The saying “it takes a village to raise a child” doesn’t explicitly factor in how much that village will cost. The price of just “being Black” is expensive. And for many creatives, innovators, and entrepreneurs, the cost of growth and expansion is unaffordable. Although one of the brief responses to the murder of George Floyd was a slight uptick in public and private commitments, data reveals that funding to Black entrepreneurs still severely lagged in comparison to what white spaces received. Institutions gained a lot of clout and exposure being connected to the brand of Black activism and movement, but not that most have departed from their public promises, Black entrepreneurs seeking to build impactful ventures are lumped back into the traditional models of funding and support—which includes tokenizing and the VC quest for the next “unicorn” in tech and business.
Former NYC Deputy Mayor and current CEO of Robin Hood Foundation, Richard Buery, Jr., challenges the From Chains to Links community to question whether these standards yield sustainable results, and how bridging imagination with capital interventions helps us build the villages we deserve.
Welcome back to Chains to Links. I am Kelly Burton, your host and I’m here with future New York Times bestseller, Ife Ike.
Is that me?
Yes, it’s you.
You just called it into existence and I wasn’t expecting that. Hi, Kelly. How are you?
I’m good. What exactly am I referring to?
I have a book that’s coming soon called The Equity Mindset. It’s based on a training called the same name that was developed during the height of the pandemic to help individuals across industries create a different practice around problem-solving and to adopt equity as the new normal of how we solve problems versus the thing you tackle at the end. I’ve learned a lot.
I am super excited to welcome Richard Buery Jr. who is the CEO of the Robin Hood Foundation. A former deputy mayor in the city of New York. He has an extensive background in philanthropy and education. I am going to say, for me, the colleague because if I were to say my boss, he would interrupt this whole thing and we would have to start over, but the colleague that allowed me to experiment with equity the most. I don’t think I’ve told you that, Rich, but thank you for allowing me to play a bit because you’ve helped my career. Thank you for being here.
Beautiful thing to say. Thank you for saying it. I appreciate that.
It’s the truth. I’m going to let Kelly kick off. She has a favorite question that she likes to start this off with.
I do because I love this origin story. Everybody has an origin story and it tells you so much about how they have arrived where they are in life. I’m curious, Rich, and do you prefer Richard or Rich?
Whatever works. I guess Rich is faster.
I’ll start with Richard, and depending on where the conversation goes, we go to Rich. Richard, tell us about your people. Where are your people from?
Where are my people? That’s a hard question to ask a Black American. I don’t know where my people are from, but I can say that Panama. My family, my parents, my mom, and my dad are both from Panama. The families got to Panama via Barbados to make other places. My parents immigrated to New York in the ‘60s. I was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York. I claim Brooklyn, I claim Panama. That’s where I’m from.
There’s a Pendamian thread throughout this series. What’s interesting, I came across this little interesting nugget, but there are more enslaved people that were brought to Barbados than the U.S., and the colonies, which you wouldn’t imagine, but I thought that was pretty fascinating.
Same thing with Jamaica when you think about the Caribbean and Central America as well. The first time I went to Panama, I’m not going to lie, I was surprised at how many people looked like me. My friend’s passport was also about to expire in less than 30 days. I had to utilize the best Spanish that I could on the spot for us to enjoy, but it helped that I could speak the language a bit. More than that, there was a cultural familiarity. I don’t know if I always thought that Panamanians see themselves as Black. Maybe they do, but I felt like I was with Black folk when I was there.
Shout out to Grisel, who was our team member at BA who lives in Panama. Richard, next question. When did you know you were Black in America? When did you realize or was there always a knowing?
Probably there was always a knowing. I grew up in a very Black community in the sense of just physically. I grew up in East New York, Brooklyn. East New York is a neighborhood on the Queens border, a Black Latino community. My family’s community was very much entrenched in the Afro-Caribbean culture. I grew up going to a church called St. Gabriel’s on Hawthorne Street in Brooklyn, which was full of the Caribbean diaspora worshiping in Brooklyn.
I grew up in elementary school and middle school, all my classmates were Black and Latino except there were two White kids in my middle school, both of whom were named John, which I find fascinating. I think on a certain level, that was my experience with living in a Black community, but I don’t know that I understood, or had the full meaning of what that meant. I think that probably developed more in high school. Going to high school was my first time going to school with folks who were not Black and Latino who weren’t from central Brooklyn.
I would say that was my real awareness of what race might mean as opposed to growing up. I grew up feeling very privileged. I grew up in a poor neighborhood, but I always felt very resourced. We went on vacations. My mom was a public school teacher. I’m glad that when you went to Panama, it was lucky you were not with me because I don’t speak any Spanish, which is even more horrible when you consider my mother as a Spanish teacher.
That’s bad, Rich.
That’s not on me. That’s on her.
You blame your Mama.
I can’t teach myself. I would say high school is probably when I started to develop a sense of awareness of race as something meaningful because this wasn’t a part of my White teacher. Other than that, it wasn’t close to anything other than Black, Latino, or Caribbean.
St. Gabriel, I’m curious, what’s that? What’s that denomination or faith tradition?
Episcopal land. Catholic without the land.
That’s interesting. The Catholics didn’t play. They were everywhere.
No, even if you weren’t Catholic, they didn’t play. We can talk about that later. Many of your works are in the intersection of not only these institutions of education, philanthropy, and government, but also innovation has almost always, either by design or by force, been a part of the work that you have both supported and funded. When we talk about Black innovation, we all know there’s no shortage of ideas. There’s no shortage of ways that we solve creatively.
When it comes to our ventures, even the ones that seem to address our problems the deepest, there is this shortage of funding. I wanted to start a little bit with not on a downer, but the way you see the landscape. I love how you talked about how there was both meaningfulness and it sounds like abundance that you experienced when you were younger even in spaces that were designed to be poor. What is your state of the landscape of Black innovation and the funding of Black innovation at this moment?
As you say, my background has been focused on social services and education. I’ve also spent some time in government and philanthropy. I haven’t spent time in business. It’s what you would expect. All the secular societies operate in the same context and therefore the same challenges in accessing capital and asking for opportunities that you would find in the business community. You certainly find the same thing in the philanthropic community as well.
At Robin Hood, as we thought about what it means to be an anti-racist organization or an organization that focuses on racial equity, one of the data points that was inspirational to us was research from a foundation called Echoing Green, which is an organization that supports social entrepreneurship. They did some research I think in 2020, just before the pandemic, that showed that 10% of philanthropic dollars were going to organizations led by people of color. Those dynamics are widespread in the field. Robin Hood’s work is focused on New York City.
Our mission is to fight poverty in New York City by connecting people to opportunity and making sure that people are on the pathway to social mobility. In our own grant-making, we look at our grant-making in 2020 in a city that is overwhelmingly Black, Latino, and Asian. Only 30% of grantees were led by people of color and they were only getting 20% of our money. Robin Hood, like every other institution, is an American institution. We’ve been on our own journey to do better but those dynamics that folks in every other sector experience, those exact same dynamics exist in the philanthropic space as well.
Do you see progress being made? This is something that we are trying to constantly wrestle with at Black Innovation Alliance. Our work is focused on creating the ecosystem that is necessary for Black innovators and entrepreneurs to thrive. Much of our work feels very early stage. We’ve been thinking through how we get foundations to understand the power of entrepreneurship to address all of the issues that large-scale philanthropy cares about, whether it’s juvenile justice, early childhood learning, lack of access to quality, and all the things.
Folks who have money have access to quality healthcare. They have access to quality jobs, access to quality water, clean water, and transportation. It’s the lack of access to wealth that locks you off from all the other things. I’m curious in terms of the learning journey of philanthropy around entrepreneurship, around innovation, around shifting its approach from a charity lens to more of an uplift standpoint, where do you think philanthropy currently stands?
I am wildly optimistic. That may be a character flaw but I am wildly optimistic. I think you have to be wildly optimistic. That optimism is what gives us the energy and the strength to move forward. We also look at the world. It would be difficult to look in the world and not be optimistic because I’m sitting in a room with Black men and women having this conversation in a way that would not have been possible 50, 60, or 70 years ago. It’s impossible to look at the progress of our country and not feel a certain optimism.
It doesn’t mean that we don’t have deep and serious work to do. For me, it’s almost disrespectful to those who came before us not to approach the work with optimism, and not to use that optimism as fuel for the work moving forward. I think that is certainly true in our work. I talked about our work at Robin Hood. Three years ago, 30% of our grantees were led by people of color. They got 20% of our dollars. Today, 48% of our grantees are led by people of color, and they get 48% of our dollars.
Some of that is about progress in the field. Some of that is just more and more organizations are identifying leaders who look like the community that they serve. Part of that is our intentional work at Robin Hood to change our practice with an explicit race-conscious lens. One of the things that we launched at Robin Hood is something called the Power Fund, which we invest through that fund exclusively in leaders of color. There’s so much of the circuit of society having an intentional focus to force us to find talent, creativity, and innovation that exists in the market.
One thing that we find from our work in the Power Fund is that the organizations who come to Robin Hood through the Power Fund have a higher grant renewal rate than those who don’t, which I think is important to say because the problem is that there weren’t Black, Latino, and Asian people who are leading organizations doing great work. The problem with that was we didn’t know who they were and that wasn’t their fault. That was our fault. It’s our problem because that means that we can do our mission as well.
If our job is to drive dollars to the organization that is having the most impact, we have not been doing that so the race-conscious lens is something that allowed us to do our work better and more impactfully because it’s forced us to find talent where it lives. Just an important thing for us all to say out loud because the narrative of race consciousness, and decision-making in America is a narrative of a perversion of what would otherwise be a merit-based ideal. We talked about this to say and this was a conversation in our community. It’s that somehow if you have a race-conscious approach to grant-making, are you going to find organizations that are less impactful, that are doing less good work?
The discipline here is driving out of that narrative. The problem is not a lack of talent, experience, or innovation in the sector among Black people. The problem is that this sector or every sector is not organized to find that talent. We’re effectively designed to exclude that talent to keep people down. The race consciousness lens has been very important to us. It has led us to do a better job. It has led us to more impact and more talent than the alternative.
When I think about that, there are a couple of different ways that I think of the development of a race-conscious lens in many ways. It’s like there was a practice of participating in liberation and equity at large. I like to think of Harriet as a legit liberator. There was not this concept of, “Let’s make this environment work for me.” It was like, “Let me get out of this environment.”
When we think about the actual innovation of the race-conscious lens and what that means as far as data points that resulted in a framework to help people make better decisions, I feel like that’s a conversation that, in the backdrop of America, gets missed because you’re right. There is this inherent feeling that merit, which also has not necessarily gotten the full breadth of really talking about what we mean by that. There is this difficulty and if I can frankly say, even people like us Black people, leaning into explaining to each other ourselves the value that a race-conscious lens has in progress for us and for other folks.
Of course, I’m saying this in the backdrop of the recent Supreme Court decision around affirmative action, which in many ways was built upon from a race-conscious lens approach that has been an attempt. I don’t want to say it’s been perfected, but an attempt at looking at how we all have access. You are an attorney. You are legally trained. Don’t say fake attorney.
I went to law school.
You went to law school, but I do think about the progress that you all have, the model that you all have created or participated in at Robin Hood. I would love to think that that was even the practice that was being employed writ large in philanthropy. I think unfortunately the dollars show that that may not be the case even for those that say they’re doing social impact work. I also know that a lot of the conversations with philanthropy are nervous about what they can fund, what they cannot fund, and the impact of this case on their work. I don’t know if this has come up for you in your space, but even if it hasn’t, I want to know what your thoughts are on that.
Even to step back for a moment, institutions like Robin Hood, and this is not to be self-critical about our organization, it’s true for every organization in this space, are by definition conservative with the lowercase C in that there is often a sense that institutions like ours need to stay in a particular lane. If you’re a grant-making institution, what you do is you make grants to organizations that are delivering services. What you don’t do is you don’t engage in policy and political work. Our mission is as I said to fight poverty in New York City.
In a typical year, we distribute over $140 million in funding. That’s substantial funding. It makes us the largest poverty-fighting philanthropy in New York, but that money is dwarfed by New York City’s $100 billion budget, by New York State’s $200-plus billion budget. If we’re serious about creating a world, creating a city where every New Yorker has access to opportunity, every New Yorker has access to a quality place to live, a safe place to live, food, education, and jobs, that’s going to take more than $140 million from a foundation.
That’s going to take concerted policy at the city, state, and federal levels of taking a country that is built to destroy opportunity and realize the opportunity to build a country that goes from powerful ideals to powerful practice. Institutions like ours and part of it is the way the laws are written, I think constantly underestimate what we’re allowed to do and what we can do. Part of the journey of Robin Hood over the last 5 or 6 years has been to more directly engage with policy work, not political work with the capital P,
Legally, we cannot engage in electioneering. We cannot support candidates, but we can advocate for policies like increasing the minimum wage, expanding the child tax credit, improving health care, and reducing barriers to developing deeply affordable housing. We can do that. It’s appropriate for us to do that. We cannot achieve our mission unless we do. There are tons of ways in which I think institutions like ours can be conservative. I mean conservative in the sense of not being willing to come close to the envelope than what theoretically a grant-making organization would do.
All that has prelude to, I think, your question. One of the most damaging aspects of a decision like Students for Fair Admissions versus Harvard is that it will lead institutions to behave in a way that they’re not required to behave, even by a deeply and fundamentally flawed decision, even on the surface of that rule, that an institution like ours will say, “We cannot identify organizations led by people of color,” though there’s nothing in that decision that tells Robin Hood that we cannot do that. It requires fortitude because even more important now that we do what we know makes sense.
Just not saying anything to anybody who doesn’t know, the fundamental sadness of that decision is that it’s built on a faulty premise that the 14th Amendment to the Constitution embeds the principle of colorblindness. The Reconstruction Amendments adopted after the Civil War were not adopted to promote color blindness. They were adopted to promote racial liberation. They were designed to empower the former slaves to be full citizens. That same Congress that passed the 14th Amendment passed what can only be described as the first race-conscious affirmative action laws designed specifically to connect the formerly free slaves to opportunity.
It is a powerful long game of conservative politics that at first we decided that this constitution was about being colorblind. Now we’re going to stop being conscious of race, and then use this tool designed to promote Black liberation to hold Black liberation back. I think it is critical for institutions like ours to use what power we have, to do what voice we have, to do the right thing, to push ourselves, to push our communities, and to push the rooms where we have influence, and to continue to acknowledge that. You cannot look at the reality of America and not come to 1 of 2 conclusions that either something is wrong with Black people or something is wrong with America. You have to decide which of those lines. It’s not porous. It’s one or the other. That has to drive our behavior.
I think that’s so good. As you’re talking, I appreciate you lifting up policy as a catalytic opportunity for foundations to invest, but also ideas. The way you unpack that, for me, that’s thought leadership. We need deeper investment from philanthropy at large around the incubation of ideas and the fostering of ideas. Meritocracy is a myth. Meritocracy has never been real in this country.
I used to have this little hobby of when I would go to governmental buildings or old banks or things that had been around for a long time. There was always this picture of White men and I used to call it my wall of White dudes because that meant for hundreds of years in this country, White men only had to compete with one another. For a good chunk of it, White men only had to compete with other White men who owned property. This notion of meritocracy that these White men had to compete with women and with people of color has never been real.
Even when you use the word compete, I’m like, “Did they compete?” A significant chunk of their practice is also the connectivity to each other. I find it interesting that competition became a practice largely when the expansion of the Reconstruction Era. There are statistics that I show to my students around some of the earliest behavioral what we would probably call like the Nielsen ratings now, what have you, in the country. How just a year after the Civil War, the people who once owned slaves would label them as loyal, obedient, and hardworking, and a year after Civil Rights, they were called lazy and receiving handouts and what have you.
The shift in how we also designed competition and worthiness and meritocracy is very interesting because it’s both a design but it’s also a lack of acknowledging, as you mentioned, how wealth positions. In some ways, the inherent right to not compete, to get a certain standing was just a practice.
Harvard is a great example of this. For most of Harvard’s history, Harvard admissions were not competitive in the sense that most people who applied to Harvard got in, but the only people who applied went to Andover. Even the whole idea again of meritocratic admissions comes from a good place. In some way, it’s an opportunity to break through what was the next stop after your prep school.
The notion of meritocracy in institutions has never been built on the idea of taking all the talent and finding the “best,” then using what is fundamentally an impossible task of finding, I don’t know how many seats are at Harvard. I think it’s maybe 1,600 freshman seats at Harvard. It’s not like there are 1,600 people who can do the work at Harvard and then there’s everybody else, inevitably. You are cultivating a community of learners that you want to cultivate whether it’s SAT scores or grades. There is no way to disentangle those things from privilege, opportunity, and experience.
We take something that is perfectly unmeritocratic, pretend that it’s meritocratic, and then treat race consciousness as an abomination as a pollution of that meritocracy. The best way to get into Harvard is to have some parents who went to Harvard and make sure they had a lot of money. I say this as an alum, so I want to keep some of that privilege for myself. It’s part of what makes this decision so painful. Even in this, I would be optimistic because what we are witnessing, as we all understand, is the painful and powerful death row, the dying idea. It’s painful, but the death row, the wild, it’s like that fish on the boat flailing badly. You might get dry taking it out.
I also want to revisit something else you said and kick it back to Ife. You said either there’s something wrong with America or there’s something wrong with Black people. I love that so much because it is true that people are built with an equal portion of possibility and human potential. It shakes out that according to this artificial criteria race, which is not real, that race is a primary determinant of outcomes. Either is something inherently wrong with Black people, a qualifier that’s not even real, it’s made up, or there’s something wrong with America. Can you unpack that a little bit? I think it’s very powerful.
By any measure of well-being, Black people fall behind. There’s no exception to that. Health outcomes, Black maternity, one of the most dangerous things you can do with a Black woman in America is to try to have a baby. Educational outcomes, jobs, wealth. We talk about the wealth gap. Pick the topic. We do worse. All I’m saying is that those statistics suggest 1 of 2 options. There is something aberrant in the abilities of Black people.
Slavery was in 1860. It’s a long time ago. Something aberrant about Black people or we have a society that is organized in ways that lead to inequitable outcomes. I think what the conversation about merit and affirmative action makes clear is that there are plenty of people who believe there’s something wrong with Black people. The reason why affirmative action programs feel like a violation, they feel aberrant, is because they take from what is expected to be the norm.
You expect an unequal distribution of outcomes because you don’t actually believe what you started by saying that talent and opportunity are equally distributed. People don’t want to admit it. It’s a hard thing to admit about yourself. We create these stories, these ideas, these measures, and these tools to make okay what is not okay.
One of the areas that you’ve already raised is the wealth gap. In philanthropy, we know that obviously, I don’t even know what the percentage is, but it’s not a lot of us that would qualify in the space of Black and wealthy to this individual donor category if you will. Therefore as a community, we have models of collective economics, whether we label it as Black Wall Street, or talk about the 1920s, Tulsa being one of the prominent examples, but there were also other economies in America. We often talk about the $1 trillion.
That’s a lot of money. Is it that high right now?
It’s a billion dollars.
We talk about this and we also talk about it. When I hear it, I hear this warmness as if like this is our money, and then my mind is always like, are we practicing collective economics? I want to hear if this is a conversation, literally as we’re talking about investments, is this a conversation that we need to maybe put to rest? Is this a conversation that is about there are these things that happened in the past that are not possible today? I want to get your sense as to the role of Black money as we are talking about investment, especially in social impact spaces. Also if collective economics is still the framework that we need to be talking about this in or if we need to invent something else.
It’s an interesting question. I don’t know why I started the conversation. I don’t know that I start from a place of thinking through collaborative collective economics. It is the case that the lack of wealth in our communities is a critical driver of the experiences we have as Black people. I don’t know if that’s a question about there not being enough Black billionaires, so much as it’s a question about whether people of color have the opportunity to build and generate wealth over time, especially given the deficits we have in the community in getting there, which we all know and understand.
A perfect example of redlining, we know that one’s home in America is the typical majority of one’s wealth, but we also know that few both private practice and public policy, Black people have been stymied in their ability to build wealth through their homes. I think the question of collective economics is interesting in the sense that to the extent that people can organize and collaborate as a community, of course, that increases opportunities for collective action. The idea of a corporation is different people coming together, pulling their resources, and doing things together.
I don’t know that it’s different than White capitalism or the other form of capitalism. For me, the fundamental question is it’s hard to even get there because there aren’t enough people of color with enough wealth. I start by asking how we build an environment where people have the opportunity to build wealth, and then we can have a conversation about what they mean for themselves and their lives. I don’t know if that answers your question, but I guess that’s the way I think of it. That’s not where my orientation is. I’m trying to make sure that people have access to good schools, good education, and good economic opportunity.
How do we get the Black people with the money on the same page about how we might establish some sort of collective action around the advancement of Black people? Is there an opportunity there?
I think the Black people who I know have significant wealth, it’s hard to generalize because every community is a diverse community. Today, a significant action among folks with the means to commit to driving economic opportunity in our community. I think about organizations like the Black Economic Alliance, institutions that are built by Black people of means who are serious about making sure that the door they’ve been able to go through is held open and widened and expanded for other people. For me, I don’t know that that’s a problem.
The people I know who have significant wealth are serious about what that means for their community. That’s why I take a step back. The problem is there isn’t enough Black wealth. What today might be a community of 100 people or 200 people needs to be a community of thousands of people and it’s not just about those at the extreme of the wealth curve. It’s that we need more people in the middle class, people who have equity in their homes, and people who are not living deeply in debt. We have so much work to do. I don’t want to reject the premise, but I guess I am rejecting the premise a little bit. That’s not where I see the problem.
Some of the things you’re touching on are policies. Let me take a step back and bring in one of my favorite rising shows, Abbott Elementary. I don’t know if you’ve seen any of the episodes. I don’t know if you remember the science episode where Quinto was beefing with one of the teachers who was a science teacher. A Black male science teacher and he’s not a major character.
Was it the science fair episode where they were going back and forth on the science fair and it was about the stacking of the eggs?
It was trying to get the egg to make it to the ground without cracking. It’s beyond hilarious because what Quinta was trying to show was that there’s a funness. She was critiquing one of the teachers that there isn’t fun in science and that it doesn’t have to be that deep. She had her students come one by one to the top of this ladder and drop their eggs with all these things that were clearly not going to protect the egg, then the tragedy on their faces or when they saw the tragedy of all of their eggs cracking and dying because they thought the eggs were dying. Each kid was traumatized by her experiment, and the science teacher was unmoved and was like, “That’s exactly what’s going to happen.” He didn’t care that these kids were crying.
He was like, “That’s what you get,” but one of the things that stuck in my mind was he was like, “You want all these kids to win, but you miss that science is also about failure. How we create these equations is built on failure.” That resonated with me as someone who has a passion for science and grew up as a STEM kid, and in many ways sees themselves as an innovator. I know that the one thing that is not necessarily given to me that I don’t have access to a lot of times is failing.
I don’t have the space and the room. I think I hear this from creatives a lot around like, “I have an idea but I want to test it out. I want to try it.” Sure there are incubators and there are accelerators, but you had talked about wealth as not just this destination, but for us to analyze the consequence of what it means at almost every stage of a person’s life when wealth and abundance are not accessible, and that those things also have consequences.
Even if you come out and graduate at the top of your class, it’s not that you weren’t impacted by inequity. There are things that you did experience. You mentioned a couple of policies like EITC and stuff related to maternal health. Are there policies that you feel like we should be talking about a little bit more robustly in especially the life course of an individual when it comes to creating the spaces for more Black innovators and more creative entrepreneurs?
One thing is a talk about how would they give the connection between wealth and the ability to fail because part of the privilege of the entrepreneur is the freedom to take chances, which is difficult to do when you’re trying to meet the immediate and urgent needs of your well-being. I think about the privilege in my own life. When I graduated from law school, I did not follow the typical path that was very much available to me going to a law firm or a bank and making a lot of money.
What I did instead is I started a youth mentoring program, which is why I call myself a fake lawyer because I did not practice law very long. That was an incredible privilege. It’s interesting to talk to my parents now as I’m older, especially my dad, who grew up with a joke that he grew up po’ed because they couldn’t afford the O and the R at the end. My parents are incredibly proud of me, but I think for him, it was hard because he got the highest-paying job he could get because he got a wife and kids and a family to support.
The idea that I was like, “I’m going to start a youth mentoring program,” is an incredible privilege. For me it wasn’t about a wealth-building enterprise, it was about taking a chance, taking a flyer, and doing what I wanted to do as opposed to what I “had to do.” Anyway, I just wanted to elevate that. I think that’s a very important connection. I forgot what your question was.
It’s you think about the policies.
A bunch of policies, but I start with also the very unoriginal idea that you cannot be creative and take risks if you cannot put food on the table for yourself and your family. I think first about the basic needs, food, and shelter. One of the things that we’ve seen during the pandemic is we saw the tremendous power of public policy in reducing poverty. Federal, state, and city resources, particularly federal dollars expansion of the child tax credit and other cash transfers had a tremendous impact on poverty in the country. It reduced child poverty in New York City by half.
It had a spectacular impact on the well-being of children and families. Those who have a problem with cash transfers will make up these crazy stories about people. What the research shows and what people did with the money when they got it is they did what you would do. They paid bills, they paid their rent, they bought food, took their kids on a vacation. They created space for themselves and their families where you weren’t worried about how am I going to feed my kids tonight? You could think about how to build a better future for my kids tomorrow.
Now of course, in true American fashion, we have this amazing experiment with tremendous results and powerful well-being, and so we stopped doing it. Those pandemic-era cash transfers, everything from cash transfers to eviction, more returns, etc., are all done or ending. I know for the good or the bad news that we know much of what we should do. We could expand child tax credits. We can do incredible work to increase the supply of affordable housing, to provide support to families so that they can pay their rent.
We can continue to invest in quality education. All the things that we do, but I start with these things are not like magic or special. People need a place to live. They need to be able to be safe. They can be able to buy their kids food. Imagine the unleashing of human potential if people weren’t living on the streets and starving.
That’s real. As we wrap up this conversation, there’s so much here. I’m curious about what’s your soapbox about these days.
I think I’ve been on my soapbox a lot.
Anything we didn’t touch on that box.
What’s on my soapbox today? I’ll say one thing that may be contrarian. One of the most spectacular failures of American public policy is our failure to educate our children, especially our children of color, but not exclusively our children of color. There are tons of dimensions to that. One of the things that I’ve been a passionate supporter of most of my career is things like charter schools that create additional educational opportunities for young people. I don’t think charter schools are not something that they’re not a panacea that solves the broad problem of public education, but it’s important to me because I think about my own life experiences.
I grew up in East New York, Brooklyn, fundamentally a failing public school system. My parents put me in Catholic school until the third grade, then I went to a magnet public school. They had taken the exam at IS383 in Bushwick, Brooklyn. Our motto was “For whom much is given, to whom much is given, much is required.” It was started by a Black educator named Loretta Boyce, an entirely Black and Latino population of “gifted and talented kids.” I passed the test to Stuyvesant. I didn’t go to a charter school.
There weren’t charter schools at the time but I also didn’t go to PS 213, IS 166, and Thomas Jefferson High School, which were my zone schools. I don’t think I’d be here if I had gone to those three institutions. I guess the thing I put on my soapbox is that we as a country are very generally comfortable with school choice in the sense that if you have means you can exercise school choice by sending your kids to private school. You can exercise your school choice as I did when my kids were young by moving from one district to another.
We exercise school choice all the time. We have a problem with school choice when it’s poor Black people who want to exercise some choices. We live in a country where systems have so often let Black people down. The whole point of Brown vs. Board of Education is that the public systems were letting our school children down. We continue to resist efforts even at the margins. For parents who are tired of being failed by their schools, and who want something different for their kids, that would be my soapbox, I would say.
We need to get a drink on that. There is so much there.
That’s a whole podcast episode right there.
Before we wrap, let’s get to the final question we’ve asked everyone. You weren’t prepared for this. This is on the fly. Who is your favorite Black innovator, dead or alive, real or fictional?
I want to be boring and say T’Challa.
Another Black Panther.
I’m going to try to say something different.
You said boring, T’Challa?
I feel like it’s a cliché. This is corny. I’m going to get some family points. My wife. I can justify this. This is not just to get family brownie points. My wife is a real lawyer. She’s a professor at NYU Law School, where she directs clinical programs, and a professor of clinical law, and teaches courses in civil rights law. She is the president of the ACLU, the first Black person to lead the ACLU in its 100-plus year history, 11th president of the ACLU. I think she’s an innovator in part because of her research. I heard she has a book coming out. I’m excited to see that.
She’s writing a book right now. A lot of her research recently is relevant to this topic, the role that transportation infrastructure plays in the destruction of Black wealth historically. For me, it’s been interesting reading her papers and reading through the draft of her book. I never understood the way in which we use infrastructure, highways, roads, and schools, in some cases, to destroy communities, to separate communities physically from opportunity, particularly as the law made it more difficult, where the law said that you couldn’t keep Black people here, but we can build a wall that keeps them there.
I find it fascinating because it displays the genius of racism and the way that racism adapts and uses this physical plant to entrench oppression. I think she’s an innovator, at least for me, because she has helped me to understand the world in a different way. I think that the work that she does is important, particularly at this moment when our infrastructure is falling apart.
There’s an opportunity with the infrastructure bill to rethink the physical makeup of America, and there’s an opportunity in that work. You cannot erase the harm of the past, but you can try to begin to address the harm of the past by investing in infrastructure in equitable ways, whereas historically, infrastructure has been used profoundly inequitably. T’Challa and Deborah.
You’re a smart man.
I feel like I could justify it.
Good job, Rich. Thank you so much.
Where can people find you if you want to be found? If you don’t want to be found, where can they find something about the Robin Hood Foundation?
You can find the Robin Hood Foundation at www.RobinHood.org. Speaking of if you’ve got resources, we’re a foundation that is not in doubt. Every dollar we give, we raise. I had to find the $140 million every year to reinvest it. You can come to learn more, you can support our work. That’s the best way to find me, or on Twitter, and now on Threads. I’m trying to figure out how Threads work, but @RichardBuery, at all those places.
Thank you, Richard.
Thanks for having me. Thanks for the comfy couch.
Thank you, Rich.
Thanks, you all, for joining us for another episode of Chains to Links. We will see you next time.
A New York native, urbanist, social innovator, educator, and Robin Hood’s Chief Executive Officer. A first-generation, Panamanian American born and raised in the East New York neighborhood of Brooklyn, Richard R. Buery, Jr. has spent his career fighting to advance equal opportunities for families and communities often left behind. In September 2021, Richard became the CEO of Robin Hood, one of the nation’s leading anti-poverty organizations.
