About Us
We’ve sat in the chair.
I’m Jordan Jerkovich. I was the Community Development Director in Lindsborg, Kansas, then spent three years at Raftelis on 30-plus projects across 17 states and Canada.
And through the Collective, a network of local government professionals, public servants, and academics, we bring the right expertise to whatever you’re facing.
We know what a Tuesday at city hall looks like. One person, five jobs, and a council meeting tonight.
The Collective
Good people, on purpose.
A bench, not a payroll. Most of us hold posts in universities, public health, and industry, and we come together on the engagements where our work is the work. That is the point: a city gets the practitioner it needs for the part that needs them.
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Jordan Jerkovich, MPA, MSc
Founder and CEO
All services
Founder of Good Local Gov and builder of One(GoodGov) and TurboCAP. He has sat at the permit counter and written the staff report. Former local gov CD Director and consultant. University of Kansas MPA Fellow with focus in local government management.
Full bio, Jordan Jerkovich
Jordan grew up in Salina, Kansas, and lives in Kansas City. He served as Community Development Director for the City of Lindsborg, Kansas, from 2021 to 2023. He then spent three years as a consultant with Raftelis, where he worked on more than 30 strategic planning, organizational assessment, and implementation engagements for cities, counties, and utilities across 17 states and Canada.
Before Lindsborg, he worked in Europe: he analyzed municipal sustainability outcomes in Sweden and led cross-sector circular economy initiatives in Scotland. He holds a Master of Public Administration in local government management from the University of Kansas and a Master of Science in Strategic Leadership towards Sustainability from Blekinge Institute of Technology in Sweden.
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Caroline de Filippis, MSc, MA
Consultant
TurboCAP, strategy development, grants
Sustainability and communications strategist. As a FUSE Executive Fellow she led Wyandotte County’s first resiliency assessment, and she holds master’s degrees from Sweden’s Blekinge Institute of Technology and France’s Grenoble IAE.
Full bio, Caroline de Filippis
Caroline is a sustainability and communications strategist whose work spans countries and sectors. She builds equity-centered strategies for environmental and social problems that do not sit inside one department.
As a FUSE Executive Fellow, she led Wyandotte County’s first Resiliency Assessment, covering strategic planning, data analysis, and implementation. Her background runs through stakeholder engagement, public health, and sustainability. She holds master’s degrees from Blekinge Institute of Technology in Sweden and Grenoble IAE in France.
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Ward Lyles, PhD, AICP
Strategic Advisor — Climate Action, Resilience, and Sustainability
TurboCAP
Professor of urban planning at the University of Kansas and director of its Center for Compassionate and Sustainable Communities. He has led over $1M in externally funded research on climate adaptation and plan implementation.
Full bio, Ward Lyles
Ward is a Professor of Urban Planning at the University of Kansas, where he directs the Center for Compassionate and Sustainable Communities. He joined the faculty in 2013. His research asks how communities reduce long-term risk from climate change and natural hazards while centering equity, compassion, and public participation.
He has led over $1M in externally funded research and published widely on climate adaptation, just transition, and plan implementation. His work won the 2020 Best Paper in the Journal of the American Planning Association. Before his doctoral work, he worked in transportation policy at 1000 Friends of Wisconsin. He holds a PhD in City and Regional Planning from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
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Alex Coley, MSc
Consultant
TurboCAP
Health promoter and engagement specialist with Nova Scotia Public Health, with fifteen years across public health, education, and community development. Master of Science in Strategic Leadership towards Sustainability.
Full bio, Alex Coley
Alex has been a Health Promoter with Nova Scotia Public Health since 2019, leading cross-sector initiatives on health equity, climate action, and community resilience. He brings over 15 years of experience across public health, education, and community development.
His strength is engagement: building trusted partnerships and turning complex ideas into actions that reflect how people in a community actually live. He holds a Master of Science in Strategic Leadership towards Sustainability from Blekinge Institute of Technology and a Certificate in Development Evaluation for Social Impact from the Coady Institute at St. Francis Xavier University.
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Nick Tvrdy
Business Development and Sales
TurboCAP
A decade in sales, business development, and team leadership across the solar, roofing, and insurance industries, with a degree in sustainable energy from Creighton. He is the one who clears the operational barriers.
Full bio, Nick Tvrdy
Nick is based in Gainesville, Florida, and brings over a decade of experience in sales, business development, and team leadership across the solar, roofing, and insurance industries. He is Sales Manager at EnLight.Energy, and earlier worked as a design and on-site project manager for Solar Heat & Electric.
His focus is the operational barriers that stop organizations from acting: the systems, the processes, and getting people to decide from the same data. He holds a Bachelor of Arts in Sustainable Energy, with a minor in Communication Studies, from Creighton University, and he is a certified yoga teacher.
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Joseph Cummings, PhD
Strategic Advisor — Data Science and Research Design
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Mathematician, PhD from the University of Kentucky, postdoctoral research associate at the University of Edinburgh, and author of a package distributed with Macaulay2. He designs the research and checks the analysis.
Full bio, Joseph Cummings
Joseph is a mathematician and a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the University of Edinburgh. He held the same post at the University of Notre Dame from 2022 to 2025, after earning his PhD in Mathematics from the University of Kentucky. His first degree in mathematics is from the University of Kansas.
He has 11 papers published or accepted in algebraic statistics, computational algebra, and mathematical biology, in journals including the Journal of Symbolic Computation and the Bulletin of Mathematical Biology. He co-wrote the MultigradedImplicitization package that ships with Macaulay2, referees for three journals, and taught statistical methods and data analysis at Notre Dame.
Do good work? We’re building a bench of practitioners who’ve done the work inside local government.
Join the collectiveOur promise
A lot of companies say they mean well.
Good Local Gov is the business. We work with local governments on AI, climate action, and development.
We wrote it into the contract.
- No AI surcharge. Ever.We pass AI usage through at cost and never profit from it, so we have no reason to put AI into everything. The only way we earn is by delivering real value and keeping you as a partner. Our goal is not a good fourth quarter this year. It is a good fourth quarter thirty-five years from now.
- You own your data, your workflows, and your agents, even if we go out of business.This is about resilience. Your data and workflows are your documented institutional knowledge, so they stay yours, not ours. You need to run on them whether or not the AI is working that day, whether or not a vendor stays in business, and whether or not AI is in the picture at all.
- Humans stay in the lead.This is how we protect trust, democracy, and the integrity of public service. Every action leaves an audit trail, with a person you can reach, human oversight, and clear accountability. It is about the future of local government: protecting it, and making it better.
If we break one of those, the contract ends.
I’d love to hear from you first.
You might hear from me directly. Leave a message, and I’ll reach out to set up a time. Why we started Good Local Gov.
A free thirty-minute call. Nothing to sign.