David Rivel is the Executive Director of NYC City Parks Foundation.
David Rivel has been Executive Director of City Parks Foundation (CPF) since October, 2001. CPF works in over 750 parks citywide, reaching more than 600,000 New Yorkers each year. By presenting a broad range of arts & culture, sports & recreation and education programs-and by helping communities support their local parks-CPF contributes to the revitalization of parks and neighborhoods throughout New York City.
David has written and lectured extensively about the importance of parks to the life of a community and about the key role community involvement plays in revitalizing parks. His writings have appeared in The New York Times and in publications by the American Planning Association and the National Recreation and Park Association.
From 1995 to 2001, Mr. Rivel was President of the Brooklyn Conservatory of Music (BCoM). BCoM is one of the nation's oldest and largest community schools of the arts, serving over 10,000 people of all ages each year through schools in Park Slope, Brooklyn and Flushing, Queens. Mr. Rivel saved the school from impending bankruptcy and engineered six consecutive years of record enrollment and fundraising results. He also launched and managed a successful $2.5 million capital campaign to renovate BCoM's historic brownstone school in Brooklyn and built a new $500,000 facility in Flushing. During his tenure, BCoM's endowment grew from zero to over $1.5 million and scholarship giving increased tenfold.
Before coming to the Conservatory, Mr. Rivel was Vice President of Marketing & Communications at Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. As Vice President, he created Lincoln Center's first-ever in-house marketing and design departments and directed over $3 million of annual expenditures. Before being promoted to Vice President, Mr. Rivel served as Director of Executive Projects (1990-92) and Assistant Director of Strategic Planning (1988-90), playing an important staff role in the creation of Jazz at Lincoln Center.
From 1986 to 1988, Mr. Rivel was Director of Finance for First Run Features, where he directed all financial operations of a $1 million international film and video distribution company. At First Run Features, he negotiated and supervised a merger with a major competitor, thereby creating the country's largest nontheatrical distributor of political and social issue films.
Mr. Rivel's academic background is in film history and aesthetics, and he taught film studies at Wesleyan University in Connecticut. After receiving his M.A. from Wesleyan, he served as the first Assistant Curator of the newly-formed Wesleyan Film Archives.