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The NYU CSC Eleventh Annual Child Advocacy Award Dinner was held on Tuesday, December 9 at Cipriani 42nd Street. This year’s dinner raised $5.8 million. Paul Tudor Jones II was honored for his dedication to the Center’s fight against childhood psychiatric and learning disorders and awarded the Child Advocacy Award. The evening was led by dinner chairs and board members Lisa Pevaroff-Cohn and Gary Cohn and friends of the NYU Child Study Center Danielle and David Ganek, and Sukey and Michael Novogratz.

Nearly 600 guests were in attendance at the event which included a live auction conducted by Sotheby’s Hugh Hildesley to raise funds for the Brooke Garber Neidich Open Doors Fund (a scholarship fund that supports unfunded clinical care and outreach for needy children) and the debut of a new film created by Oscar-nominated director Nathaniel Kahn (My Architect, 2004) featuring ParentCorps, a preventive school- and family-based early intervention program for pre-schoolers living in low-income, urban communities.

The evening program included remarks from NYU Child Study Center Board Chair and co-founder Brooke Garber Neidich and founder and director Harold S. Koplewicz, M.D., who also announced a $4 million gift from the J. Ira Harris and Nicki Harris Family Foundation to help further the mission of HOPE (Harris Obesity Prevention Effort) and better address the childhood obesity epidemic in the United States.

Honoree – Paul Tudor Jones II

Paul Jones is founder, chairman and CEO of the Tudor group of companies, a money management and proprietary trading organization which actively participates in the global debt, equity, currency and commodity markets. Mr. Jones founded the Tudor Group in 1983, following an early floor trading career on the New York Cotton exchange. Tudor today is a diverse, multi-strategy enterprise. The firm manages approximately $17 billion in client and firm capital across eight funds. An organization of 425 employees, Tudor is headquartered in Greenwich, Connecticut with global operations in Boston, Surrey (U.K.), London, Singapore, Sydney and Washington D.C. He served as Chairman of the New York Cotton Exchange (which is now a division of the New York Board of Trade) from August 1992 through June 1995. He was instrumental in the creation of FINEX, the financial futures division of the New York Board of Trade, and in the development of the U.S. dollar index futures contract which trades there. Mr. Jones regularly commits a substantial amount of his personal time to philanthropic and conservation efforts. Mr. Jones is founder and currently a director of the Robin Hood Foundation, which since 1988 has contributed $600 million towards alleviating poverty in New York City. He is also the founder of Excellence Charter School of Bedford Stuyvesant in Brooklyn, New York, which scored in the top 1% of New York City Public Schools in 2008. Mr. Jones is also chairman of The Everglades Foundation and former chairman and currently a director of The National Fish and Wildlife Foundation. Mr. Jones lives with his wife Sonia and four children in Connecticut.

Past honorees include Brooke Garber Neidich; Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg; Governor George E. Pataki; Bob and Suzanne Wright; Whoopi Goldberg; former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani; Senator Hillary Clinton and Stanley and Fiona Druckenmiller. This is the fourth year that Alexandria Real Estate Equities, Inc. was the corporate sponsor of the event.

Nathaniel Kahn Films

ParentCorps
Nathaniel Kahn, the Academy Award nominated director of My Architect in 2004 and Two Hands: The Leon Fleisher Story in 2006, produced this film in partnership with the New York University Child Study Center. This film hightlights the Child Study Center's ParentCorps program and the impact it has had on the parents and children. This film made it's debut at the 11th Annual Child Advocacy Award Dinner on December 9, 2008.