Interview with Diahann Billings-Burford

As Deputy Executive Director of External Affairs for City Year New York, Ms. Billings-Burford establishes and maintains relationships with politicians, leaders and community stakeholders.  In addition, she indirectly oversees Recruitment and Communications.  Most recently, Ms. Billings-Burford served as the Director of External Affairs (NY) for Achievement First, a charter school management organization, which opens and operates high performing, college preparatory elementary, middle and high schools in urban areas.  Most of her career has been spent with Prep for Prep, a New York based leadership development organization where she served in various capacities, including Director of College Guidance and Director of Leadership Development Opportunities. Ms. Billings-Burford has also worked as a history teacher (middle school), curriculum developer, and corporate attorney. She graduated from Yale University in 1994 with a B.A. in Psychology and a certificate in teaching. In 2002, she earned her J.D. from Columbia School of Law.

Recently, Ms. Billings-Burford sat down with Nick Davidson of Shinnyo-en Foundation to give insight about City Year and her work there.

Nick Davidson:  Thank you for taking time to sit down and talk with us about all the wonderful work you do.

Diahann Billings-Burford:  It’s my pleasure.

N:  First I'd like to ask, in your words, what is City Year?

D:  City Year is a national service-leadership development organization that seeks to engage both the energy and gifts of individuals from 17 to 24 years in age, so that they may better serve our communities and increase democratic participation.  And I say democracy to mean simply a community where everyone is involved, everyone participates, and everyone has responsibility.  At our core, that’s who we are. 

We have City Year sites in 18 locations, 17 here in the United States and another one in Johannesburg South Africa.  And we reach this admittedly lofty mission by asking young people to commit ten months of full-time, and I mean full-time, service in one of these 18 sites.  We primarily serve in schools as well as several entire community service days to beautify and transform our physical environments.

N:  What eventually led you to your work here at City Year?

D:  I’m a native New Yorker and in fact, from one of the communities we serve in Brooklyn, Bedford-Stuyvesant.  It was and still is a community in need.   Early on, I attended New York public schools and later, through the scholarship program Prep for Prep, I attend independent schools, so even early on, I was able to see the differences in various educational opportunities.  I had a wonderful undergraduate experience at Yale, and so decided to come back and work for Prep for Prep because I clearly saw the impact that different educational opportunities have on someone’s life and their life choices.  So, I worked at Prep for about five years and then decided to become a corporate attorney. 

N:  That’s quite the career change.

D:  Well, I didn’t really decide, I simply ended up a corporate attorney.  I went to law school and it was one of the easier things to do.  Firms would just wait outside of Columbia Law waiting to pick people up.  And there, I first realized my professional choices could drain me.  As you can see, I love to work, but I was not enjoying going to work each day at that law firm.  I think Shinnyo-en Foundation’s idea of Six Billion Paths to Peace sums up a lot of these ideas. 

N:  In what way?

D:  It made me stop taking these rote steps in life and made me start taking the time to reflect and appreciate all the gifts I had.  So after leaving the corporate world, I came back to the not for profit world and worked on a project to open high performance charter schools in some of the most under-served schools with the worse cases of student achievement.  These are place where we have only a third of the child population reading at grade level, where less than half of these children graduate from high school, and most of that number eventually end up incarcerated.  Through that program I eventually heard about City Year through a mentor of mine who said the New York site was looking to expand.   I then came on with the position I’m in now. 

N:  How do you define service?

D:  I think to serve, it is to sacrifice, using your best gifts, give them to someone else, for another person’s benefit.  Yet for those of us who engage in service, we know that in that act, we are receiving more than we are giving.  Although our City Year corps members do receive a small stipend, that’s not their motivation for being here.  Recently we’ve moved a lot of our language from the functional benefits to the aspirational benefits.    That’s what’s speaking to the young people coming here.  These aspirations of, “I want to make a difference, I want to help somebody and make a real impact in my community”. 

N:  At Shinnyo-en Foundation, we primarily work with youth and young adults, a group we’ve recently dubbed “Generation Peace”.  What potential do you see for this next generation of leaders?

D:  I think this generation truly has the potential to do anything.  The things that move and motivate them, as I’ve said before, are these aspirational benefits.  They really think that they can do anything.  We don’t need to convince anyone who comes here that “you can make a difference in ten months”.  They already know that.

I also see this generation as one that will show us how to do things differently.   All these things that are not good for us, not good for our environment, not good for our economy, all these problems that we have known historically for years, this generation will make that change.  They are also an impatient generation.  They will not allow this negativity to continue.  They love text messaging and want answers right now.  And they will make change right now.

N:  And in closing, what is your Path to Peace?

D:  That’s a question I keep going back to.  It’s one of those cyclical thought processes that we keep visiting over and over again.  As I see it now, my path to peace is using my talents to make our world better.

> View Spotlight Archive