**Live, online shopping sessions with the faculty instructors are taking place on September 3rd and 4th, 2024.
Access these sessions via the course Canvas sites, linked from shopping session schedule posted on the HKS website here.**
Today’s array of societal challenges – from economic disparity, political injustice, rising dangers posed by climate change, and ongoing threats to basic human rights and democratic freedoms – demand, more urgently than ever, that citizens come together and act in collaboration to hold accountable, or change, the existing institutions and systems meant to ensure justice, health, safety, and dignity for people. The Harvard Kennedy School offers numerous important courses that explore the fundamental ways people organize and take collective action for social change. Further, the MLD Area course offerings provide students with the excellent opportunities to directly apply their learning in existing advocacy organizations and movements, and even to create campaigns of their own from the ground up.
In her new course MLD 370: Social Movements: The Art and Science of Social Change, Assistant Professor of Public Policy Liz McKenna applies a sociological lens to historical and contemporary cases of social, labor, and political movements from around the world to answer the questions: What’s the difference between a movement that wins victories for its constituents, and one that fails? And, what are the factors that make collective action powerful?
Drawing on her award-winning doctoral research on civil society in Brazil, and the studies detailed in her 2021 book, Prisms of the People: Power and Organizing in 21st Century America, McKenna’s work examines how organizational leaders build constituency bases that successfully exercise political power. Students in the course will also learn about the role of culture, media, and technology in collective action. With these frameworks in their toolkit, students then enter an experiential learning “lab,” where they investigate how the course concepts work in practice by selecting an existing social-movement organization and analyzing a challenge its leaders face. Projects can explore areas ranging from movement narratives; organizational structure and governance; leadership development; strategy and tactics; learning and adaptation; political contestation; power mapping; and effective use of data. Again, by understanding how to analyze, then potentially create and implement these aspects of a movement or campaign, students will benefit when working in future change-making roles.
Marshall Ganz, the esteemed Rita E. Hauser Senior Lecturer in Leadership, Organizing and Civil Society, has been teaching organizing at HKS for nearly 30 years. Having first come to Harvard (College) in the fall of 1960, he left a year before graduating to volunteer with the 1964 Mississippi Summer Project. There, he found a “calling” as an organizer for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and, in the fall of 1965 joined Cesar Chavez in his effort to unionize California farm workers. During 16 years with the United Farm Workers he gained experience in union, political, and community organizing; became Director of Organizing; and was elected to the national executive board on which he served for 8 years. During the 1980s he worked with grassroots groups to develop new organizing programs and designed innovative voter mobilization strategies for local, state, and national electoral campaigns. In 1991, in order to deepen his intellectual understanding of his work, he returned to Harvard College and after a 28-year “leave of absence” completed his undergraduate degree in history and government. He earned his MPA from HKS in 1993, then began teaching at HKS soon thereafter, while simultaneously completing a Harvard PhD in sociology (awarded in 2000). During his time as HKS faculty, Ganz has continued to work “in the field,” including with the Obama presidential campaign (2007-8), the Sierra Club, the Ahel Organizing Initiative (Jordan), Serbia on the Move (Belgrade), Avina (Bogata), Tatua (Kenya), and Community Organizing Japan (Tokyo), learning and perfecting his organizing frameworks.
The premise for MLD-377M and MLD-378M is that an “organized” citizenry is able to formulate, articulate, and assert its shared interests. Organizing, in turn, requires leadership: accepting responsibility for enabling others to achieve a shared purpose in the face of uncertainty. Organizers, then, ask three core questions:
That is to say, organizers must learn to identify, recruit and develop leadership; build community with that leadership; and create power from resources of that community. Students do this in MLD-377M, the “Design” module of the two-course sequence, by applying the five organizing practices: storytelling; relationship building; strategizing; structuring; and, lastly, taking action, as they actually organize their own leadership teams, decide upon a shared purpose, and design organizing campaigns to achieve their purpose. The pedagogy is structured in a purposeful sequence: “explanation,” “modeling,” “practice,” and “reflective debriefing,” which allow students to better learn from repeated practice.
During the second “Leadership” (in practice) module, MLD-378M, students learn to lead the campaign they designed: organizing a kick-off; developing leadership; innovating tactics; engaging with power; and winning, losing, and learning. Practice and critical reflection are again the keys to learning in this module. Students are supported in this process by a set of skilled course coaches who, themselves, have extensive experience actively engaging in these organizing practices and developing students into movement leaders.
MLD-375 Creating Justice in Real Time: Vision, Strategies and Campaigns taught by Professor Cornell William Brooks is another powerful experiential learning course in which students actively engage with movements addressing many of the most critical social injustices of our time.
Brooks’s course seeks to understand longstanding inequities and injustices and recognizes the importance of principled advocacy in an age of unprecedented activism.
Like Ganz, Professor Brooks, brings a wealth of experience into the classroom, having served four years (2014 – 2017) as president and CEO of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP); worked as civil rights attorney; and practiced as an ordained minister in the African Methodist Episcopal Church.
At the NAACP Brooks reinvigorated the activist social justice heritage of the NAACP, dramatically increased its youth membership, and conceived and led the 2015 march known as “America’s Journey for Justice” from Selma, Alabama to Washington, D.C., over 40 days and 1000 miles. During his tenure, Brooks and the NCAAP aided in organizing to address policing injustice in Ferguson, MO to failure of government to protect water quality in the majority-black, low-income community of Flint, MI. Prior to leading the NAACP, Brooks was president and CEO of the New Jersey Institute for Social Justice, where he led the passage of pioneering criminal justice reform and housing legislation. He also served as senior counsel and acting director of the Office of Communications Business Opportunities at the Federal Communications Commission; executive director of the Fair Housing Council of Greater Washington, and a trial attorney at both the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law and the U.S. Department of Justice. As a DOJ trial attorney, he secured a record-setting settlement for housing discrimination victims and filed the first government case alleging housing discrimination against a nursing home.
Brooks’s course MLD-375 seeks to understand longstanding inequities and injustices and recognizes the importance of principled advocacy in an age of unprecedented activism. Issues of highest concern in the course are environmental injustice, biased policing and public safety, criminal justice and prison reform, the fragility and erosion of the right to vote, the need for equitable economic development, and the long call for reparations for racial injustice in the United States. Brooks teaches students tested advocacy principles – e.g., moral ambition, perfect/imperfect victims, concentric/consecutive coalitions, and scholarship — to address these issues, including the particular strategies of the arc of advocacy.
To provide an experiential element, students in MLD-375 work with the William Monroe Trotter Collaborative for Social Justice, U.S. municipal governments, as well as national- & state-level advocacy organizations, on real time campaigns with a focus on what is demonstrably effective. Students will develop visions, strategies and campaigns as well as designing legislative, policy, organizing, communication, and moral framing strategies to address injustices. As an example, one recent student project sought a posthumous presidential pardon for pioneering civil rights leader, Callie House, who at the turn of the 20th century was wrongfully imprisoned. House founded the National Ex-Slave Mutual Relief, Bounty, and Pension Association, a movement of over 300,000 members, but her efforts were squashed and her legacy was tarnished and minimized by a gross corruption of justice. (Read more here.) Projects like this are part of a portfolio of reparations efforts featured in the course that aim to face up to the deep harm caused by slavery, racist Jim-Crow era laws and policies, and ongoing structural inequities.
MLD-340 Power and Influence for Positive Impact (Julie Battilana)
DPI-312 Sparking Social Change Through Arts and Culture (Sanderijn Cels)
DPI-376M Queer Nation: LGBTQ Protest, Politics, and Policy in the U.S. (Tim McCarthy)
IGA-147 Civil Resistance: How It Works (Erica Chenoweth; Not offered AY24)
IGA-385 Strategizing for Human Rights: Moving from Ideals to Practice (Doug Johnson)
IGA-453 Reweaving Ourselves and the World: New Perspectives on Climate Change (Rebecca Henderson)
If you have any questions about these courses, or any other in the MLD curriculum, email Greg Dorchak, MLD Area Administrator.
Throughout history, Boston and Massachusetts have been progressive leaders in social change: the first public school, the Revolutionary War, the first public library, the Abolitionist Movement to eliminate slavery, Women’s Suffrage, Universal Health Care (almost), and Marriage Equality, to name of a few.
Yet, Boston has had, and continues to have, serious challenges. Today its economy is booming; some talk about this being Boston’s “Golden Age.” That said, Boston has one of the highest levels of income inequality of any city in the U.S. Its history of difficult race, ethnic, and class relations issues continue to this day.
In their fall course, MLD-618: Leadership, Social Change, and its Challenges: Focus on Race, Class, and Social Justice, Christopher Winship and Ira Jackson of Harvard’s Sociology Department explore a range of challenging issues facing Boston through a leadership lens. Examining cases like Boston’s school busing crisis, the Catholic church child sex abuse scandal, the Boston Harbor cleanup and Seaport development, and Boston policing, this course focuses on the analytic aspects of leadership: the careful assessment of a situation and the potential for individuals or groups to create change.
Winship and Jackson posit that social change, for better or worse, often occurs, at least in part, because of individual or group leadership. But what makes for effective, or ineffective leadership? Is it the quality or skills of an individual? Do ethics matter? A good match between what is needed and who is in leadership? Or is it making the right strategic choices based on a thorough understanding of situation?
Answering these questions requires someone to be a good social scientist – to have a sophisticated understanding of the manifest and latent dynamics of a situation and the potential leaders within it. Importantly, different situations require different types of leadership and individuals differ in their leadership skills and resources.
Through MLD-618 students have fantastic opportunity to deeply examine local issues and actually interact with the key individuals who are, or were, the protagonists in the cases being studied.
Students can ask these special class guests how they understood the situation(s) they were in, why they made the decisions that they did, and if now, in retrospect, they would have done anything differently. A few examples of expected guests in the course are:
The core learning goal of this course is to give students the tools to rigorously analyze and evaluate situations where leadership is an issue and social change is the goal. You will learn how to do this by using a specific framework consisting of a series of steps: analyzing a situation, determining what options are available, and then evaluating each option in term of its consequences and its ethics. In addition, many cases in the course are interrelated. What is possible to do in any situation will often be constrained by what happened in previous situation(s). It is important that the cases we examine be understood in context, not as isolated situations. The local focus on Boston as a community allows students to do this. The course also provides a unique opportunity for students to learn about Boston and its environs. Through three different trips to explore Boston: one as a class (Museum of African American History), and two on your own (The Black Heritage Trail and the Ella J. Baker House) students gain concrete experience of the city in which they are studying, and see the city as a learning laboratory.
MLD-618 is also listed at the Faculty of Arts and Sciences as Sociology 1119. It will be taught in Fall on Mondays 3:00-5:45 in William James Hall 105. The course makes a good complement to other MLD courses in Leadership, Strategic Management, Urban and Civic Innovation, and Organizing Civic, Political, and Social Action. For questions about these courses, or any other in the MLD curriculum, email Greg Dorchak, MLD Area Administrator
Many development experts use plan and control methods to introduce new policy solutions into complex settings. Too often these results end up in in failure. Effective leaders in the challenging development context should be using more flexible facilitated emergence methods instead, but often they do not know what these methods involve. MLD-103M: PDIA in Action: Development Through Facilitated Emergence taught by Matthew Andrews, Edward S. Mason Senior Lecturer in International Development, is a Spring module course that introduces students to a new approach to doing facilitated emergence, Problem Driven Iterative Adaptation (PDIA) in the development context. Students will learn how to facilitate discussions about problems and potential solutions, to engage with teams, and to facilitate an iterative learning process. MLD-103M is a complementary course to MLD-102: Getting Things Done: Management in a Development Context also taught by Matthew Andrews, although MLD-102 is not a pre-requisite.
To learn more, view this general introduction to PDIA. Check out the PDIA Toolkit from the Building State Capability program.
and Watch Matt explain more about the model, and read his related blogpost. Listen to a podcast introducing his co-authored 2017 book which explains the origins of and ideas behind the PDIA model. Download the book itself here.
MLD-103M will be offered at Harvard Kennedy School in the Spring semester. If you have questions about this course, or any other in the MLD curriculum, email Greg Dorchak, MLD Area Administrator.
How can effective leaders learn from experience and decisions in the past to make more effective decisions that advance one’s strategic purpose?
Strategy is expressed in the decisions we make every day. There are no choices or actions that are truly neutral with respect to one’s strategic purpose. Yet few decisions come labelled as “strategic”; instead policy makers, analysts and managers face an unending stream of judgments and choices that arrive in varied frames from every imaginable direction.
No decision stands alone. Today’s decisions are linked undeniably to decisions in the past reflected in the experience of individuals, groups, teams and organizations, even nations. Experience both enables and limits our perceptions, beliefs, values, predispositions and capabilities. We both learn from the past (it’s all we’ve got) yet our learning can be limited by the deceptive clarity and presumed certainty associated with explanations of past events.
MLD-113M Strategy and Decision with Peter Zimmerman will help students develop more robust explanations of past decisions, their strategic impact and will help students make better predictions of the effects of future decisions. Taking as the course text cases and stories involving others, from different times and places, and even students’ own stories and experience, students will work on three parallel tracks. First, students have the chance to analyze and explain decisions large & small while experimenting in a tentative qualitative way with how things might come out differently. Next, they explore the science of behavior & decision-making (i.e., what are the sources of influence on decision and what’s going on in the black box?). Finally, they develop a framework to help improve our explanations & predictions and to integrate individual choices into a pattern of strategic decisions.
This course is offered in the spring module 2 semester. If you have any questions about this course, or any other in the MLD curriculum, email Greg Dorchak, MLD Area Administrator.
This is the primary learning goal of MLD-304 The Science of Behavior Change taught by Professor Todd Rogers.
The fast growing research field dubbed “behavioral economics” or “behavioral science” examines the mechanisms of, and influences on, human judgment and decision making, especially in the areas where our choices differ from the rational and the optimal. Insights from this research has provided a new set of tools that complement standard economics and policy levers for influencing behavior (namely, incentives and information) and allowed us to improve implementation of interventions promoting the public good. These new tools and ideas have relevance across fields ranging from healthcare, education, criminal justice, social welfare, electoral politics, personal finance, and beyond.
In addition to learning more about the science of how humans make judgments and decisions, students in MLD-304 will also be taught how to improve the quality of their own judgments and decisions by identifying areas of thinking prone to errors and cognitive biases. Some of these errors are particularly important for real world problems. This course will also increase students’ familiarity with randomized experiments, enabling them to be smarter consumers of claims that interventions cause certain outcomes.
Watch Professor Rogers describe an example from his work on voter mobilization:
Read an extensive piece the HKS alumni magazine about Todd Rogers’ recent work.
Join other students at HKS and across Harvard interested in behavioral science in the Behavioral Insights Group which brings together an outstanding group of decision research scholars, behavioral economists, and other behavioral scientists. BIG’s staff are always happy to talk with students. Please feel free to reach out to Program Manager, Maja Niksic (maja_niksic@hks.harvard.edu), follow BIG on Twitter, check out BIG’s LinkedIn Network where behavioral science-specific jobs are posted, or access the resources of the Behavioral Insights Student Group.
MLD-304 is offered at Harvard Kennedy School in the Fall semester with 2 sections available. If you have any questions about this course, or any other in the MLD curriculum, email Greg Dorchak, MLD Area Administrator.