Richard R. Buery

Richard R. Buery, Jr. is The Children's Aid Society’s new President and Chief Executive Officer. He will succeed C. Warren Moses, who will retire at the organization’s annual meeting in October 2009.

Mr. Buery, Co-Founder and Executive Director, was born and raised in the East New York section of Brooklyn, New York, and is 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. 

Groundwork is the third nonprofit organization Mr. Buery has founded. While still an undergraduate at Harvard, he 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. 

In addition to his work as a social entrepreneur, 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 holds a J.D. from Yale Law School and a B.A. from Harvard College. He has been named one of Ebony Magazine’s Thirty Leaders of the Future under Thirty in 2000 and one of the Crain’s New York Forty under 40 in 2009, and one of the nation’s “Extraordinary Black Men” by the United Negro College Fund, and received the Mary McLeod Bethune Award from the National Council of Negro Women.