2017 Professional and Cultural Visit to New York City
From Sunday, January 29th to Tuesday, January 31st, we completed a three-day odyssey of diverse professional and cultural site visits across New York City. Our agenda was full of meetings at some of the most iconic and influential banking and finance institutions, educational initiatives designed to break the cycles of poverty and gender inequality—both in NYC and abroad, and an array of memorable cultural experiences.
Download our NYC 2017 brochure with the full agenda here! A summary of our activities follows:
On Sunday morning we departed from Boston on our private bus, enjoyed a short lunch break on the highway, and arrived in the late afternoon at the New York Historical Society for a short film on NYC history and a guided tour of two new exhibits on Muhammad Ali. Founded in 1804, NYHS is the city’s oldest museum. It holds over 1.6 million works of art including iconic genre and history paintings, sculpture, and American folk art. Muhammad Ali was the world heavyweight boxing champion in 1964 and twice during the 1970s. After retiring, he focused on philanthropy and earned the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2005.
On Sunday evening, we checked into the New Yorker Hotel and then walked to Times Square for dinner and live music at Havana Central. The New Yorker is a Jazz Age-era hotel that has hosted luminaries such as John F. Kennedy, Muhammad Ali, Fidel Castro—and many BU Humphrey Fellows over several years! Havana Central is a restaurant designed on the theme of Havana in the 1950s. As we dined, we enjoyed the music of the YeraSon Orchestra, which combines old-school Cuban music with a modern New York twist.
On Monday, we visited these organizations:
- Bank of New York Mellon, a multinational banking and financial services corporation with nearly US$400 billion in total assets. Its predecessor, the The Bank of New York, was the oldest banking corporation in the U.S. and the 20th oldest bank in the world, having been established in 1784 by Alexander Hamilton. We met with senior executives for an overview and discussion followed by a brief tour of the trading floor.
- UN Women—the UN Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women, which was created in 2010 to become the global champion for gender equality. Several members of the Policy and Programme divisions met with us to discuss a wide range of initiatives. particularly those in the areas of economic development and political participation.
- New York Stock Exchange, the world’s largest stock exchange, with the market capitalization of its listed companies at approximately US$20 trillion. The average daily trading value is about US$170 billion. We met with education and outreach executives, trader Kenneth Polcari, and with Listings and Capital Markets Team specialists Linda Woodward, Shannon Rochford, and Vidya Nallasivan on the iconic trading floor, where we also witnessed the closing bell.
- University Club, a private social club the origins of which date back to 1861. Vicki Brooks is a former banker, trader, and senior executive at JP Morgan, and a longtime colleague of HHHP Director Jack McCarthy. She was among the first women on Wall Street, and she was instrumental in developing and leading leadership development at JP Morgan, one of the world’s largest investment banks.
On Tuesday, we visited these organizations:
- Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the largest and most influential of all twelve regional Federal Reserve Banks in the U.S. Executives from the International Affairs & Strategy and Education & Outreach divisions met with us, and then Heather Daly, Director of Operations for Education & Outreach, took us on a brief tour of the NY Fed’s gold vault, the largest depository of gold reserve in the world (7,000 tons), located five stories below street level.
- Young Women’s Leadership Network, a network of public schools for girls in NYC with affiliates in six states. Its concept is to provide economically disadvantaged girls with a high-quality college preparatory education modeled on the finest private schools. It is one of the most nationally recognized initiatives that empower girls to break the cycle of poverty through education. We met with Acting Executive Director John Roure, Managing Director of Girls’ Education Laura Rebell Gross, administrators, teachers and students at the YWLN school in Astoria, visited classrooms, and learned about the YWLN approach and some of its proudest achievements.
Our cohort at the Young Women’s Leadership School of Astoria - Institute of International Education (IIE), Higher Education Readiness (HER) Program, an initiative that provides high school-aged girls in underserved communities a pathway to university. It is a new project currently being piloted in Ethiopia. IIE is one of the world’s largest and most experienced international education and training organizations; it also administers the HHHP and other Fulbright programs. We met with Evgenia Valuy, Data Analyst at the Center for Academic Mobility Research and Impact, who provided a monitoring & evaluation-based overview of the HER Program.
We concluded our 2017 NYC trip with a visit to Fraunces Tavern, a national historic landmark, museum, and restaurant that is said to be the oldest surviving building in New York City. In revolutionary history, this location served as a headquarters for General George Washington, a venue for peace negotiations with the British and then, after the Republic was established, housing for federal offices.
In all, it was an action-packed trip full of valuable professional and cultural exchange. Several Fellows are now planning to return to NYC for followup visits to some of the organizations that hosted us.