New York, NY

A Quiet Network With Enormous Influence

Most New Yorkers have never heard of the Coro New York Leadership Center. That anonymity is part of its power. For more than forty years, Coro has served as a quiet—but extraordinarily influential—pipeline that funnels a particular kind of leader into government, nonprofits, foundations, and political campaigns.

If elections determine who holds office, Coro helps determine who understands the machinery of power well enough to run the city behind the scenes.

And its fingerprints are all over New York’s new political order—right up to Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani’s inner circle.

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What Exactly Is Coro?

Coro is not a college program, think tank, or traditional internship. It is a nine-month political apprenticeship that places handpicked “emerging leaders” inside City Hall, state agencies, large nonprofits, labor unions, advocacy groups, major foundations, and even corporate civic offices.

Through these rotations, fellows are given something far more valuable than credentials: access—to staff, to processes, to decision makers, to the unwritten rules that shape how New York actually operates.

Coro markets itself as training “leaders who make institutions work better.” But in practice, it trains people to navigate, influence, and ultimately control institutions.

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Who Gets Picked and Who Picks Them

Admission into Coro is highly selective: roughly a dozen fellows per city per year. Applicants face a gauntlet of interviews conducted by Coro staff, alumni, and civic leaders chosen by Coro’s board.

The board’s composition is revealing. Among its most prominent members:
• Travis Terry, Chair — CEO of Immortal Strategies
• Gregg Bishop, Vice Chair — Executive Director of the Tsai Foundation’s Social Justice Fund
• Tom Regan, Treasurer — Partner at the major law firm Brown Rudnick LLP

The full board spans more than forty members drawn from corporate consulting, philanthropy, real estate, nonprofits, and academia. In other words, the gatekeepers of Coro are not random; they are the very people who sit at the intersections of money, influence, and policy in New York.

They shape what Coro values, and therefore whom Coro chooses to elevate.

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How Coro Influences Government Without Running for Office

Over decades, Coro’s model has produced a dense, interconnected leadership network. Alumni show up across:
• City agencies
• The Mayor’s Office
• State legislative staffs
• Unions
• Housing nonprofits
• Transit advocacy groups
• Foundation-funded policy coalitions

While it may feel and look like a conspiracy, it’s really a culture—a shared set of assumptions about governance, equity, public-sector primacy, and the role of the state in shaping society. This worldview is inevitably progressive because the institutions that host fellows are progressive, as do the nonprofit and philanthropic sectors that fund them.

Coro does not tell its fellows what to believe. It doesn’t have to. It pulls them from elite, left-wing institutions and immerses them in environments where one ideological framework dominates.

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The Mamdani Connection

This year, Coro’s influence entered center stage when Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani named Elle Bisgaard-Church—a Coro alum—as his incoming Chief of Staff.

Bisgaard-Church is widely considered the “architect” of Mamdani’s victory and one of the most capable progressive strategists in the city. Her background explains why:

Coro gave her the training, the network, and the early exposure to power centers that allow someone in their early thirties to step into one of the most important unelected positions in city government.

This raises an intriguing irony. Mamdani ran on an aggressively anti-corporate, redistributionist platform. Yet one of his administration’s rising stars comes from a leadership pipeline guided, in part, by a board that includes real-estate lawyers, corporate strategists, and philanthropic executives managing multi-billion-dollar funds.

Whether that means he is beholden to these interests is another question—but it does show that in New York, even the most ideological administrations are built on networks that trace back to institutional power players.

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Why This Matters Now

New York’s political direction is no longer shaped by elections alone. Increasingly, it is shaped by the left-wing talent funnel—the organizations that determine who has the competence, connections, and strategic skill to rise quickly in government.

Coro is one of the most powerful of these funnels.

It doesn’t set policy directly. It sets the people who write the policy.

If New Yorkers want genuine reform, the answer isn’t just at the ballot box. It’s in the institutions upstream of elections—institutions like the left-wing political accelerator, Coro.

And if those institutions continue to produce leaders from only one side of the ideological spectrum, then whoever wins the vote may matter less than who trained the people waiting just behind them.

References

• Coro New York Leadership Center — Official Site
• Brown Rudnick LLP — Leadership Profiles
• Tsai Foundation — Social Justice Fund Overview
• NYC Civic Leadership Programs — Public Records

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photo by Eden, Janine and Jim