Chairman Frederick A.O. Schwarz, Jr., of the New York City Campaign Finance Board announced today that Nicole A. Gordon will be leaving the CFB this September after 18 years as the Board’s Executive Director to become the Vice President of the JEHT Foundation.
“Nicole Gordon has been a creative, committed, selfless, and steady leader of the staff of the City’s Campaign Finance Board since its founding. She has been recognized as a leader of the campaign finance reform movement nationally,” Chairman Schwarz said today. “Thanks to Nicole, New York City has been at the forefront of reform. We will miss Nicole as a colleague and as a friend. But we know she will continue to do creative and important work at the JEHT Foundation.”
Ms. Gordon was appointed in September 1988 as the first Executive Director of the New York City Campaign Finance Board, then-chaired by Father Joseph A. O’Hare, S.J. New York City’s pioneer Campaign Finance Program was enacted, at the urging of Mayor Edward I. Koch, by the New York City Council under Majority Leader Peter F. Vallone, and was confirmed in the New York City Charter by voter approval of a Charter Revision Commission ballot proposal in November 1988. Over the years, the Board has established itself as a nationally- and internationally-recognized non-partisan model for reform. Board members and staff have received awards for the Board’s work from the Council on Governmental Ethics Laws; New York State Common Cause; the Citizens Budget Commission; the Center for Policy Alternatives; and the Center for Digital Government, among many others, and the agency has been called upon for information and guidance by jurisdictions locally, throughout the United States, and around the world, including by other governments at every level, as far away as Nigeria and Bosnia-Herzegovina. Ms. Gordon personally is the recipient of Columbia Law School’s Lawrence A. Wien Prize for Social Responsibility and was selected as a Wasserstein Public Interest Fellow at Harvard Law School. (See also, Gordon bio.)
Before appointment to her position at the CFB, Ms. Gordon had served as Counsel to the Chairman of the New York State Commission on Government Integrity (“Feerick Commission”) and as an Assistant Corporation Counsel in the Law Department of the City of New York.
“I have had a great and unique privilege, under the direction of the members of the Campaign Finance Board and with the support of an extraordinary staff, to set up an agency and to see it become a well-established institution of New York City government, respected around the world for its outstanding disclosure mechanisms, generous public funds matching Program, and rigorous enforcement of the law,” Ms. Gordon commented today. “I am deeply proud of the work this agency has performed and, after so many years, am very sad to leave it. But at this point in my life and in the life of the CFB, it seemed the right time both personally and institutionally to think about new challenges. I look forward to continuing work in the democracy area in a different capacity as well as expanding into other areas that I also care deeply about.”
The JEHT Foundation’s programs work in the areas of criminal justice, international justice, fair and participatory elections, and palliative healthcare.