Newark Mayor Cory Booker is trying to save his city with a little help from his friends -- his Facebook friends, that is.
Booker has raised nearly half of the $100 million he needs to trigger Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg's $100 million matching donation to the Newark school system.
Booker's roots in the tech community run deep. His parents were among the first African-American employees of IBM. Now Booker has managed to organize a loose and growing collection of technology and finance heavyweights and others to help him with his mission to rebuild Newark.
Education is central.
"More than anything, we must do better for our children's education," Booker said Tuesday night in his annual State of the City address. "We know that there will never be a great Newark unless there is a great public school system for our city."
When Zuckerberg made his $100 million pledge to Newark schools last fall, some wondered what the young Palo Alto billionaire had to do with Newark. After all, Zuck is a middle-class kid who went to elite schools in New England. So why Newark? As much as anything else, Zuck's donation represented a vote of confidence in Booker and his vision for education reform.
But there was a catch. Zuck made his pledge contingent on Newark raising $100 million in matching funds, which would bring the total amount of the donation to $200 million. Needless to say, raising $100 million as the economy emerges from the worst recession in 80 years is easier said than done. But the mayor's on his way.
Booker says he's raised $25 million from New York investor William Ackman, the finance titan who runs Pershing Square Capital Management. Then there is $10 million from John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins, arguably the most influential technology venture capitalist in the country. New York philanthropists Elizabeth and Ravenel Curry have thrown in $5 million. And a well-known couple by the name of Bill and Melinda Gates has chipped in an additional $3 million.
So, $43 million down, $57 million to go.
Newark is New Jersey's largest city, and it's been decimated by decades of poverty, crime and mismanagement by corrupt party bosses, negligent administrators and a country that appeared to care little about the city's fate.
If anyone has a shot of turning Newark around, it's Booker, who was elected mayor in 2006 with a whopping 72 percent of the vote. This guy makes run-of-the-mill overachievers look like slouches. Raised in Bergen Country, New Jersey, Booker, 41, graduated from Stanford University in 1991 with a B.A. in political science, and earned a master's degree in sociology from Stanford the next year.
Did I mention that he was a star tight end on the Stanford Cardinal varsity football team?
Following Stanford, he earned a Rhodes scholarship and went to Oxford, where he received an honors degree in modern history. But wait, there's more. In 1997, Booker graduated with a law degree from Yale Law School, arguably the most cerebral law school in the country.
With a resume like that, Booker could have done whatever he wanted. Wall Street, white-shoe law firm, corporate America, you name it.
Instead, he embarked on a personal mission to try to save one of the most blighted and beleaguered cities in the United States. Booker made national news in December when, responding to a massive blizzard that crippled the East Coast, he raced around his city like a madman, tweeting and personally digging out his constituents, a display that took popular admiration for him to a new level.
“2011 is the year when, after all of our planning, pushing and promoting, we truly begin digging, drilling and dazzling," Booker said in his speech. "This is our groundbreaking year.”
Among other announcements, Booker said that Audible.com, the web-based audio content company, will expand its presence in Newark by 25,000 square feet in 2011, in order to grow its local workforce.
The challenges facing Newark are immense. Booker and his colleagues confront problems that the vast majority of Americans would be hard-pressed to relate to; murders, carjackings, violent assaults, gang violence. It's tragically clear that the city's historical strategy of combating gang violence has failed. Booker wants respected community members to engage with gang members and show them there are economic alternatives to hustling on the streets.
In what he described as a very difficult move, Booker was forced to lay off about 150 police officers last year -- a shocking proposition in a city with such crime -- after failing to reach an agreement with the police union. But Booker and his colleagues reorganized the police department, shuffled assets and resources, and now he says there are just as many cops on the beat as there were before the layoffs.
Among the services that Booker and his team are trying to bring to Newark residents are things most of us take for granted. For example, one of the highlights of his State of the City address came when he announced two new grocery stores and a new movie theater for city residents. The need to address basic issues like those illustrates the magnitude of the challenges facing the city.
Booker and his colleagues are trying to rebuild the housing stock brick-by-brick, attract businesses, create jobs and stop the violence that has claimed innumerable lives in Newark over the years.
In a major coup, Booker has managed to attract the NCAA Men's Basketball East Regional (aka "March Madness") to Newark's Prudential Center later this month.
Newark's recent history is tragic, but Booker is not dwelling on the past. Whether it's education, economic development or crime reduction, Booker is bringing innovative ideas to the table.
That may help explain be why some of the wealthiest technologists in the world are willing to join his team and invest in a city that might as well be a million miles away from Silicon Valley.
See Also:
- Mayor Hacks Snowmageddon With Epic Tweets
- Live! From New York! It's Mark Zuckerberg!
- Why Mark Zuckerberg Should Like The Social Network
- The Wired Interview: Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg
- Wired 14.06: The Challenger
- Bill Gates Venture Invests $136 Million In China Energy Projects
- President Obama Expands “Educate to Innovate”
- Gates Donates Millions to Schools
