Board of Directors

Bethany was inspired to launch City Hall Fellows after working for the City of New York right out of college. As a Special Assistant to the Commissioner of New York City's Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications (through the New York City Urban Fellows program), Bethany played an integral role in developing New York's first city-wide information technology strategy – ensuring that City agencies effectively utilized Internet technology to provide services to and communicate with local residents and businesses. That experience opened Bethany’s eyes to the importance of a capable local government – not just for providing routine services, but also for effecting social change.

While Bethany really enjoyed working for New York City, she often wished she could have participated in a similar program in her native Louisiana, so that she could have created social change in a community near and dear to her heart. Throughout Harvard Law School and developing a successful career as a business litigator at the top-tier international law firm of Quinn Emanuel Urquhart Oliver & Hedges, Bethany developed a vision for empowering a new generation of public leaders – a national service corps of recent college graduates who spend a year serving in and learning about how to create social change through local government in their own home communities. In March 2007, Bethany founded City Hall Fellows to make this vision a reality.

Directly prior to launching City Hall Fellows, Bethany was representing clients in state and federal courts and arbitral forums nationwide. While at Quinn Emanuel, she also re-designed firm-wide print and electronic attorney recruiting materials, was one of only two attorneys appointed to manage the firm’s website redesign and was among the few associates invited to participate in a firm-wide business development program designed for junior partners. In 2007, Bethany received the Wiley W. Manuel Award for Pro Bono Service from the State Bar of California.

Bethany holds a J.D. from Harvard Law School and is a summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, where she earned both a B.A. and an M.A. in Political Science. At Penn, Bethany was inducted into the Golden Key, Mortarboard and Order of Omega national honor societies and received both faculty- and student-nominated leadership awards. Bethany has published several articles in national law and civic journals. For her work starting City Hall Fellows, in 2009 Bethany was awarded the Echoing Green Fellowship for innovative new social entrepreneurs who have devised high-impact solutions addressing the root of social problems.

Robert W. Cort
Film Producer & Owner
Robert Cort Productions

Robert W. Cort has achieved a remarkable record of success as a film producer in the entertainment industry. Since 1985 he has produced forty-eight feature films, which have achieved enormous popularity with movie-going audiences, grossing over 2.5 billion dollars in worldwide box office. These include Outrageous Fortune, Three Men and a Baby, Three Men and A Little Lady, The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, Cocktail, Class Action, Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure, Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey, The Cutting Edge, Terminal Velocity, Operation Dumbo Drop, Bird on a Wire, Jumanji, Runaway Bride, Mr. Holland’s Opus and Save the Last Dance. In 2007 Cort went global, producing his first foreign language film in Germany. Cort’s HBO film, Something the Lord Made, became one of the most honored movies in television’s history, winning three Emmys, including the 2004 Outstanding Film Made for Television, the American Film Institute Award, the Director’s and Writer’s Guild Awards, the Christopher, NAACP Image Award and the prestigious Peabody Award. His six other television films have also won multiple honors, including the 1991 Emmy for Best Children’s Programming for A Mother’s Courage: The Mary Thomas Story.

Cort entered the motion picture industry in 1976 as vice president of advertising, publicity and promotion for Columbia Pictures. In 1980, he became executive vice president of marketing for Twentieth Century-Fox. As marketing chief, Cort planned and supervised the campaigns of such films as Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Midnight Express, The China Syndrome, All That Jazz, The Empire Strikes Back, and Nine to Five. He then served as executive vice president of production at Fox, where he oversaw the making of Romancing the Stone, Bachelor Party and Revenge of the Nerds. For the next eleven years, Cort was a partner and president of Interscope Communications, which was sold to Polygram in 1992. From 1996 to 2001, Cort was the managing partner of The Cort/Madden Company, a production unit with close ties to Paramount Pictures. He currently operates Robert Cort Productions, an independent production company.

Prior to the entertainment industry, Cort was a management consultant for McKinsey & Company. He also served a two-year assignment in the Central Intelligence Agency. In 2003 Random House published Cort’s novel, ACTION!, which garnered outstanding critical reviews and became a bestseller. His articles and essays have been published in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and several websites. In 2006 Cort joined the faculty of the American Film Institute as a professor in the production department. He received his BA, magna cum laude, and MA degrees in history from the University of Pennsylvania, where Cort was also elected to Phi Beta Kappa. He later earned an MBA from the Wharton School, graduating at the top of his business school class. Cort and literary manager Rosalie Swedlin, his wife of twenty-four years, live in Beverly Hills.

Jason Alexander Hayter
Assistant Visiting Professor
Department of Landscape Architecture and Planning, University of Arizona

A native of St. Louis, Missouri, Jason has pursed a career that merges research, practice, and public service within those professions that shape the cities and landscapes we each call home. A graduate of the New York City Urban Fellows program, Jason has worked for local and regional governments in New York, Missouri, Oregon, and California, as an adjunct lecturer in the Department of Urban and Regional Planning at San Jose State University, as well as a researcher, editorial assistant, instructor and consultant in and around the city building professions.  Jason also currently serves as City Hall Fellows' National Director of Curriculum Development and Chair of City Hall Fellows' National Academic Advisory Board.

Jason holds a Bachelor of Arts with Honors from the University of Texas at Austin, where he majored in history and government, minored in architecture, and completed the Liberal Arts Honors program, a Master of Community and Regional Planning from the University of Oregon, where he completed the thesis A Planner’s Dilemma: The West, the Sense of Place, and the Lessons of Santa Fe, and is presently a PhD candidate in the Department of City and Regional Planning at the University of California, Berkeley.

A founding Board member, Rich brings a wealth of non-profit experience to City Hall Fellows, where he provides guidance on strategic development and operations matters, including fundraising, recruiting, marketing and business operations. Rich is currently the Director of the Aspen Institute's Business and Society Program's Center for Business Education where he uses his experience at the intersection of business and nonprofits to help manage the Beyond Grey Pinstripes program and takes the lead in a number of marketing, strategic planning, and development issues. Pinstripes is the Aspen Institute's report card on business schools, and includes the Faculty Pioneer Awards and the industry-leading website: www.beyondgreypinstripes.org.

National Advisory Board

National Academic Advisory Board

Houston Leadership Council

San Francisco Leadership Council