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.

Boston as Leadership Learning Lab | MLD-618 Leadership, Social Change, and its Challenges with Chris Winship and Ira Jackson

Throughout history, Boston and Massachusetts have been progressive leaders in social change: the first public school, the Revolutionary War, the first public library, the Abolitionist Movement to eliminate slavery, Women’s Suffrage, Universal Health Care (almost), and Marriage Equality, to name of a few.

Yet, Boston has had, and continues to have, serious challenges. Today its economy is booming; some talk about this being Boston’s “Golden Age.” That said, Boston has one of the highest levels of income inequality of any city in the U.S. Its history of difficult race, ethnic, and class relations issues continue to this day.

In their fall course, MLD-618: Leadership, Social Change, and its Challenges: Focus on Race, Class, and Social Justice, Christopher Winship and Ira Jackson of Harvard’s Sociology Department explore a range of challenging issues facing Boston through a leadership lens. Examining cases like Boston’s school busing crisis, the Catholic church child sex abuse scandal, the Boston Harbor cleanup and Seaport development, and Boston policing, this course focuses on the analytic aspects of leadership: the careful assessment of a situation and the potential for individuals or groups to create change.

Winship and Jackson posit that social change, for better or worse, often occurs, at least in part, because of individual or group leadership. But what makes for effective, or ineffective leadership? Is it the quality or skills of an individual? Do ethics matter? A good match between what is needed and who is in leadership? Or is it making the right strategic choices based on a thorough understanding of situation?

Answering these questions requires someone to be a good social scientist – to have a sophisticated understanding of the manifest and latent dynamics of a situation and the potential leaders within it. Importantly, different situations require different types of leadership and individuals differ in their leadership skills and resources.

Through MLD-618 students have fantastic opportunity to deeply examine local issues and actually interact with the key individuals who are, or were, the protagonists in the cases being studied.

Students can ask these special class guests how they understood the situation(s) they were in, why they made the decisions that they did, and if now, in retrospect, they would have done anything differently. A few examples of expected guests in the course are:

The core learning goal of this course is to give students the tools to rigorously analyze and evaluate situations where leadership is an issue and social change is the goal. You will learn how to do this by using a specific framework consisting of a series of steps:  analyzing a situation, determining what options are available, and then evaluating each option in term of its consequences and its ethics. In addition, many cases in the course are interrelated. What is possible to do in any situation will often be constrained by what happened in previous situation(s). It is important that the cases we examine be understood in context, not as isolated situations. The local focus on Boston as a community allows students to do this. The course also provides a unique opportunity for students to learn about Boston and its environs. Through three different trips to explore Boston: one as a class (Museum of African American History), and two on your own (The Black Heritage Trail and the Ella J. Baker House) students gain concrete experience of the city in which they are studying, and see the city as a learning laboratory.

MLD-618 is also listed at the Faculty of Arts and Sciences as Sociology 1119. It will be taught in Fall on Mondays 3:00-5:45 in William James Hall 105.  The course makes a good complement to other MLD courses in Leadership, Strategic ManagementUrban and Civic Innovation, and Organizing Civic, Political, and Social Action. For questions about these courses, or any other in the MLD curriculum, email Greg Dorchak, MLD Area Administrator

Demystifying Power. Enabling Empowerment. | MLD-340 Power and Influence for Positive Impact with Julie Battilana

Having been awarded the Academy of Management’s 2022 George R. Terry Book Award* for her book Power, for All, Julie Battilana brings her award-winning research to life in the Harvard classroom teaching MLD-340 Power and Influence for Positive Impact.

In Power, for All, Battilana and her co-author Tiziana Casciaro offer a new vision of power – what they define as the ability to influence someone else’s behavior – as deriving from having access to valued resources. Understanding what those resources are, people can take action to plan for, create, and sustain organizational and systems change. Drawing upon lessons derived from their rich research, and conveying lessons through wide-ranging case narratives, Battilana and Casciaro reveal the insights into power and influence that come from understanding (1) the two basic needs all human beings share—safety and self-esteem—and (2) the resources people seek to satisfy those needs: obvious ones, like money and status, but also less obvious and less tangible resources, like autonomy, achievement, affiliation, and morality. In sum Power, for All demystifies the essential mechanisms for acquiring and using power, showing that it is available to ALL people, not just those with personality, money, or, indeed, those willing to use intimidation, threats, or worse.

Split picture: At left: Tiziana Cascario and Julie Battilana seated together at a table. At right: book cover of their book, Power, for All.Pictured
Tiziana Casciaro and Julie Battilana with their award-winning book, Power, for All.

Building on these empowering ideas…,

…and designed for individuals at any stage of their career, Battilana’s course MLD-340 Power and Influence for Positive Impact will debunk the fallacies that many have about power and explore the fundamentals of power in interpersonal relationships, in organizations, and in society. In doing so, it will lift the veil on power, revealing to students what it really is, and how it works, ultimately unleashing their potential to build and use power to effect change at home, at work, and in society.

MLD-340 is ideal for students who want to make things happen, despite the obstacles that might stand in the way. Students will walk away prepared to exercise power positively to challenge the status quo in order to address the pressing social and environmental problems of our time. Students will learn conceptual models, tactical approaches, and assessment tools to develop their personal influence style and understand the political dynamics surrounding them. The subject matter in the course also specifically encourages students to use power responsibly, resist its corruptive perils, and challenges students to develop their own sense of what constitutes the ethical exercise of power and influence in their lives.  In the past a stellar array of in-class guests have been invited into the course, each an eminent and effective changemaker in their field:

MLD-340 is a useful complement to other MLD course offerings in the areas of LeadershipNegotiationOrganizing Civic, Political, and Social Action, and even Social Enterprise. If you have any questions about this course, or any other in the MLD curriculum, email Greg Dorchak, MLD Area Administrator.

*The Academy of Management’s George R. Terry Book Award is granted annually to the book judged to have made the most outstanding contribution to the global advancement of management knowledge during the last two years. Books that contribute to the advancement of management theory, conceptualization, research, or practice are eligible for this prestigious award. Battilana and Casciaro were presented the award at the 82nd Annual Meeting of the Academy of Management on August 7, 2022.

MLD-113M: Strategy and Decision with Peter Zimmerman

How can effective leaders learn from experience and decisions in the past to make more effective decisions that advance one’s strategic purpose?

Book Cover: Strategy: A History, by Lawrence Freedman, Copyright Oxford University Press, 2013

Strategy is expressed in the decisions we make every day. There are no choices or actions that are truly neutral with respect to one’s strategic purpose.  Yet few decisions come labelled as “strategic”; instead policy makers, analysts and managers face an unending stream of judgments and choices that arrive in varied frames from every imaginable direction.

No decision stands alone. Today’s decisions are linked undeniably to decisions in the past reflected in the experience of individuals, groups, teams and organizations, even nations.  Experience both enables and limits our perceptions, beliefs, values, predispositions and capabilities. We both learn from the past (it’s all we’ve got) yet our learning can be limited by the deceptive clarity and presumed certainty associated with explanations of past events.

MLD-113M Strategy and Decision with Peter Zimmerman will help students develop more robust explanations of past decisions, their strategic impact and will help students make better predictions of the effects of future decisions.  Taking as the course text cases and stories involving others, from different times and places, and even students’ own stories and experience, students will work on three parallel tracks. First, students have the chance to analyze and explain decisions large & small while experimenting in a tentative qualitative way with how things might come out differently. Next, they explore the science of behavior & decision-making (i.e., what are the sources of influence on decision and what’s going on in the black box?). Finally, they develop a framework to help improve our explanations & predictions and to integrate individual choices into a pattern of strategic decisions.

This course is offered in the spring module 2 semester. If you have any questions about this course, or any other in the MLD curriculum, email Greg Dorchak, MLD Area Administrator.

Signpost with three signs pointing different directions, all staying "Career" on them

MLD-515M: Serving the Public Good: Planning for Career and Life with Grant Freeland

With a career spent weaving together smart organizational strategy and a concern for the people driven to execute towards these goals, Grant Freeland brings unique insight into what it takes to sustain a career in public service. After spending many years in the consulting field and teaching at HKS, Freeland understands that the professional prospects for HKS students are richly diverse, but also, as a result, less structured and harder to forecast than in other fields (e.g., business, law, medicine). To address this challenge, Freeland carefully designed a course, MLD-515M: Serving the Public Good: Planning for Career and Life, to help students navigate careers fueled by aspirations to contribute to the public good.  Drawing on evidence from the study of professional careers and leadership journeys, work-family conflict and integration, and wellbeing, the module adopts a broader “life” perspective and asks students to reflect, explore, and develop options to successfully and sustainably work toward their aspirations in public service.  The course is grounded in the premise that HKS students have agency in determining the direction of their careers. While not everything is planned and certain, self-direction is possible and is likely to be facilitated by actively exploring alternative paths.

Human characters building a bridge of puzzle piecesIn a short 6 weeks, MLD-515M students undertake a substantial course load, with rigorous work in and out of classroom. Students read relevant academic research, conduct expert interviews, and participate in a variety of reflective and interactive exercises. Peer coaching is integral to the teaching model, which is designed to build a lasting sense of community that Freeland hopes will sustain students for years ahead. Course assignments and peer coaching are adaptable to accommodate the diversity of career stages among students in the class.

The module is structured into three blocks: knowing yourself (e.g., aspirations, motivations, values); where are you going and how are you getting there (e.g., negotiating careers, networking, developing a leadership story); and building the resilience (e.g., wellness, work and family). Students in the course also engage with HKS alumni whose own leadership stories help current students make sense of their own potential career paths.

About the Instructor:

Grant Freeland is an Adjunct Lecturer at Harvard Kennedy school, and Adjunct Professor at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth where he teaches a course on Transforming Public Interest Organizations.  Grant is also a Senior Advisor and Senior Partner Emeritus of the Boston Consulting Group where he was previously a Senior Partner and Global Leader of its People and Organizations Practice, and the Managing Partner of the Boston office. During Freeland’s 31+ years at BCG, his client work has focused on driving transformations in large organizations in both the private and public sector. This work includes organizational redesigns, post-merger integrations, restructurings, creating high performance workforces, culture change, leadership effectiveness, and creating digital and agile organizations.

Portrait photo of Grant Freeland
Grant Freeland

From a BCG leadership perspective, he was one of BCG’s Global Leaders when BCG was one of only two companies rated in the top five best places to work in Fortune’s Best Places to Work survey for eight years in row. Grant was selected as one of Consulting Magazine’s Top 25 Consultants in 2017 and is the protagonist of two Harvard Business School cases, one focusses on BCG’s efforts to improve work life balance. He has contributed over 60 columns to Forbes.com on leadership.

Previously, Freeland was a marketing communications manager for Hewlett-Packard. He received his undergraduate degree in marketing from the Chisholm Institute of Technology (now Monash University) in Australia.  He holds a Master’s in Public Administration from the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, and an MBA from the Australian Graduate School of Management, where he was the medal winner for corporate strategy.

MLD-515M: Serving the Public Good: Planning for Career and Life will be taught in the Fall 2 module in 2023. For questions about this course, or any other in the MLD curriculum, email Greg Dorchak, MLD Area Administrator.

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).