The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University hosted a talk by Harvard Kennedy School Professor Tarek Masoud on Monday, November 9. The lecture, entitled “When God Speaks, Does Anyone Listen?” was based on a study Dr. Masoud conducted on one of his recent trips to Egypt. Dr. Masoud began the presentation by […]

BY TAYLOR WOODS It has been a love-fest on the campaign trail this year. During weekends in October and the days leading up to Election Day, I’ve been a volunteer canvasser knocking on doors for Mike Michaud’s run for governor of Maine, US Senator Jeanne Shaheen’s reelection campaign in New Hampshire, and Wendy Davis’s run […]

The UCLA Center for Health Policy Research released findings from the most recent California Health Interview Survey (2011-2012) on various health indicators among adult Californians, including insurance status, nutrition, clinical health outcomes, health behaviors, food insecurity, and English proficiency. Health profiles were published for all racial groups and provided disaggregated data for several Asian American […]

By Patrick Daniel As the Austrian-born American management consultant Peter Drucker once said, “What gets measured gets managed.” When Eric Schmidt visited the Harvard Kennedy School last spring, everyone listened. Insights from the Executive Chairman of Google were in such high demand that students filled all three levels of the auditorium. The talk hosted by […]

BY BRIAN CHIGLINSKY, PANGYRUS This article is being published in collaboration with Pangyrus.   Sendhil Mullainathan had studied poverty for years, and something haunted him in nearly every study. Born into a small rural village in India, the Harvard behavioral economist and winner of the MacArthur Fellowship—commonly known as a “genius grant”—was inherently skeptical of […]

  One student prepares to run for elected office. Another has just finished an internship in a federal courthouse. A third is taking a college course on Kierkegaard. These students are eighth graders. Education can be transformative. And it can be transformed. RETHINKING EDUCATION REFORM Education reform has been an ongoing effort for the past […]

BY ELIZABETH BENNETT Rwanda is the only country in the world where more women than men serve as elected officials. For a small, land-locked nation in the middle of sub-Saharan Africa, that’s an impressive distinction. But when you consider how far the country has come over two decades, it becomes downright astonishing. For Rwandans, the […]

BY JULIA FETHERSTON ADAM SMITH WOULD HAVE BEEN mystified by the bankers, government officials, analysts, and activists assembled in the City of London for the inaugural G8 Meeting on Social Impact Investment, a meeting convened at the behest of U.K. Conservative Party Prime Minister David Cameron. Smith, the pioneer of free market political economy, wrote […]

BY MARYROSE MAZZOLA “Two police officers, a court advocate, and a social worker walk into a room,” might sound like the beginning of a bad joke, but in Edinburgh, Scotland, it’s a new policy norm. This is what’s known as a MARAC (Multi-Agency Risk Assessment Committee) meeting. Here, up to a dozen domestic abuse service […]

BY ISAAC LARA During the 1970s and 1980s, Times Square was not the tourist mecca that it is today. The now-glitzy area in Midtown’s theatre district had fallen into disrepair from decades of government negligence, with drug addicts and prostitutes prowling the streets. The few legal businesses that existed were mostly low-rent strip clubs and […]

Steve Lydenberg began his career in responsible investment in 1975, as he says, before “careers in responsible investment even existed.” He joined the now-dormant Council on Economic Priorities, one of the first organizations to investigate and publicize corporate misbehavior, to support his passion for writing off-Broadway plays. But in the 1980s, divestment from the apartheid […]

BY HAYLING PRICE Last fall, I had the opportunity to invite a hero to Harvard’s Center for Public Leadership (CPL). While CPL often features celebrities, dignitaries, and heads of state, resident students rarely hear from community-based practitioners grappling with the poverty we tend to engage with in the abstract. Steve Gates has spent years leading […]