Sharon Cooley

Sharon Cooley has over 15 years’ experience as a project manager, subject matter expert, and practitioner for local government and community capacity building programs in East Central Europe, the former Soviet Union, Central Asia, and the United States. Ms. Cooley’s technical expertise encompasses participatory strategic planning, performance management, and budgeting and capital investment programming. She also works extensively on overall decentralization reform, institutional and organizational development, democratic governance and anti-corruption strategies, civil society and citizen participation, and policy analysis. Ms. Cooley’s recent technical assistance work has been focused on building credible partnerships between various levels of government and civil society in Albania, Russia, and Tajikistan through inclusive and results-oriented development/budgetary planning and service improvement activity. Ms. Cooley is also an accomplished researcher, deploying a range of interpretive and statistical methodologies in performing analyses and recommendations for institutional performance improvement. As part of a USAID project in Albania, she oversaw the Albanian National Local Government Survey (and ten individual municipal surveys) that produced baseline indicators on local government service delivery performance and citizen perception of trust, corruption, and local government accountability, including analysis and presentation of results to national and local stakeholders. Ms. Cooley has also garnered significant first-hand government experience as a member of the Executive Leadership Team for a US municipality (Riverside, CA, pop. 300,000) where she was tasked with implementing far-reaching strategic management, organizational development strategies – including a High Performance Organization model – and transformation of the city’s annual operating budget into a performance-based budget.

Areas of Expertise: Performance management; democratic local governance; strategic planning; budgeting and capital improvement planning; civic engagement; and organizational and institutional development.

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