Fight song: Robin Hood CEO iamwesmoore on $115M 'rallying cry' RiseUpNewYork benefit
Founded in 1988, Robin Hood is the largest organization devoted to fighting poverty in New York City. With board members covering the company's overhead, CEOsays that 100% of each donation goes directly to help New Yorkers via front line organizations providing support for food, shelter, cash assistance, health and legal services, and more.
During the telethon, Moore appeared from his former Bronx neighborhood to address the community’s urgent needs. He grew up between the borough and Baltimore, and later earned degrees from Valley Forge Military College, Johns Hopkins University and the University of Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. He served as a captain and paratrooper with the U.S. Army’s 82nd Airborne, including a combat deployment to Afghanistan, and later served as a White House Fellow to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.
I’m in my fourth year as CEO of Robin Hood, but prior I was fortunate to have the chance to see the American economy through a lot of different lenses. I was a combat officer who was deployed as a paratrooper in Afghanistan with the 82nd Airborne division. I’ve worked in mergers and acquisitions and private equity work, and had a chance to start up my own social enterprise. When Robin Hood first approached me about becoming CEO I was reluctant.
The Rise Up New York! benefit was one of the more complicated things to pull off because the world was and is changing in real time. We’re having to execute this at the same time as we’re watching 11 years of job growth go away in five weeks or as team members get sick. 1 in 4 people in this country that have died from COVID-19 are New Yorkers. 1 in 4 are from this city. There are more New York City children in shelters than there are in Madison Square Garden right now.
In addition to the diverse talent and community members, we told the stories of places like the River Fund, which is one of our partners, and has fed as many as 900 New Yorkers in a day and seen lines stretch 16 city blocks. Something like this would have been difficult to pull off in normal circumstances and these were as far from normal circumstances as you could possibly imagine. Now that we are on the cusp of a really special night, it’s important to take stock in that.
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