{"id":102,"date":"2023-11-15T22:28:46","date_gmt":"2023-11-15T22:28:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/table-of-success.local\/?p=102"},"modified":"2023-12-18T01:46:16","modified_gmt":"2023-12-18T01:46:16","slug":"tiffany-raspberry","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/tableofsuccess.mysites.io\/tiffany-raspberry\/","title":{"rendered":"Tiffany Raspberry"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
In an interview<\/a> posted in August 2021, the lobbyist Tiffany Raspberry shared that “one of the things that I’ve found to be most difficult when I started my firm, that I still struggle with every day, is the back end of the business.” She added, “You can’t get paid and operate if you don’t manage the back end of your affairs well.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n Raspberry, now one of Mayor Eric Adams’s top aides, is well aware of the consequences of mismanagement. As the New York Daily News reported<\/a>, her firm York Group Associates had so many lobbying disclosure violations from 2011 to 2020 that the firm was fined nearly $38,000 by the city clerk’s office. In 2018, the state’s Joint Commission on Public Ethics, or JCOPE, also investigated and fined York Group Associates<\/a> for failing to file timely reports. (Later that year, York Group Associates turned around and sued JCOPE<\/a> over new rules requiring lobbyists to disclose more details about their work.) <\/p>\n\n\n\n When asked by the Daily News<\/a> about these disclosure violations, Raspberry said they were “small mistakes,” explaining that much like Adams, she is “perfectly imperfect.” <\/p>\n\n\n\n Neither these “small mistakes,” nor her client list as a lobbyist, prevented Adams from bringing Raspberry on board as his senior adviser for external affairs as one of his first hires as mayor<\/a>. That client list included the tobacco company Reynolds American Inc., whom she worked with to argue against a proposed ban on menthol cigarettes; Camber Property Group, the owner of the Bronx apartment building where 17 people died in a fire in 2022; the homeless services provider CORE Services Group, which was plagued by so much scandal and mismanagement over the years that the City ended its contract with them<\/a> and then sued them at the end of 2021, and Walmart<\/a>. (Raspberry, for her part, has defended lobbying as “necessary.” “Behind every major legislative issue there is a lobbying campaign,” Raspberry said in 2014<\/a>, adding, “Lobbying is just a more organized level of advocacy.”)<\/p>\n\n\n\n Raspberry and Adams go back decades\u2014according to Raspberry<\/a>, they met when she was a student at Fordham University via her mother, who worked in the same police precinct as Adams. In her work at York Group Associates, she often lobbied Adams when he was Brooklyn borough president (and hosted at least one fundraiser for him<\/a>), and she was a paid consultant for his mayoral campaign<\/a>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n “Politicos do not often look at Black women and see what they believe is the face of someone who is capable of communicating with or accessing the seat of political power. Black women are often seen as good individuals to bring in to assist on larger teams or fill in gaps, but are not often given a chance to play a larger, more significant role,” Raspberry told City and State in 2020<\/a>. “The bias I have faced can be likened to racial stereotyping that Black quarterbacks have faced historically in the NFL.” <\/p>\n\n\n\n