Jerry Lee

Jerry Lee (born April 20, 1936 in Sharon, Pennsylvania) is the President of SpotQ Services Inc and the Lee Foundation.

A philanthropist of crime prevention, education and evidence-based policy-making, he was the original donor of the Stockholm Prize in Criminology, the Jerry Lee Center of Criminology at the University of Pennsylvania, the Jerry Lee Centre of Experimental Criminology at the University of Cambridge, and the Coalition for Evidence-based policy in Washington.

He was the former owner of Philadelphia Radio Station, WBEB-FM, the last independent radio station in a major media market.

In 1960, Jerry Lee graduated from Youngstown State University in Ohio with a bachelor's degree in Economics.

His first job out of college was with a management consulting firm.

A year and one half later he landed a job as the general manager of an FM station in Baltimore, even though he had never worked in radio.

In 1963, he moved to Philadelphia, where he formed a partnership with the late Dave Kurtz to launch a brand new radio station, WDVR – 101 FM. One of the early stations in the US to use a “Beautiful Music” format, WDVR attracted the largest FM radio audience in the Philadelphia area within five months of its launch.

Jerry Lee was first elected to the board of directors of the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) in 1969.

After repeated terms of service, he holds the record for total years on the board with 25 years of service.

In 1977, he was appointed to serve on the Advisory Committee of the House Communications Subcommittee for the rewrite of the Communications Act and co-founded the Grass Roots Government Affairs lobbying arm of the NAB.

Lee then developed the concept of The Broadcast Minority Fund, responsible for $100 million in loans to provide minority ownership of broadcast properties.

In 1979, he became President of the Broadcast Pioneers (predecessor organization of the Broadcast Foundation) and became a member of COLRAM (Committee on Local Radio Audience Measurement) of the NAB and is now its longest serving member.

In 1980, the station changed its call letters to WEAZ, to signal the “EAZY” listening of its format.

By the late 1980s, research found an audience demographic change away from beautiful music towards light rock.

In 1993, the station was re-launched as WBEB-FM, with an emphasis on adult contemporary music.

Since 1993, Lee's station WBEB-FM (known as "B101", later "More FM", and now "B101.1") has focused on a research-based target of people listening while they worked in offices, hair salons & barbershops, retail stores and many other public places, as well as at home and in their cars.

The station's audience of fans of classic modern singers.

Throughout this period, many national radio groups have offered to buy the station.

Kurtz and Lee always refused to sell.

They soon became the last independent broadcasters in any major radio market in the US.

In 1996, Jerry Lee and his late partner David L. Kurtz founded the Lee Foundation.

According to its website, the Jerry Lee Foundation is committed to solving social problems associated with poverty, especially in American inner cities which suffer from concentrated poverty.

The Foundation's special concerns are elementary education and crime.

Its major strategy is to support research to find out what works, what doesn't work, and what may be promising to prevent crime and improve education.

Its major projects have been established at the Universities of Maryland, Pennsylvania, and Cambridge (England).

In 1997, the University of Maryland’s Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice invited Jerry Lee to serve as Chair of the Advisory Board of its multi-million dollar “Preventing Crime” program, which extended the work of its landmark 1997 Report to the US Congress on Preventing Crime: What Works, What Doesn’t, What’s Promising.

In 1999, the Jerry Lee Foundation, with the assistance of the Broadcast Industry Council and National Broadcast Association for Community Affairs, established an award of $2,500 to annually recognize outstanding community service programs, or programs, news series or public service campaigns promoting or examining the demonstrated effectiveness of local crime prevention programs.

Also in 1999, he was elected to the Board of the Philadelphia Police Foundation and was elected chairman of the advisory board of the Fels Institute of Government at the University of Pennsylvania.

In 2000, he was a founding Trustee of the Campbell Collaboration, a non-profit global network of program evaluators in crime, education and social services now supported by the government of Norway.

The program made several Congressional Presentations, and in 2000 launched the annual Jerry Lee Symposium on Crime and Justice Research, originally at the US Capitol and for over 14 years held on Capitol Hill for an audience of policy-makers and practitioners.

The Jerry Lee Foundation enlisted other donors to support the Maryland Criminology Department in making term appointments of two research assistant professors (David Wilson and Spencer Lee), and of David Farrington as a Research Professor.

In 2000, Jerry Lee founded the Jerry Lee Center of Criminology at the University of Pennsylvania with a multimillion-dollar gift.

Dean Samuel H. Preston appointed Lawrence W. Sherman, the Greenfield Professor of Human Relations, as the first director of the Lee Center, and later as the founding chair of University of Pennsylvania Department of Criminology, the first and still only department of criminology in the Ivy League.

The Jerry Lee Center's goal is to foster collaboration among outstanding criminologists from around the world to further the discipline as a multi-disciplinary science in research, education and public service.

Their work helped to lead to the founding in 2001 of the international Campbell Collaboration, of which Jerry Lee was one of three original incorporators and David Farrington was the first chair of the Coordinating Committee on Crime and Justice.

The mission of the Campbell Collaboration is to provide decision makers around the world with sound evidence in implementing and evaluating policies in the areas of education, crime prevention and social services, derived from systematic reviews of research on specific policies, treatments and programs.

Appointed by President George W. Bush to serve on the United States Department of Education's Institute of Education Sciences from 2004 to 2008, he helped to supervise over $1 billion in research funding decisions by the Institute of Education Sciences.

In 2006, Dave Kurtz died, and Jerry Lee became the sole owner of their station.

In 2008 he was Knighted by His Majesty Carl XVI Gustaf, King of Sweden, and in 2010 the American Society of Criminology created an annual award named in his honour, the Jerry Lee Award for Lifetime Achievement in Experimental Criminology.

In 2018, Jerry Lee announced his plans to sell WBEB-FM to Entercom.