Deputy Mayor Buery Visits Managers’ Quarterly Forum
Now that NYCHA’s strategic plan for the next 10 years has finally been publically launched, our NextGeneration NYCHA work has just begun. That was the message with which Chair and CEO Shola Olatoye welcomed senior staff on July 14 for the second Quarterly Leadership Meeting, after attendees watched a video compilation of NextGeneration NYCHA media coverage.
Presentations included “NextGeneration NYCHA by the Numbers” by Karina Totah, Senior Advisor to the Chair, and Policy Analyst Valerie Rosenberg; an overview of the central office reorganization from Chief of Staff David Pristin and General Manager Michael Kelly; “Coaching to Promote Positive Organization Culture and High Performance by Toni Harris Quinerly of Community Resource Exchange; an overview of current operations initiatives from Brian Clarke, Carolyn Jasper, Thomas Johnston, James Artis, Anthony Porcelli, Lillian Harris, and Aaron Trauring; and a presentation on the Fund for Public Housing by Rasmia Kirmani-Frye.
But perhaps the most interesting segment of the meeting was the Chair’s conversation with Richard Buery, Deputy Mayor for Strategic Policy Initiatives, who talked about organizational change and the challenges of tackling tough mandates hostile environments. Prior to joining the Mayor’s staff, the Deputy Mayor, a native of East New York and a graduate of Harvard, served as CEO of the Children’s AID Society. To date, his primary focus in the de Blasio administration has been the rollout of the Mayor’s City-wide pre-K program.
On NYCHA’s challenging road ahead, the Deputy Mayor advised that we keep our eyes on our goal of safe, clean and connected communities and quoted his favorite section from a speech of Theodore Roosevelt’s, which is often referred to as the Man in the Arena:
“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”
