The National Civic League (NCL) conducts all of its work in partnership with national organizations, key universities, and a national network of facilitators and experts. Team NCL is made up experienced former mayors, city managers, and senior facilitators located throughout the country including those listed here.
National Civic League President Gloria Rubio-Cortés is also executive editor of NCL's award-winning journal National Civic Review. She has held leadership positions in business, philanthropy, and nonprofits in California (Southern and Northern) and Colorado over the past 35 years and specialized in civic engagement, social change, and civil rights. At philanthropic foundations, she was a senior manager at Levi Strauss Foundation and ZeroDivide. She plays many roles at NCL including strategic planner, facilitator, researcher, and writer. She has facilitated and co-facilitated a wide variety of meetings in her professional life. She is co-author of the Civic Index, 2nd Edition, and many articles on civic engagement. She serves on the Denver Public Library Commission (vice chair), Urban Libraries Council Board, Delilberative Democracy Consortium Executive Committee, Latino Community Foundation of Colorado Advisory Board, Mile High United Way Board of Trustees, and others. An elected member of the National Academy for Public Administration, she is a co-principal investigator on NCL’s Fiscal Sustainability Case Investigations Project with colleagues at the University of Southern California and the University of San Francisco. She is a co-facilitator of the Envision Palm Desert strategic planning initiative. Awards include the Disability Funders Network Bill Diaz Award for grantmaking. She earned an M.S. in journalism from Columbia University and a B.S. from the University of Colorado at Boulder.
The Honorable Bev Perry is executive director of the Southwest Megaregion Alliance. She is also a public affairs consultant with skill areas in community engagement, meeting facilitation, and dispute resolution for public and private organizations conducting strategic planning and community conversations. Perry has served as the assistant director of the Bedrosian Center on Governance at the University of Southern California; manager of Member Relations at the Southern California Association of Governments; associate with Greer/Dailey Public Affairs; and was elected city clerk, city councilmember, and mayor of Brea, California. She has served in leadership positions (president or chair) at the Orange County Division of the League of California Cities, the Southern California Association of Governments, the California Association of Councils of Government, and the National League of Cities’ CityFutures Panel on Democratic Governance. She serves on the advisory council for both the Institute for Local Government's Public Engagement Program and the Pepperdine University's Davenport Institute for Public Engagement and Civic Leadership, and was a board member for the National Civic League. She has a BS in geology from the University of the Pacific and a MSEd in counseling from the University of Southern California.
The Honorable Bill Schechter is a consultant to nonprofit organizations, foundations, and government agencies. His portfolio of work and expertise includes local governance and citizen participation; collaboration, consensus, and community building; visioning and strategic planning; community planning, development, and environmental protection. He provides technical assistance and coaching, training and presentations, process and meeting design and facilitation, research on promising practices, and policy development. Schechter was coordinator of Collaboration DC, a network of practitioners working to build civic capacity and solve community problems in the nation’s capital. Other recent projects include partnering on strategic assessments for National Heritage Areas; strategic planning workshops for friends groups of National Park Service sites in western Pennsylvania; facilitating community forums on the Master Facility Plan for DC Public Schools; researching regional planning efforts for Envision Greater Washington; conducting an assessment of watershed management planning in Fairfax County, Virginia; facilitating community forums on the DC Comprehensive Plan; and facilitating a task force and community meetings on long-range transportation and land use planning in Montgomery County, Maryland. Schechter worked from 1995 to mid-2003 at the National Civic League in its Washington, DC office. He served as senior fellow and then director of the Program for Community Problem Solving (PCPS), director of the DC office, director of Community Services-DC, and senior associate for federal-community partnerships. He worked directly with communities and in partnerships with foundations. He is the former mayor of Castle Rock, Colorado.