NGB was on hand at the historic Empire State Building, in the heart of New York City, as the lobby filled with New York Police Department officers, their families, and representatives of the Mayor’s office.

New York City Police Commissioner, Raymond Kelly, gave a few heartfelt remarks about the dedication and sacrifice of NYPDs officers before inviting all the children in attendance to help him throw the commemorative switch.  The Empire State Building’s tower lights were then turned all blue to commemorate Police Memorial Week.

This is one of many events held at the historic landmark honoring holidays, observances, and special occasions by the city of New York. Soaring 1,454 feet (from base to antenna) above Midtown Manhattan, the Empire State Building is the “World’s Most Famous Office Building.” The Empire State Building was named America’s favorite building in a poll conducted by the American Institute of Architects. The Empire State Building Observatory is one of the world’s most beloved attractions  and is the region’s #1 tourist destination.

Stacey Tisdale, the founder of Winning Play$, a life skills and financial literacy program that works with women and children, led a panel discussion in the New York home of philanthropist and TV executive Loreen Arbus. The discussion spoke of the importance of financial literacy and of financial values to women climbing up the corporate ladder.

Winning Play$ is a Life Skills and Financial Literacy program, with built in assessment tools, that will be delivered to high school students in partnership with NFL Hall of Famer Ronnie Lott’s All Stars Helping Kids Foundation. The program will be made available to high schools and other nonprofits hoping to make financial literacy part of everyone’s vocabulary.

Frustrated by the fact that people could not create healthy financial lives, Ms. Tisdale embarked on a six-year study to find out what’s really at work in our financial behavior. Her key findings are recognized by the greatest financial minds in the world. She found that social messages from advertisers and the media, stereotypes about race and gender, as well as early role modeling are among the primary drivers in our financial behavior. This methodology serves as the basis for Winning Play$.

Soledad O’Brien, who’s career spans nearly twenty years in broadcasting, was honored by the Women’s Media Center for her tireless efforts to promote women on television and in broadcasting. O’Brien, an award-winning and critically acclaimed documentarian, is the current anchor for CNN morning show Starting Point with Soledad O’Brien. A working mother and successful journalist in a fast-paced and demanding business, Soledad sheds new light on many of today’s most important issue including the media, diversity, women’s issues and education among others.
Hosted by comedian/actress Wanda Sykes, the event featured a cross-section of the most powerful and influential women in America, paying tribute to those who have brought a much-needed light to women in the media.

Gloria Steinem, who co-founded the organization in 2004 with Jane Fonda and Robin Morgan, has stated: “The media is where we get our ideas of what is normal, what is OK, what is possible for us, what we can become.” She goes on to compare the media to a “…current campfire. For all the time that human beings have been on Earth, we have been sitting around a campfire telling our stories. And if one person could not tell their story they were not part of the group, people didn’t learn from them, and the circle was incomplete.”

WMC promotes women as subjects and decision-makers within the media, training women and girls so they are media-ready and media-savvy. WMC founder Robin Morgan said, “we’re all constrained by two-dimensional information—at our peril. The greatest threat to democracy in the Information Age is the erasure, underrepresentation, and misrepresentation of women, who after all comprise 51 percent of the U.S. (and global) population.” The Women’s Media Center plays a pivotal role in ensuring a female presence in newsrooms, on air, in print and online.

Honorees were:

Soledad O’Brien (CNN)
Broadcast Journalism Award

Lara Logan (CBS correspondent)
Whole Truth Award

Maggie Wilderotter (Frontier Communications Chair & CEO)
Business Media Award

Yanique Richards (Howard University Student)
Carol Jenkins Young Journalist Award

Sady Doyle (Founder of tigerbeatdown.com)
WMC Social Media Award

In a body where “Special Envoy” titles are reserved for only the most seasoned diplomats, an unprecedented first occurred in New York recently to one of Hollywood’s most vibrant luminaries and humanitarians. After a decade of promoting refugee causes around the world, Angelina Jolie herself has been promoted.

The United Nations refugee agency has elevated the Hollywood star from being a goodwill ambassador to a special envoy, a role that will see her represent the organization to governments and diplomats. Jolie has jetted the world on behalf of the organization over the past ten years, making high-profile visits to refugee camps in Iraq, Haiti and Pakistan, among other places in dire need.

Apart from her time, Jolie has also given large personal donations to the organization, which relies entirely on voluntary contributions from governments, companies and individuals.

“She has donated substantially to refugees,” said spokesman Adrian Edwards, noting that the actress/director won’t receive any money for her role. “There is to my knowledge absolutely no connection between any donation of money and this role.”

Jolie’s new position will focus on the complex crises that result in the mass displacement of people, such as in Afghanistan and Somalia. In addition, on special occasions she will represent the U.N.’s High Commissioner for Refugees, Antonio Guterres.

The United Nations High Commission on Human Rights works to help almost 35 million refugees and internally displaced people around the world. It was established to aid millions of Europeans displaced by World War II and has since become one of the world’s most prominent humanitarian organizations.

There are several stages on the road to success and a team effort is needed to get there. Often times, it is necessary to stop being a strategist and start being a cultural anthropologist, studying and examining what makes cultures and organizations tick. Once an understanding is developed, it is important to get to a place where you are stable and effective at forming partnerships. These bonds and partnerships make all the difference when it comes to being a successful leader.

A tribal leader is somebody who is not only able to achieve stability for themselves, but is one who is able to inspire and motivate others to rise with them. Last October, when 33 Chilean miners were trapped 800 meters under ground, packages of teams started showing up from all over the world to create a solution that was not yet existent. It was only by working and collaborating with one another that they were able to develop a successful strategy that was able to save the miners lives.

If employees can have the imagination to take on new projects, work together cohesively and develop a plan to conquer things that once seemed impossible, than all of the tools are available to develop a successful tribal strategy.

Largely due to longstanding stereotypes about men, women and money, gender plays a tremendous role in our financial experience. Money brings us back to our primitive natures and since the beginning of time, men have been conditioned to believe that they need to provide and protect. While women today play a much bigger role on the provider side than they used to, the common belief still exists that it’s a man’s job to provide for his family while it’s a woman’s job to take care of it.

Labor Department Data shows that college educated women between 36 and 45 years old earn about 75 cents in hourly pay for every dollar that men in the same group earn.  Additionally, a study by the Consumer Federation of America found that women are 32 percent more likely to carry a mortgage with higher interest rates than men with similar incomes.

Experts say that the belief that women can be taken advantage of is largely the cause of these statistics. Therefore, whether it be negotiating salaries or taking out a mortgage, it is important for both sides of the gender aisle to comparison-shop and be aware of what is a fair salary or mortgage rate before signing any paperwork.

There is a lot more to money than dollars and cents and understanding how gender affects your financial experiences will allow you to direct more resources towards your goals.

Whether you’re 18 or 80, the key to achieving your goals and creating an effective financial plan is to be financially literate. In order to understand how to use money to create the life you want, there are two key steps that need to be followed. The first, is controlling your thoughts.  It is vital to understand that you can change your thinking and beliefs about yourself in order to serve your highest goal.  The second, is recognizing how your current behavior is or is not consistent with your values.

There are several tools we are born with that control our thoughts and create a positive emotional environment, called signature strengths.  These include:

• Our ability to change our mind
• Our ability to be inspired
• Determination
• Compassion
• Changing our perspective

Discipline, confidence, and focus are additional traits that may come to mind when thinking about someone who is financially successful. It is important to recognize that all of us are born with these very same signature strengths and in order to be successful, we need to actively use them.  Several steps you can take to help yourself master the fundamentals are to:

* Talk to someone you feel is financially responsible

*Read a news story about what’s happening in the economy

*Read an article about how to save

Training your mind to be successful takes control, confidence and consistency and the more active measures you take to learn and practice the basics, the closer you will become to achieving your life goals.

As a teenager pursuing her calling as a singer/songwriter, Mary Buffett proved she was business savvy early on in her career.  Reminiscing about the days when she and her friends would try to sell their songs to “anybody” that would listen, she says,  “All of the other writers would say, no, let Mary go in and negotiate because she gets the most money for us.”

Today, Mary is a best-selling author, international speaker, consultant and environmental activist, who credits one time father-in-law Warren Buffett for not only shaping her outlook in the world of finance, but for having a major influence on how she lives her life. “ I started listening to Warren as soon as I met him,” she says.  “By talking with him and by observing his actions up close, it gave me the unique perspective of understanding his fundamentals from a philosophical point of view.  The beliefs that grew from that knowledge became the foundations of how I live my life.”

Mary’s first book, Buffettology, was a USA Today, Business Week and New York Times bestseller. Since then, she has published five more books, all highlighting and analyzing the career of the legendary king of investing.  “By broadening our knowledge of finance, I hope to give guidance as to how to define happiness individually as opposed to using standards that others may have,” she says.

Having worked her way up from modest means to becoming a successful business force in her own right, she acknowledges that you can’t get through life without support. “Support comes in a variety of sources. For example, many women have developed close bonds of relationships through marriage, through children, through divorce, through career ups and downs, it doesn’t have to be a spouse.”

As she’s about to release her latest book, she admits she can’t help but be proud of all she has accomplished. “ We can’t believe that with this new book we will now have our books in over 18 different languages throughout the world and that I really like.  I like that feeling.”

French President Nicolas Sarkozy and Mayor Michael Bloomberg celebrated the 125^th anniversary of the Statue of Liberty on September 22^nd, on Liberty Island.

This world-renown statue is the ultimate symbol of freedom throughout the world. It is “not just a statue. It’s an idea. Not just for Americans, not just for the French, it is for all peoples of the world,” said President Sarkozy in his speech. He stated that the French and Americans had the “responsibility” to “show that freedom is for everyone.”

While re-affirming his pro-American foreign policy positions, Sarkozy blessed the Franco-American friendship. “France and America share blood ties and a love of freedom,” he said. Mayor Bloomberg echoed President Sarkozy’s comments and said the US should not forget France’s support during the American Revolution, “before there was an America”.

Formerly called “Liberty Enlightening the World”, the statue was a gift by France to the United States in 1886 as a symbol of friendship between the two nations. It is located in New York in lower Manhattan, on Liberty Island, near Ellis Island, the historical gateway for millions of immigrants to the free land of the United States of America.

President of the Assembly of European Regions Michele Sabban was recently honored by President and founder of the R20 Arnold Schwarzenegger for being an active supporter of efforts to control climate change.

The R20 Regions of Climate Action non-profit organization is a coalition of subnational government leaders worldwide and the United Nations to lead the way in innovation and implementation of environmentally protective measures that promotes strong local economies. The R20 advises and help national governments to identify sustainable development projects and match them with innovative technology companies. The participation of the largest stakeholders to the R20 provides the funding which is expected to cover over $100 billion in low-carbon projects by 2020.

The cooperation between the regions is serving as a role model to national governments and international institutions for fighting the impact of climate change through a transition to a low carbon economy. The R20 has established itself as an “action tank” as opposed to a “think- thank” that helps redefining a new approach of international action.

“Today the regions are the future of Europe and one day with the R20, they will be the future of the world,” concluded Michele Sabban.