
Ron Bruder is an
American
American(s) may refer to:
* American, something of, from, or related to the United States of America, commonly known as the "United States" or "America"
** Americans, citizens and nationals of the United States of America
** American ancestry, p ...
entrepreneur
Entrepreneurship is the creation or extraction of economic value in ways that generally entail beyond the minimal amount of risk (assumed by a traditional business), and potentially involving values besides simply economic ones.
An entreprene ...
and advocate for increased youth employment opportunities in the
Middle East
The Middle East (term originally coined in English language) is a geopolitical region encompassing the Arabian Peninsula, the Levant, Turkey, Egypt, Iran, and Iraq.
The term came into widespread usage by the United Kingdom and western Eur ...
and
North Africa
North Africa (sometimes Northern Africa) is a region encompassing the northern portion of the African continent. There is no singularly accepted scope for the region. However, it is sometimes defined as stretching from the Atlantic shores of t ...
. He is the founder of Education for Employment (EFE), a network of affiliated locally-run nonprofits which create public-private partnerships with employers to train youth in technical and soft skills and place them in jobs. The network has local affiliates in
Jordan
Jordan, officially the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, is a country in the Southern Levant region of West Asia. Jordan is bordered by Syria to the north, Iraq to the east, Saudi Arabia to the south, and Israel and the occupied Palestinian ter ...
,
Palestine
Palestine, officially the State of Palestine, is a country in West Asia. Recognized by International recognition of Palestine, 147 of the UN's 193 member states, it encompasses the Israeli-occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and th ...
,
Yemen
Yemen, officially the Republic of Yemen, is a country in West Asia. Located in South Arabia, southern Arabia, it borders Saudi Arabia to Saudi Arabia–Yemen border, the north, Oman to Oman–Yemen border, the northeast, the south-eastern part ...
,
Egypt
Egypt ( , ), officially the Arab Republic of Egypt, is a country spanning the Northeast Africa, northeast corner of Africa and Western Asia, southwest corner of Asia via the Sinai Peninsula. It is bordered by the Mediterranean Sea to northe ...
,
Morocco
Morocco, officially the Kingdom of Morocco, is a country in the Maghreb region of North Africa. It has coastlines on the Mediterranean Sea to the north and the Atlantic Ocean to the west, and has land borders with Algeria to Algeria–Morocc ...
,
Algeria
Algeria, officially the People's Democratic Republic of Algeria, is a country in the Maghreb region of North Africa. It is bordered to Algeria–Tunisia border, the northeast by Tunisia; to Algeria–Libya border, the east by Libya; to Alger ...
,
United Arab Emirates
The United Arab Emirates (UAE), or simply the Emirates, is a country in West Asia, in the Middle East, at the eastern end of the Arabian Peninsula. It is a Federal monarchy, federal elective monarchy made up of Emirates of the United Arab E ...
,
Saudi Arabia
Saudi Arabia, officially the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA), is a country in West Asia. Located in the centre of the Middle East, it covers the bulk of the Arabian Peninsula and has a land area of about , making it the List of Asian countries ...
and
Tunisia
Tunisia, officially the Republic of Tunisia, is a country in the Maghreb region of North Africa. It is bordered by Algeria to the west and southwest, Libya to the southeast, and the Mediterranean Sea to the north and east. Tunisia also shares m ...
and capacity-building support organizations in the United States and Spain. EFE has supported over 155,000 youth (59% women) to enter the world of work. In 2011 Bruder was named on the ''
TIME 100
''Time'' 100 is a list of the top 100 most influential people, assembled by the American news magazine ''Time''. First published in 1999 as the result of a debate among American academics, politicians, and journalists, the list is now a highly ...
'' list of the 100 most influential people in the world.
He lives in
Westchester County
Westchester County is a county located in the southeastern portion of the U.S. state of New York, bordering the Long Island Sound and the Byram River to its east and the Hudson River on its west. The county is the seventh most populous cou ...
,
New York
New York most commonly refers to:
* New York (state), a state in the northeastern United States
* New York City, the most populous city in the United States, located in the state of New York
New York may also refer to:
Places United Kingdom
* ...
.
Background
Childhood
Born in
Brooklyn
Brooklyn is a Boroughs of New York City, borough of New York City located at the westernmost end of Long Island in the New York (state), State of New York. Formerly an independent city, the borough is coextensive with Kings County, one of twelv ...
, Bruder was a part of a Jewish family that had migrated to the
United States
The United States of America (USA), also known as the United States (U.S.) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It is a federal republic of 50 U.S. state, states and a federal capital district, Washington, D.C. The 48 ...
from
Eastern Europe
Eastern Europe is a subregion of the Europe, European continent. As a largely ambiguous term, it has a wide range of geopolitical, geographical, ethnic, cultural and socio-economic connotations. Its eastern boundary is marked by the Ural Mountain ...
in the early half of the 20th century. Both of his parents worked, with his father an
optometrist
Optometry is the healthcare practice concerned with examining the eyes for visual defects, prescribing corrective lenses, and detecting eye abnormalities.
In the United States and Canada, optometrists are those that hold a post-baccalaureate f ...
and his mother a
remedial reading teacher. While working as an encyclopedia salesman at age 17, Bruder created a new, more efficient method for selling them, by hiring "economically disadvantaged mothers to do phone solicitations and employed their children to stuff envelopes through doorways all over Brooklyn."
At the age of 16, Bruder enrolled at
Shimer College
Shimer Great Books School ( ) is a Classic_book#University_programs, Great Books college that is part of North Central College in Naperville, Illinois. Prior to 2017, Shimer was an independent, accredited college on the south side of Chicago, or ...
, a
Great Books
A classic is a book accepted as being exemplary or particularly noteworthy. What makes a book "classic" is a concern that has occurred to various authors ranging from Italo Calvino to Mark Twain and the related questions of "Why Read the Cl ...
college then located in
Mount Carroll, Illinois
Mount Carroll is a city in and the county seat of Carroll County, Illinois, United States. The population was 1,479 at the 2020 census.
History
Mount Carroll began life as a mill town around 1841. In 1843, a referendum moved the county seat fro ...
.
He went on to earn a
Bachelor's degree in Economics at
Adelphi University
Adelphi University is a private university in Garden City, New York, United States. Adelphi also has centers in Downtown Brooklyn, Hudson Valley, and Suffolk County in addition to a virtual, online campus for remote students. As of 2019, it had ...
,
followed by a
Master's Degree in Business Administration
A Master of Business Administration (MBA) is a professional degree focused on business administration. The core courses in an MBA program cover various areas of business administration; elective courses may allow further study in a particular ar ...
at
New York University
New York University (NYU) is a private university, private research university in New York City, New York, United States. Chartered in 1831 by the New York State Legislature, NYU was founded in 1832 by Albert Gallatin as a Nondenominational ...
, and a Post-Master's Degree in Accounting and Taxation at
Iona College
Iona University () is a private Catholic university with a main campus in New Rochelle, New York, United States. It was founded in 1940 by the Congregation of Christian Brothers and occupies a campus of in New Rochelle and a campus of in Bro ...
.
Career
Ron Bruder worked as a real estate developer for more than 30 years, and his earliest real estate activity involved converting an "electric generating plant in lower Manhattan to residential use." He created The Brookhill Group, a real estate company that built and turned around shopping centers and reclaimed
brownfield
Brownfield is previously-developed land that has been abandoned or underused, and which may carry pollution, or a risk of pollution, from industrial use. The specific definition of brownfield land varies and is decided by policy makers and l ...
s. From there, he went on to found a "medical technology company and an oil-and-gas business, and he redeveloped a number of shopping malls".
It was after this that he started working with brownfields in partnership with Dames and Moore, a multibillion-dollar engineering company. Bruder invented a method of encouraging investment in tainted properties by capping clean-up costs and "securitizing the debt", which enabled The Brookhill Group to become "one of the largest buyers of distressed properties in the U.S."
The group quickly obtained properties in more than 21 states.
The
September 11 attacks
The September 11 attacks, also known as 9/11, were four coordinated Islamist terrorist suicide attacks by al-Qaeda against the United States in 2001. Nineteen terrorists hijacked four commercial airliners, crashing the first two into ...
were very traumatic for Bruder, as his eldest daughter was working near the World Trade Center and the event drove Bruder to "make a real impact" in something other than real estate.
Working with experts and business owners in the Middle East and North Africa, Bruder investigated entrepreneurial responses to overcoming two key challenges in the Middle East and North Africa: the world's large youth bulge and the highest youth unemployment in the world. He believes that stable societies can only be built if youth have economic opportunity and jobs. After hiring the
Brookings Institution
The Brookings Institution, often stylized as Brookings, is an American think tank that conducts research and education in the social sciences, primarily in economics (and tax policy), metropolitan policy, governance, foreign policy, global econo ...
to research methods of ameliorating the situation, along with traveling for several months in Middle Eastern countries, Bruder decided to create Education For Employment (EFE). His stated reason for doing so was,
Bruder funded the creation of the foundation. Since its establishment in 2002, EFE has grown to become a network of locally-run and staffed affiliate organizations located across the Middle East and North Africa and supported by capacity-building nonprofits in the United States, the UAE, and Europe. In order to expand within each of the network's countries of operation, Bruder partnered with "local companies that provide funding and agree to hire a set number of graduates from his training programs". The first Middle Eastern affiliate, EFE-Jordan, was founded in Jordan in 2005, and the second, EFE-Palestine, in the Gaza Strip in 2006.
They were followed by the creation of EFE-Egypt, EFE-Morocco, EFE-Yemen, EFE-Tunisia, EFE-Algeria, EFE-United Arab Emirates and EFE-Saudi Arabia.
Bruder has become a major voice in the conversation on youth unemployment in the Middle East and North Africa. He has served as a delegate of the Council on Foreign Relations to the Jeddah Economic Forum, and a contributor to the US-Islamic World Forum in Doha, Qatar. He is frequently invited to share EFE's best practices at major international conferences and fora and in the media, including the
Harvard Business Review
''Harvard Business Review'' (''HBR'') is a general management magazine published by Harvard Business Publishing, a not-for-profit, independent corporation that is an affiliate of Harvard Business School. ''HBR'' is published six times a year ...
. Bruder has also addressed audiences at the
Clinton Global Initiative
The Clinton Foundation (founded in 2001 as the William J. Clinton Presidential Foundation, and renamed in 2013 as the Bill, Hillary & Chelsea Clinton Foundation) is a nonprofit organization under section 501(c)(3) of the U.S. tax code. It was e ...
, World Economic Forum and the United Nations, among others.
At the World Economic Forum Meeting of New Champions in 2012, Bruder was named Global Social Entrepreneurs of the Year by the Schwab Foundation.
In 2014, he received the ''Creativity in Philanthropy Award'' from the New York University George H. Heyman Jr. Center for Philanthropy and Fundraising for his contributions to enhancing economic opportunities for women in the Middle East and North Africa. In 2011, Bruder appeared on the ''
Time
Time is the continuous progression of existence that occurs in an apparently irreversible process, irreversible succession from the past, through the present, and into the future. It is a component quantity of various measurements used to sequ ...
'' magazine list of 100 Most Influential People in the World
and subsequently authored an op-ed for the magazine. In 2010, he received ''The Amy and Tony Polak 2010 Distinguished Advocate Award'' from the
Anne Frank Center for his contributions to world education.
References
Further reading
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External links
Education for EmploymentHome Website
The Brookhill GroupHome Website
{{DEFAULTSORT:Bruder, Ron
Jews from New York (state)
American company founders
Founders of educational institutions
Businesspeople from Brooklyn
Businesspeople from New Rochelle, New York
New York University Stern School of Business alumni
Year of birth missing (living people)
Living people
Adelphi University alumni
Activists from New Rochelle, New York