Kennedy School Review

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 […]

The Winter Games don’t deserve to be Olympic Games. BY JORDAN WARD, PANGYRUS This article is being published in collaboration with Pangyrus.   The International Olympic Committee (IOC) has a problem. With Stockholm, Krakow, and now Lviv pulling out of the running to host the 2022 Winter Olympic Games, they’ve been left with slim pickings. […]

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 […]

BY WILL DENN Fahim Muhammad believed that until the Taliban were defeated, Afghanistan, his homeland, would never be safe.1 In 2006, despite the objections of his wife and two children, Fahim dropped out of school to become a U.S. military interpreter. Because of his excellent command of English, Dari, Pashto, and the obscure Nuristani language, […]

What the Most Recent Attack on Organized Labor Will Mean for American Workers’ Health and Safety BY DANYAAL RAZA Organized labor is under attack. In 2011, in the depths of an icy Midwestern winter, roughly 100,000 Wisconsinites descended upon their state capitol. Just one month into his term, Governor Scott Walker’s ultimately successful attempt to […]

A New U.S. Defense Strategy for the 21st Century BY GREGORY WHITTEN AND ERUM JILANI THE UNITED STATES HAS EMBARKED on a new defense strategy: the rebalance to the Asia-Pacific region. Moving forward, the United States will play a deeper and more enduring role in promoting security and prosperity in the region. The rebalance to […]

Wading into the Debate BY DANIEL R. BOWLES When Rex’s mother passed away, he was lost. Just eighteen years old and only six days past his high school graduation, he had nowhere to stay and no good prospects for employment. He spent the next three years out of work. Without any real direction in life, […]

BY BALE DALTON In the United States we are gearing up for another electoral season. Even though we won’t be electing a new president in 2014, candidates for Congress as well as state and local positions are girding themselves for political combat, convening staff for strategy sessions in war rooms and readying salvos for the […]

  BY JOSH RUDOLPH The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed, the world is ruled by little else. – John Maynard Keynes Friday afternoons tend to be subdued affairs at the Harvard Kennedy School. But the afternoon […]

BY CROSBY BURNS A preliminary version of this post originally appeared on the Ash Center’s Challenges to Democracy blog Last year the City of Boston unveiled its plans to devote a portion of its capital budget towards a participatory budget, a social innovation that aims to reimagine citizen engagement, the appropriations process, and democratic participation. […]