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Richard J. Riordan served as thirty-ninth mayor of Los Angeles from June 1993 to June 2001. As mayor, Riordan focused his efforts on making Los Angeles safer, creating quality jobs throughout the city, making government more efficient, making neighborhoods healthier, and reforming the public education system. During his first term, he created the Mayor’s Alliance for a Safer Los Angeles, a public/private partnership that raised $16 million to computerize records and information for the Los Angeles Police Department. With technology as a tool, police officers are able to spend less time behind desks and more time protecting and serving Angelenos. Riordan’s reform efforts changed the way Los Angeles does business. As a means to create economic opportunities, Riordan made international trade a top priority. In 1997, he created the International Trade Initiative to enhance Los Angeles’ position as a world leader and location for international trade in the twenty-first century. Riordan’s focus on healthy neighborhoods led to community-based action throughout the city. The mayor’s Volunteer Bureau saves city taxpayers more than $30 million each year by mobilizing more than 30,000 community-spirited volunteers throughout the Los Angeles area. He also created the Los Angeles Neighborhood Initiative, a community-based effort designed to improve transit-dependent areas and established one dozen Targeted Neighborhood Initiatives that give citizens a say over community issues. Riordan devoted his second term to the challenge of providing quality education for all children. The mayor strongly believes that every child deserves the tools to compete in society: reading, writing, and problem-solving skills. Riordan launched “Read to Me,” a city-wide reading program that encourages parents and caregivers to begin reading to their children at an early age, in 1998. Long before his first election, he was actively involved in education issues, creating the Riordan Fellowship and Riordan Scholars programs, which fund college-level business studies for high school students. He is a founding member of the acclaimed LEARN effort and of BEST (Better Educated Students for Tomorrow), a nationally recognized after-school program serving more than 5,000 children in Los Angeles’ disadvantaged neighborhoods. Riordan created The Riordan Foundation in 1981. His goal was simple: to enable people to acquire the skills necessary to compete successfully in society. To accomplish this, his plan was also simple: to teach children how to read and write at an early age and to nurture leadership skills in young adults. Now, 21 years later, The Riordan Foundation has left an impressive legacy of computer-based, early childhood literacy programs across the country and youth development and leadership programs with over 1,000 graduates. Through our signature Rx for Reading programs, The Riordan Foundation has proudly distributed over 21,700 computers to over 2,100 schools in 40 states and provided funds for over 128,000 books purchased for elementary classroom libraries. Eli Broad is a renowned business leader who built two Fortune 500 companies from the ground up over a five-decade career in business. He is chairman of AIG Retirement Services Inc. (formerly SunAmerica Inc.) and founder-chairman of KB Home (formerly Kaufman and Broad Home Corporation). Today, he is focused on philanthropy. The Broad family’s commitment to philanthropy and community is both deep and wide-ranging. It includes ongoing leadership roles in art, education, science and civic development. Avid supporters of contemporary art, Mr. Broad and his wife, Edythe, have created one of the world’s finest collections. Since 1984, The Broad Art Foundation has operated an active “lending library” of its extensive collection to more than 400 museums and university galleries worldwide. In 2001-2003, an exhibition of the Broads’ collection was shown at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, DC; the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston; and the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain. Mr. Broad was the founding chairman of the board of trustees of The Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, and is currently a trustee of The Museum of Modern Art in New York, and a trustee and member of the executive committee of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, where the Broads recently announced a major gift to build The Broad Contemporary Art Museum. In 1999, the Broads founded The Broad Foundation, whose mission is to dramatically improve urban public education through better governance, management and labor relations. In its first five years, the Foundation has committed over $400 million to support new ideas and innovative leadership in the nation’s largest urban school systems. The Foundation also has launched four national flagship initiatives – The Broad Prize for Urban Education, The Broad Center for Superintendents, The Broad Residency in Urban Education and The Broad Institute for School Boards. Mr. Broad has said, “I can imagine no more important contribution to our country’s future than a long-term commitment to improving urban K-12 public schools.” In 2001, The Eli and Edythe L. Broad Foundation created the Broad Medical Research Program, which seeks to stimulate innovative research that will lead to progress in the prevention, therapy or understanding of inflammatory bowel disease. In June 2003, in an unprecedented partnership with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard University and Whitehead Institute, the Broads announced the founding gift to create The Eli and Edythe Broad Institute for biomedical research. The Institute’s aim is to realize the promise of the human genome to revolutionize clinical medicine and to make knowledge freely available to scientists around the world. Committed to the belief that all great cities need a vibrant center, Mr. Broad is currently leading the effort to turn Los Angeles’ Grand Avenue into a truly “grand avenue,” to rival the main boulevards of the world’s greatest cities. In 1996, he and Mayor Richard Riordan took on the task of raising sufficient funds to build the Frank Gehry-designed Walt Disney Concert Hall, which opened to worldwide acclaim in October 2003. Strong believers in higher education, the Broad Foundations have made a major contribution to the School of the Arts and Architecture at UCLA toward the construction of The Edythe L. and Eli Broad Art Center, designed by Richard Meier. Mr. Broad is a member of the board of trustees of CalTech, where the Broads gave the cornerstone gift to create the Broad Center for the Biological Sciences, designed by James Freed. Mr. Broad also served as chairman of the board of trustees of Pitzer College and vice chairman of the board of trustees of the California State University system. In 1991, the Broads endowed The Eli Broad College of Business and The Eli Broad Graduate School of Management at Michigan State University, from which Mr. Broad graduated cum laude in 1954. Related Links |
