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Richard Buery

CEO
Children's Aid Society

Born and raised in the East New York section of Brooklyn, New York, the son of a retired New York City public school teacher, Richard R. Buery, Jr. has dedicated his life to developing institutions that work to improve educational opportunity and life outcomes for young people of color. This year, Mr. Buery was named one of Crain’s New York Business’ 40 Leaders of the Future under 40 in recognition of his contributions to the life of the City. 

He will become President and Chief Executive Officer of The Children’s Aid Society in October 2009. He is currently the Co-Founder and Executive Director of Groundwork, Inc. , a nonprofit organization serving the children and families of Brooklyn public housing developments. Groundwork‘s mission is to help children who live in neighborhoods of concentrated poverty achieve the same educational, professional, and personal success as children growing up anywhere. Groundwork and its programs have been featured in a variety of media, including The New York Times Magazine, WNYC New York Public Radio, the CBS Evening News, New York Newsday, New York 1, The New York Sun, and The Chronicle of Philanthropy, and was recently awarded a 2009 New York Times Company Nonprofit Excellence Award for excellent management. Since founding Groundwork seven years ago, Mr. Buery has grown Groundwork into a dynamic, well-respected, and nationally recognized nonprofit organization whose staff of 200 serves over 3,000 families annually.

Groundwork is the third nonprofit organization Mr. Buery has founded. While still an undergraduate at Harvard, he co-founded the Mission Hill Summer Program, an enrichment program for children in the Mission Hill Housing Development in the Roxbury section of Boston. More recently, he co-founded and served as executive director of iMentor, a technology education and mentoring program that each year connects New York City middle and high school students with professional mentors through on-line and face-to-face meetings. Already one of the largest youth mentoring organizations in New York City, iMentor is currently undergoing a national expansion of its highly-effective program.

A graduate of Harvard College and the Yale Law School, Mr. Buery has a background in law, education, and politics. Prior to founding iMentor, Mr. Buery was a staff attorney at the Brennan Center for Justice, where he worked to defend majority-minority Congressional districts in North Carolina; to prevent the “differential undercount” of minorities in the 2000 Census; and to protect access to the courts for Louisiana advocates fighting rampant environmental racism in that State. He also served as a law clerk to Judge John M. Walker, Jr. of the Federal Court of Appeals in New York City, as a fifth grade teacher at an orphanage in Bindura, Zimbabwe, and as Chief Political Officer and campaign manager to Kenneth Reeves, the Mayor of Cambridge, Massachusetts. He has interned for numerous social justice organizations, including the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights, and the D.C. Public Defender Service, and has volunteered for numerous insurgent (though largely unsuccessful) political candidates in New York City over the past several years. He is also an adjunct lecturer at both New York Law School and the Baruch College School of Public Affairs, where he teaches courses in social entrepreneurship and the financial management of nonprofit organizations.

Mr. Buery serves on the boards of numerous nonprofit organizations, including the Beginning with Children Foundation, an operator and supporter of public charter schools; Achievement First East New York, a charter school modeled after New Haven’s Amistad Academy; Leadership Preparatory Schools, part of the Uncommon Schools network of charter schools, and the Community Service Society, a poverty-fighting organization in New York City. He also serves on Governing Board of the Center for After School Excellence, and has served on the Executive Committee of the Yale Law School Association. A 1992-1993 Michael Clarke Rockefeller Fellow, in 2000 he was named one of Ebony Magazine’s Thirty Leaders of the Future under Thirty. He has been named NY1’s “New Yorker of the Week”; received the Mary McLeod Bethune Recognition Award from the National Council of Negro Women; the Extraordinary Black Man Award for Humanitarianism from the United Negro College Fund, and the inaugural outstanding alumnus award from the Phillips Brooks House Association at Harvard University. He was named one of ten family heroes by New York Family Brooklyn Magazine, and has been honored by the Rush Philanthropic Arts Foundation, the Brooklyn Borough President, and others. He lives with his wife Deborah, a law professor, and his two sons, Ellis and Ethan.

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