Meet the What Works Cities Certification Standard Committee
The What Works Cities (WWC) Certification Standard Committee comprises leading experts from a dozen organizations that support cities. The Standard Committee has endorsed and lent its knowledge and experience to the development of What Works Cities Certification and the What Works Cities Standard. They serve as advisors during the Certification assessment process and actively participate in site visits with select cities.
Learn more about the members of the Standard Committee:
Beth Blauer is the Associate Vice Provost for Public Sector Innovation at Johns Hopkins University. She is the former the Executive Director and co-founder of the Centers for Civic Impact at Johns Hopkins University (Civic Impact). As a dedicated public servant and international expert on government performance programs for more than fifteen years, Beth Blauer spent her career working to improve people’s lives by bringing data into governments’ decision-making processes.
Blauer founded Civic Impact, originally as the Center for Government Excellence, in 2015 and since then, has successfully worked with over 140 mayors from around the globe to advance the use of data and evidence. She has built the organization to be a leader in data-driven insights for city leaders and public sector practitioners across the country and around the World.
Prior to leading the Centers for Civic Impact, Blauer designed and launched Socrata’s GovStatplatform for federal, state, and local governments.
Having entered public service as a juvenile probation officer in Maryland, Blauer was quickly promoted within the department, quickly becoming the Chief of Staff. It was in this capacity she began working on the creation and implementation of “StateStat.” In 2008, then GovernorMartin O’Malley asked Blauer to lead his nationally recognized StateStat program. Blauer graduated with a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Maryland and holds a JD from New York Law School. She is a recipient of the 2012 CAP award for her work on Maryland’s StateStat.
Bill Eggers is the Executive Director of Deloitte’s Center for Government Insights, where he is responsible for the firm’s public sector thought leadership. He is the author of nine books, including The Solution Revolution: How Government, Business, and Social Enterprises are Teaming up to Solve Society’s Biggest Problems (Harvard Business Review Press, 2013), which The Wall Street Journal calls “pulsating with new ideas about civic and business and philanthropic engagement” and was named to ten best-books-of-the-year lists. He coined the term Government 2.0 in a book by the same name, and his commentary has appeared in dozens of major media outlets, including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and the Chicago Tribune.
Stephen Goldsmith is Daniel Paul Professor of the Practice of Government and the Director of the Innovations in Government Program at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. He also directs Data-Smart City Solutions, a project to highlight local government efforts to use new technologies that connect breakthroughs in the use of big data analytics with community input to reshape the relationship between government and citizens. He previously served as Deputy Mayor of New York and Mayor of Indianapolis, where he earned a reputation as one of the country’s leaders in public-private partnerships, competition, and privatization. Goldsmith was also the chief domestic policy advisor to the George W. Bush campaign in 2000, the Chair of the Corporation for National and Community Service, and the District Attorney for Marion County, Indiana, from 1979 to 1990.
Michael Hallsworth is Managing Director of BIT North America. He is also the former Director of Health and Tax at the Behavioural Insights Team. He has worked on health policy issues with the Department of Health, NHS England, Public Health England, the European Commission, and the World Economic Forum. He was previously a Senior Policy Advisor at the Cabinet Office and, while at HMRC, he won a Civil Service Award for running large-scale randomized controlled trials applying behavioral economics to increase tax collection. When at the Institute for Government he co-wrote the MINDSPACE report, which is one of the main frameworks used by the UK government to apply behavioral thinking to public policy. He has a Ph.D. in behavioral economics from Imperial College London, and a First Class MA and MPhil from the University of Cambridge. He has been published in The Lancet, the Journal of Public Economics, the Journal of Economic Psychology, the Journal of Health Systems Research and Theory, the Oxford Review of Economic Policy and PLOS One.
Rochelle Haynes is the Managing Director of What Works Cities. Her multi-sector career has a common thread of focusing on policies and programs that seek to identify solutions to ending the cycle of poverty in vulnerable communities. As the former Vice President of U.S. Social Impact at Sesame Workshop, she developed and led the scaling strategy of the Sesame Street in Communities initiative which expanded from 3 to 13 cities and regions serving over 75,000 vulnerable kids and families with resources to foster healthy development. Prior to that, Rochelle served as the Head of Program Strategy and Operations at 100 Resilient Cities-Rockefeller Foundation and led global operations and strategy for the City Practice Management team. Rochelle has more than a decade of experience working in municipal government, spending the bulk of her career in New York City government working to guide policies and improve operations for public benefit programs, including a tenure as Chief of Staff at NYC’s Department of Homeless Services.
Michele Jolin is the CEO and Co-Founder for Results for America. She is also a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress. Earlier in her career, Michele was appointed in 2010 to be a Member of President Barack Obama’s White House Council for Community Solutions. She additionally served as a Senior Advisor for Social Innovation at the White House under President Obama, where she designed and launched the first Social Innovation Fund. Prior to that she was a member of President Obama’s Presidential Transition Team, where she helped create the White House Office of Social Innovation and Civic Participation and the new Obama Administration’s social innovation policy agenda. Before joining the White House, Michele led the Presidential Transition Project at the Center for American Progress and co-edited the book Change for America: A Progressive Blueprint for the 44th President. Michele also was a senior vice president at Ashoka, a global foundation that invests in social entrepreneurs in more than 50 countries around the world. In the Clinton Administration, Michele served as the Chief of Staff for President Clinton’s Council of Economic Advisers for CEA Chairs Joseph Stiglitz and Janet Yellen. She also worked for Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA) on the Senate Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee. Michele holds a B.A. from the University of Wisconsin, an MSc from the London School of Economics, and a J.D. from the University of Virginia.
Neil Kleiman is the Director of the New York University Wagner Innovation Labs. He has spent nearly 20 years at the intersection of policy, media, philanthropy, government, and academia, establishing new organizations and divisions within organizations focused on developing innovative and practical policy solutions. Kleiman has established a number of new initiatives, including projects with Bloomberg Philanthropies, federal agencies in the Obama administration, and the New Cities Foundation. Beginning in 2013, he began serving as Deputy Executive Director of Policy, Research, and Evaluation for the National Resource Network. Previously, he was the Director of Policy and Research at Living Cities. In 2008, in partnership with the Kennedy School at Harvard University, he helped to create the Project on Municipal Innovation. He has written a book with Stephen Goldsmith on urban governance reform entitled A New City Operating System (Brookings Institution Press, 2017).
Jeffrey B. Liebman is the Director of the Government Performance Lab at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government and the Malcolm Wiener Professor of Public Policy. During the Obama Administration, Liebman served at the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB), first as Executive Associate Director and Chief Economist, and then as Acting Deputy Director. During the Clinton Administration, Liebman served as Special Assistant to the President for economic policy and coordinated the Administration’s Social Security reform technical working group.
Tara McGuinness is a Senior Fellow for Cities and Innovation at New America. In 2013, McGuinness was tapped by the White House to run the data-driven organizing and communications effort to sign up millions of Americans for the Affordable Care Act. She also served as a senior advisor to the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB), where she oversaw the federal government’s initiatives to support cities and towns. While at the White House, she directed the Cabinet-level White House Task Force on Community Solutions and oversaw the federal government teams working alongside city, non-profit, and philanthropic leaders in Detroit, Baltimore, Flint, and many other communities.
Lou Moore is the Chief Technology Officer at Code for America. Lou most recently served as VP of Software at Jawbone where he led software development from applications to infrastructure, and focused on delivering products that helped people to live happier, healthier, and longer. He got his start building high-performance technical teams and effective consumer products at scale while serving as Director of Product Engineering at social networking destination hi5. Lou hails from Wisconsin originally and holds a degree in Computer Engineering from Northwestern University. He is a member of CTOs For Good.
Michael Nutter is the former Mayor of Philadelphia. As Mayor, Nutter set an aggressive agenda for America’s fifth-largest city — devising the City’s innovative school-reform strategy, vowing to strengthen community policing through Philly Rising, and continuing to implement the nationally recognized GreenWorks Philadelphia initiative that is helping to make Philadelphia become the greenest city in America. Nutter managed the City by maintaining core services and reducing the City’s spending — most notably closing a $2.4 billion gap in Philadelphia’s five-year plan.
