quickly as she could.

“There are no words to capture the feeling that I have about having spent my life working at something I have always been passionate about,” said Kolen, who spent most of his career with the the Legal Assistance Foundation of Metropolitan Chicago (LAF). “For that I am a lucky man.”

“My wish is that as you go through your days at work, you will be thankful for the chance to make a difference in the world and make others lives better because of something that you did.” 

Kolen died a few weeks later on June 5, just three months after he was diagnosed with inoperable pancreatic cancer. 

An Embodiment of Evanston

As Kolen’s wife puts it, her husband “embodied being an Evanstonian.” He was born at Evanston Hospital on July 8, 1957, and attended Washington Elementary School, Lincoln Elementary School and Nichols Middle School. He graduated in 1975 from Evanston Township High School, where he competed on a bridge team that took second place at the state championships.

Fellow 1975 ETHS grad and close friend Brian Tanenbaum met Kolen when both were freshman, and was his partner on the second-place winning bridge team. Tanenbaum remembers spending many nights in high school playing bridge with Kolen and his parents, Eugene and Corinne, who encouraged their kids to serve others and to pursue whatever careers they wanted. 

“He had a great family, great family values, which allowed him to develop…a passion for poverty law,” says Tanenbaum 

He and Kolen became part of a group they jokingly called “The Skokie Men’s Club,” including several members of the class of 1975 who have stayed in touch, plus new friends added over the years.

“We’ve all taken it incredibly hard,” he says. “Bill was a great friend and a great advocate for the poor." 

He and other friends say Kolen was inspiring not just for his dedication to a career in helping others, but in the way he lived and died. When Kolen learned that he had inoperable pancreatic cancer in March, his first reaction was to consider how his illness would affect his wife and his sons, Tanenbaum says.

“He was an inspiration to us on how he dealt with his diagnosis, its shocking implications and the treatments he attempted,” Tanenbaum said in his eulogy. “Yet he faced it with courage and realism.” 

Helping Others Was ‘His Calling’ 

After graduating from law school in 1982, Kolen took a job with LAF, where he worked for most of his career at the Evanston office. When that location closed in 2011, Kolen moved to the downtown office, and became director of LAF’s public benefits practice group. He supervised a team of lawyers working on public benefits issues, including Medicaid, food assistance and temporary assistance for needy families.

Coworkers say Kolen was passionate about helping people and remained steadfast in his commitment to a job that often leads to burnout. 

“He was a tireless advocate for families,” said LAF director of advocacy Richard Wheelock. “He could have gone out and made some good bucks, but instead his sense of justice and dedication to families who are not as well off moved him.”

LAF attorney Carrie Chapman started working with Kolen in 2011 and became a supervisory attorney under him in the public benefit practice group this year.  It was obvious that he took great joy in the work, and was motivated above all by his ability to help others, Chapman says—a lesson that has stuck with her. 

“I learned that you can either get the energy to fight Goliath out of your taste for blood…or out of your profound desire to help people,” she said. “You need to choose to run on that positive energy, on hope and the belief in good things for the future. For me that was sort of life-changing.” 

According to Chapman, Kolen went to court for the last time just a few weeks before he died, for a family law client he had represented for many years. He told the woman he might not be there the next time she was in court—but promised that someone from LAF would be there, and that he or she would do a great job. 

“I think it was really reassuring for that client and just shows his incredible commitment to his work,” says Chapman.

High school friend Dan Lesser also worked with Kolen through his position as economic security director of the Sargent Shriver National Center on Poverty Law. He said Kolen was unique in remaining positive despite the daily drag of seeing families in very tough situations, and was motivated above all by the desire to help others.

“He wanted to do as much as he possibly could within his power to help poor people and make things fair for them, bring justice to them,” Lesser said. “He felt like that was his calling.” 

Family Came First

Kolen was just as devoted to his family as he was to his work, according to friends and family members. 

“You’ll hear how passionate he was about his work, but he was just as passionate about his family,” says his wife, Caryn Friedman. “Family always came first.”

Kolen had two biological sons and two stepsons. One of his sons, Joshua, died of a genetic disorder at age 8. His remaining children are 25, 24 and 21 years old.

“He was an incredible partner and parent and partner in parenting,” Friedman says. “He had no regrets with our life and with our children and with his job.” 

Kolen has a sister in Michigan, a brother in Iowa and a sister-in-law he has known since he was 12, according to Friedman, as well as four nieces and nephews. His parents both died in a car crash just a few days after his son passed away.

“He’s had his share of tragedy in life, but I think the thing that’s so amazing about him is that he always was able to look at what was positive in life,” Friedman says.

His only sadness, she says, was that he would not get to see his friends and family members grow old or see how their futures played out.

“We had made this deal that we would be able to grow old together, and he was sad that we weren’t able to do that,” she says. “The time we were together was really pretty magical.”

Friedman describes her husband as one of the most compassionate and empathetic people she’s ever known. Beyond helping people through his job with LAF, Kolen volunteered with many Evanston organizations in his free time. He was a member of the Mayor’s Task Force on Homelessness, served on the boards of Reba Place and Connections for the Homeless and traveled to New Orleans to help build houses with Beth Emet after Hurricane Katrina, among things.

In his free time, Kolen also loved hiking, often out west, with his sons and his brother. His favorite place was Rocky Mountain National Park in Colorado, where he had been going since he was 7 years old. In Evanston, he and Friedman both enjoyed walking along the beach near their north Evanston home.

While Kolen was an atheist throughout his life, he was “incredibly spiritual,” according to Friedman.

“He just found it in other places,” she says. “He found it in the woods. He found it at the lakefront…He found it in his sports and he found it in nature.” 

Kolen played softball for his almost entire life, starting out in Evanston’s James Park and most recently playing on a Shriver Center league in Deerfield, along with his friend Dan Lesser.

His most “insane passion,” as Friedman describes it, was golfing. Kolen golfed with his friends in the Skokie Men’s Club for most of his life, whether it meant getting up at the crack of dawn to play the links before work or going out while very sick, near the end of his life.

Kolen golfed his last round at The Grove Country Club in Long Grove, according to his friend, Brian Tanenbaum. The group of friends had planned to go to Scotland to golf, but Kolen got very sick much quicker than anyone had anticipated. So they rescheduled their trip the Grove, where Kolen said he would play just one hole.

He had lost 40 or 50 pounds by that time, according to Friedman, and had to stop several times. Somehow, he wound up golfing all 18 holes. 

“He went golfing weighing, like 110 pounds,” she says. “It was the most ridiculous experience of my life.”

As the game went on, his friends kept changing the rules, so that Kolen could keep up.

“What we will always remember about that day … is how determined Billy was to finish his round, despite his weakened state,” Tanenbaum said in his eulogy. “Billy fought for everything and he never gave up, not on his last golf game with his buddies, not on Caryn or his boys or his friends.”

Kolen Continues to Inspire Others

Kolen’s drive to serve others inspired at least one friend to change his career. Howard Weissman, who met Kolen in high school, spent much of his life running a business that provided employee assistance programs to employers in the St. Louis area. Last year, however, he sold his business and applied for the job of executive director of the National Council on Alcoholism and Drug Abuse [NCADA], where he had served on the board for many years.

“Coming to know Bill and coming to see his attitude and his passion for his job informed my decision,” says Weissman.

Among the group of friends he shared with Kolen—the Skokie Men’s Club—the members include a billionaire, a multi-millionaire, doctors, lawyers and businesspeople, according to Weissman. But Kolen was different.   

“Of all my friends, the one who seemed to love his job the most was Bill, and Bill—probably by a factor of six to 10—made the least amount of money,” Weissman says. “No one seemed to be more richly rewarded for the work they were doing than Bill was.” 

Now that the nonprofit is looking for a new space to expand to in St. Louis, Weissman plans to name the building after Kolen. While he doesn’t know where the new headquarters will be located or what it will look like, Weissman is sure of one thing.

As employees, volunteers and clients walk through the doors of the nonprofit, they will pass under a plaque bearing Kolen’s words. 

“There are no words to capture the feeling that I have about having spent my life working at something I have always been passionate about,” he wrote in his letter to colleagues. “My wish is that as you go through your days at work, you will be thankful for the chance to make a difference in the world.”