Barbara J. Cohn Berman is Vice President of The Fund for the City of New York and the founding director of its Center on Government Performance. The Center has brought the citizen's perspective to government performance measurement and reporting and captured the interest of cities across the nation and beyond. She also heads the Government Trailblazer Programs, which are encouraging 47 governments in the U.S. and Canada to listen to the public to learn how people assess their government's performance and what types of information and reports people need and want.

She has worked in government, nonprofit organizations and in the private sector. In government, she helped design New York City's first Housing and Vacancy Survey with the U.S. Bureau of the Census and oversaw many subsequent surveys. She led efforts to computerize rent computations and reduce major backlogs in New York's vast rent control operation when she was Deputy Commissioner for Rent Control. As Deputy City Personnel Director, she formed a new bureau to link human resource development of city employees with productivity improvement. She has been a consultant to business, non-profit organizations and government, has served on advisory committees and task forces of governmental organizations and boards of nonprofits. She was recently appointed as one of three non-governmental members to the newly formed National Performance Management Advisory Commission. She has taught graduate courses in public policy and public administration. As a post-graduate, she was a Loeb Fellow at Harvard University.

She is the author of two volumes of a study, How Smooth Are New York City's Streets?, and of the book, Listening to the Public: Adding the Voices of the People to Government Performance Measurement and Reporting. She has written articles in various journals and made presentations in the U.S., Canada and Australia about the importance of, and techniques for local governments to listen to the public in constructive ways. She was special editor of the Spring 2008 issue of The National Civic Review, the quarterly journal of the National Civic League.

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