An outdoor march on the street by hundreds of women with symbolic flags who are part of the (Movimento dos Trabalhadores Sem Terra, Landless Workers’ Movement) in Brazil

Understanding Social Movements and Creating Social Change: Experiencing Campaigns beyond the Classroom.

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.

Portrait headshot of HKS Assistant Professor of Public Policy Liz McKenna
HKS Assistant Professor of Public Policy Liz McKenna

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.


For students interested in immediate, hands-on experience creating and working in campaigns and movements, the MLD Area offers three other powerful courses:

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:

  1. Who are my people?
  2. What is the change we need?
  3. How can we turn our resources into the power we need to achieve that change?

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.

Note: *Enrollment into MLD-377M is limited and by permission of the instructor. The course is taught in a two-week intensive format during the Spring 1 Module, with in-person instruction limited to two intensive workshops on the weekends (February 23-25 and March 1-3, 2024).  Also, MLD-377M  is a firm prerequisite for enrollment in MLD-378M.

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.

Cornell William Brooks holding hands with a child and leading a group of marchers across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, AL
Cornell William Brooks in 2015 leading America’s Journey for Justice march from its starting point at the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, AL.

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.

Note: Students must competitively apply for enrollment in MLD-375, with the key criteria being a demonstrated passion for social justice. Students admitted to the course should  expect extensive work outside of class and must remain patient, flexible, and persistent in the face of the real-time challenges posed in the course.

A range of other HKS courses complement the four MLD Area offerings above, with each one listed below providing a different framework, addressing different issues and contexts, and providing informed and valuable approaches.

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)

In combination, HKS offers students a powerful set of opportunities to develop capacities and experience creating social change.

If you have any questions about these courses, or any other in the MLD curriculum, email Greg Dorchak, MLD Area Administrator.

A male government official and three female student fellows from the HKS Government Performance Lab meeting in a conference room around a table in front of a whiteboard.

MLD-630: Government Turnarounds with Jeffrey Liebman

For the past ten years, Robert W. Scrivner Professor of Social Policy Jeffrey Liebman has led the HKS Government Performance Lab which provides technical assistance to state and local governments interested in improving the results they achieve for their citizens. During that time Liebman and his team of experts, many HKS students and alumni fellows, have become experts at using analytics, outcomes-focused contracts, and cross-sector collaborations to help improve social service programs at the city and state levels. The GPL helps governments address thorny questions, like how to use data to find individuals who had fallen through the cracks, or how to restructure contracts to incentivize providers to serve the most difficult clients. Originally founded as a platform to explore the efficacy of Pay for Success (PFS) projects like Social Impact Bonds, where the governments agrees to pay for services only if they are shown to be successful, and allowing them to test promising new interventions and collaborative stakeholder models, the GPL evolved in response to a need Liebman and his team discovered across the agencies in which they worked. “Our government partners began to ask whether the same models we developed in PFS could be applied to help government social service agencies run their core operations better,” says Liebman.

Portrait photo of Harvard Professor Jeffrey Liebman in tan suit and tie in front of an HKS building
Jeffrey Liebman

Government leaders were seeking data-driven, boots-on-the-ground technical assistance, so Liebman rapidly expanded the GPL, placing students and HKS alumni with backgrounds in data analysis, public policy, and implementation in the field with a variety governments and agencies selected through national competitions. Projects began with programs aimed at reducing prison recidivism and reintegration for young people exiting the juvenile justice system, then expanded to include initiatives in maternal and infant health, high-quality pre-K, and addressing homelessness. Working across jurisdictions allowed Liebman and his team to discover and refine a set of approaches that responds to the recurring, problematic issues governments face.  For example, one of the key insights Liebman’s team uncovered during its PFS work was that procurement and contracting were too often seen as back-office compliance functions instead of used as powerful levers for systems change. GPL developed a signature framework for Results-Driven Contracting to help governments achieve high-priority strategic goals and drive improvements in service delivery.

This and other lessons are now taught at HKS each Fall in MLD-630: Government Turnarounds.  The course delivers proven strategies that government leaders have used to turn around troubled agencies and improve government performance. In teaching, Liebman draws on a mixture of lectures, case studies (often with guest visits by the case protagonists and other experts), and student presentations. Topics covered include:

1. Setting strategic goals and getting your organization to follow through on them.
2. Data-driven leadership strategies for improving agency performance, such as performance stat and delivery units.
3. Using results-driven contracting strategies to improve procurement.
4. Techniques for recruiting, training, re-energizing, and retaining talent.
5. Strategies for overcoming inertia.
6. Strategies for sustaining reforms.

MLD-630: Government Turnarounds is good complement to other MLD Courses in Government and Urban Innovation such as MLD-102 Getting Things Done: Management in a Development Context (Andrews); MLD-601 Operations Management (Fagan); MLD-605 Systems Thinking and Supply Chain Management (Fagan); MLD-618 Leadership, Social Change, and its Challenges: Boston as a Case Study (Winship & Jackson); and especially, MLD-412 Greater Boston Applied Field Lab: Advanced Budgeting, Financial Management and Operations (Bilmes) and  MLD-620M The Data Smart City: Driving Innovation with Technology (Goldsmith)

If you have any questions about this course, or any other in the MLD curriculum, email Greg Dorchak, MLD Area Administrator.

MLD-412 MBTA student site visit

FAB in MLD: Finance, Accounting, and Budgeting are Central to Organizational Success

Budgeting, accounting, and financial management are central to the successful operation of government, nonprofit, and for-profit organizations.  MLD offers a sequence of three courses for students seeking to boost their understanding how “FAB” concepts and techniques can be powerful management tools.

 

MLD-401M: Financial Analysis of Public and Nonprofit Organizations taught by Brian Iammartino is an introductory, general-audience course intended for students with no background in accounting or financial analysis. By the end of the course, students will be able to: 1) Understand commonly-used accounting and financial analysis terminology, concepts, tools and processes; 2) Evaluate financial statements in order to ask probing questions, identify risks and/or opportunities, and think critically about financial performance; and 3) Recommend and justify courses of action based on analyses of accounting and other financial data. Specific topics covered include an overview of the financial reporting landscape and governance; accounting principles and concepts; a detailed review of the major financial statements; and the analysis of major financial topics such as organizational liquidity, solvency, operations, funding, and benchmarking.  Main focus will be on features of public and nonprofit accounting, but many of the topics covered are applicable to all types of organizations. Students completing MLD-401M will be well prepared to take the the following course.

 

MLD-411M: Introduction to Budgeting and Financial Management also taught by Brian Iammartino with Senior Lecturer Linda Bilmes is a rigorous introductory course aims to demystify FAB topics for a general audience of students, even those lacking any related background. Iammartino will, step-by-step, help students understand the entire budgeting process, including budget formulation and execution, variance analysis, budget strategies such as activity-based costing, revenue forecasting, and capital budgeting. Accounting topics include an overview of the financial reporting and governance landscape, accounting principles and concepts, and a detailed review of the major financial statements.Linda Bilmes, Daniel Patrick Moynihan Senior Lecturer in Public Policy The course will build on these budgeting and accounting principles to progress to financial management techniques such as the Balanced Scorecard, financial benchmarking, and the analysis of organizational liquidity, solvency, operations and funding.

 

Students successfully completing MLD-411M may apply for Linda Bilmes’ spring course MLD-412: The Greater Boston Applied Field Lab, an advanced, field-based, experiential learning course in which students work on challenging urban management and financial projects. A comprehensive video about the course is available here.

Of MLD-412 , Mid-Career MPA (’20) and recent program fellow Will Eden says, “No course at the Kennedy School I’ve taken has been as thoughtfully composed, incorporated as much feedback, or offered such a valuable hands-on learning experience.” Real world course projects in the past year included a detailed estimate on the financial viability of plans for building a performing arts center in Gloucester, MA; an analysis for the town of Hingham, MA about funding federally mandated storm water runoff infrastructure; rethinking energy supply and demand options related to the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority‘s (MBTA) the South Boston Power Station; and, for the Massachusetts Port Authority (MassPort), an assessment of threats/opportunities for the Boston seafood cluster in the global supply chain.  Past projects have included a number of meaningful collaborations with the City of Somerville, MA, documented on video here. For more details, read the AY21 Report on the Applied Field Lab.  In 2023, students in the course investigated inclusionary zoning as a tool to increase affordable housing in two Massachusetts communities.
Students from the course often continue their work in fellowships with the Rappaport Institute for Greater Boston.

MLD-401M and MLD-411M will be offered at the Harvard Kennedy School in Fall semester. MLD-412 will be offered in the spring semester. For questions about these courses, or any other in the MLD curriculum, email Greg Dorchak, MLD Area Administrator. You may also email Rappaport Institute Associate Director Polly O’Brien.

MLD-355: Public Narrative with Marshall Ganz — A Leadership Practice Translating Values into Action

According to MLD’s  Marshall Ganz, the Rita E. Hauser Senior Lecturer in Leadership, Organizing, and Civil Society, “To lead is to accept responsibility for enabling others to achieve shared purpose in the face of uncertainty.” But where should a student aspiring to lead for the the greater good begin?  For Ganz, the process of leadership starts with the “self” and builds outward into a constituency, creating “us,” a group that’s ready “now” to meet the challenges on the path to shared goals.  In MLD-355: Public Narrative Ganz and his highly collaborative teaching team introduce students to the discursive process through which individuals, communities, and nations learn to make choices, construct identity, and inspire action. The goal is teaching students to link their our own callings to that of a community that shares a call to action, translating deeply held personal values into effective action. Ganz continues, “Because it engages the ‘head’ and the ‘heart,’ Marshall Ganz's Public Narrative Leadership Pedagogy: Head, Heart, Handsnarrative can instruct and inspire – teaching us not only why we should act, but moving us to act.” Based on a pedagogy of guided reflective practice, students work in groups to learn to tell their own public narrative. Developing their own personal practice of public narrative builds students’ leadership capacity, and is especially critical when they are called to respond in moments of challenge like facing loss, lacking power, confronting inequality and difference, and enacting meaningful change.

Over the years Ganz and his course graduates have introduced public narrative training widely across the globe including in  the Obama presidential campaign (2007-8), Sierra Club, Episcopal Church, United We Dream Movement, the Ahel Organizing Initiative, (Jordan), Serbia on the Move (Belgrade), Avina (Bogata), National Health Service (UK), Peking University (Beijing), Tatua (Kenya), Community Organizing Japan (Tokyo) and elsewhere, proving the relevance of narrative practice across disciplines, professions, and cultures.

Students seeking to extend their narrative practice and learning often follow up MLD-355 in the spring by enrolling in Ganz’s other courses MLD-377M: Organizing: People, Power, Change, and the MLD-378M Practicum, in which students put into practice what they’ve learned in organizations, movements, and campaigns of their own.

Beyond HKS, Ganz and graduates of his teaching have established the Leading Change Network, a global community of organizers, educators and researcher aiming ” To meet the challenges to democracy by developing the leadership to organize communities which build power and realize the values of equality, solidarity, and dignity.”

To learn more, view a complete (~75 minute) mini-workshop with Marshall Ganz introducing public narrative pedagogy on the YouTube channel of The Resistance School which was founded in March of 2017 by graduate students of HKS and other Harvard schools. Lesson 1 of the 15 short videos is below; the full set is here.

Well before COVID-19 moved HKS teaching online during the 2020-21 academic year, Ganz and his team with HKS Executive Education were pioneering the teaching of leadership and organizing online. With over 10 years experience developing his online public narrative Exec Ed course Ganz and his team have created an exceptionally strong model of experiential, interpersonal, and interdependent learning. For a sample of, and in-depth introduction to their online teaching pedagogy, view here a (~60 min) video of an online interactive session led by Ganz for Harvard Kennedy School faculty on his approach to online teaching.

MLD-355 will be offered at the Harvard Kennedy School in the fall semester, and MLD-377M and MLD-378M will be taught in spring. For questions about these courses, or any other in the MLD curriculum, email Greg Dorchak, MLD Area Administrator. You may also contact Emily Lin, Program Director for Ganz’s Practicing Democracy Project (emily_lin@hks.harvard.edu).

MLD-304: The Science of Behavior Change with Todd Rogers

Leverage insights about human decision making to develop interventions that improve societal well-being.

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.

Fundamental Negotiation Training at HKS: MLD-215 with Rob Wilkinson and MLD-223 with Kessely Hong

Among the signature curriculum of the Harvard Kennedy School, negotiation training has always stood out as among the most popular due to its practicality and necessity across all sectors and policy domains. Founded by one of the luminaries of negotiation science, Howard Raiffa, HKS faculty have always been at the forefront of negotiation research and training. Furthermore, we recognize negotiation skills are a critical contributor to effective leadership of organizations, campaigns, and social movements of all types.

With the two introductory negotiation courses outside the MPP core, MLD-215 Negotiation and Leadership: Essential Theory and Practice for Enhancing Your Personal Effectiveness with Robert Wilkinson and MLD-223 Negotiating Across Differences with Kessely Hong students can learn the fundamental, time-tested frameworks of negotiation analysis. Both courses introduce the core concepts of distributive bargaining, value creation, stakeholder analysis, trust-building, barriers to agreement, and strategic approaches to negotiation.

Portrait photo of Robert Wilkinson, Lecturer in Public Policy and Leadership
Robert Wilkinson, Lecturer in Public Policy and Leadership

MLD-215 (Wilkinson) will provide students with the fundamental principles, theory and practice of the field of negotiation, but MLD-215 is especially distinctive in blending leadership and negotiation principles in a single course. The curriculum will balance theory and practice, and draws on the classic literature, as well as more recent work. Students will learn using the case study method, active simulations, group work and lectures to bring the conceptual material to life, as well as to build students’ personal negotiation and leadership skills. Drawing on his extensive experience as a practitioner in the field, Wilkinson will emphasize bringing in international examples and cases throughout the course, to provide both domestic and global perspectives on negotiation and leadership.

 

 

Kessely Hong smiling and teaching students in a Harvard classroom
Senior Lecturer Kessely Hong

MLD-223 (Hong) offers more complex, multiple-stakeholder cases and simulations, some of which include salient cultural or power differences and multi-party dynamics. Students are challenged to navigate differences in expectations, attitudes toward risk, culture, power, status, and partisan perceptions. In Hong’s course, students read and analyze a variety of very rich real-world cases, in which interpretations of the protagonists’ actions provide illuminating insights into similar spectrum of dynamics (personal, psychological, political, cultural, etc.) at play in negotiations over public policy.

 

 

Both MLD-215 and MLD-223 serve as pre-requisites for MLD-280M Advanced Workshop in Multiparty Negotiation and Conflict Resolution, the January-term course, taught by Brian Mandell, Mohamed Kamal Senior Lecturer in Negotiation and Public Policy.  Students wanting to additional venues to study, research, and design new ways of negotiation practice will be interested in exploring the Negotiation and Conflict Resolution Collaboratory. Established and directed by Brian Mandell, the NCRC develops ways to connect students of negotiation with practitioners on the frontlines and faculty leading cutting-edge research. They seek to advance the field of experiential learning and motivate innovations in teaching advanced negotiation in simulated environments. In addition, NCRC faculty affiliates within the Center for Public Leadership engage in the interdisciplinary study of developments and trends at the intersection of negotiation and leadership.

MLD-215 and MLD-223 are offered at Harvard Kennedy School in Fall semester. MLD-280M is offered in January term. If you have any questions about these courses, or any other in the MLD curriculum, email Greg Dorchak, MLD Area Administrator.