Harvard University

The Center for Labor and a Just Economy is Harvard University’s hub of creative research, policy, and strategies focusing on empowering working people to build an equitable economy and resilient democracy. Through convening stakeholders, disseminating ideas, advising policymakers, and shaping how the media understands progressive labor issues, the center is committed to reimagining the law and developing paradigm-shifting policy. Launched in 2018, its Clean Slate for Worker Power project is based on a reimagined vision of labor law that works for all. It focuses on advancing pragmatic and innovative policy solutions to enable working people to build countervailing power.

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.