Harvard University

The HKS Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation brings remarkable faculty together with global leaders in the democracy field to develop constructive dialogue, exceptional scholarship, and bold ideas. In an era of spiraling inequality and political polarization, the idea of freedom as a core political value has dropped from progressive discourse. The Center’s Freedom Project — in collaboration with the Boston Review — aims to recover the word from its distortions, and to reframe it as a cornerstone of post-neoliberal democracy. Convening philosophers and academics, together with practitioners, it will revisit foundational concepts toward changing the public conversation of what a just society looks like, and what it can accomplish.

The People Lab aims to transform the public sector by producing cutting-edge research with the people in government and the communities they serve. Working with government collaborators and other stakeholders, The People Lab will expand its research on how to strengthen the public-sector workforce and improve public service delivery, with a particular focus on how to increase the talent pipeline into government, how to support public servants to be engaged and successful at work, and how to build researcher-practitioner collaborations on workforce issues. Building on the first phase of its work conducting workforce roundtables and pulse surveys of federal government employees, The People Lab plans to facilitate a set of field experiments with the federal government to pilot and test new strategies designed to improve outcomes for public-sector workers and the communities they serve.

The Deeper Learning Dozen project is housed at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. The project supports a community of practice with 12 superintendents and their team members, all of whom are committed to making the changes necessary so that all young people and adults equitably experience deeper learning. The work will result in an understanding of how to create the changes in systems, policies, practices, roles, beliefs, and assumptions. The project will share its learnings widely through a variety of channels. (Substrategy: District Deep Dives and Networks)