Our Team

Neil Kleiman has spent 25 years building a career at the intersection of policy, philanthropy, government and academia. He founded an urban issues think tank, established new university degree programs, and developed innovative and practical policy solutions for dozens of cities across the United States. He has also written and edited over thirty policy reports, with his work featured in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and on National Public Radio.

Kleiman is an urban policy professor at Northeastern University’s School of Public Policy and holds an appointment at the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice. Neil is a senior fellow at the Burnes Center for Social Change and its affiliated project, the Governance Lab. He teaches courses on policy formation, urban innovation, and new approaches to managing technology and big data.

In 2017, he published A New City O/S: The Power of Open, Collaborative and Distributed Governance on Brookings Institution press. He is the research director of the Mayors Leadership Institute on Smart Cities a partnership effort with the U.S. Conference of Mayors. In March, he published one of the first ever assessments public sector organizational culture in partnership with Bloomberg Philanthropies and the Kennedy School at Harvard. At Tulane University, Kleiman developed a new Master of Public Administration program that launched in 2020.

Kleiman was previously Director of Policy at Living Cities, a collaborative of the world’s largest foundations and corporate philanthropies. He began his career as the founding director of the Center for an Urban Future, a New York-based policy think tank.