A conversation with Julie Sandorf of the Revson Foundation about two summer necessities: pools and lifeguards who staff them
In the summer of 2022, families in New York City were waiting six hours in the heat to swim for one hour. Julie Sandorf, who ran the Charles Revson Foundation for nearly two decades, decided to find out why — and what she found was a lifeguard program that had been controlled by a single union official for nearly 50 years, accountable to no one, operating under certification requirements that exist nowhere else in the country, with exactly one test site in all of New York City. Jamie talks with Julie about how a Chicago after-school program from 2000 ended up being the model for fixing the problem, and what it actually means to be a smart, catalytic private funder in a city government this complicated.
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