2010

2010 Apr 22

New Leaders for New Schools

5:00pm

Location: 

124 Mt. Auburn Street, Suite 200-North, Cambridge, MA

Student from New Leaders for New SchoolsImproving Education Through School Leadership
Jon Schnur, New Leaders for New Schools

About the Seminar
New Leaders for New Schools is a national organization designed to drive up academic achievement by recruiting and training effective school principals in partnership with large urban school districts and charter schools. The program attracts high caliber individuals from both academic and corporate sectors to lead historically under-served and under-performing schools. It uses its program as a “laboratory” to create evidence, tools, and policy recommendations to help partner states, school systems, and schools improve student achievement. To date, more than 560 principals have been placed in schools in 12 urban centers around the country, which collectively serve over 200,000 students.... Read more about New Leaders for New Schools

2010 Apr 19

China’s Health Reforms: Global Trends and Chinese Characteristics

4:30pm to 6:00pm

Location: 

Littauer Tower, Fainsod Room (3rd floor)

Yuanli Liu, Senior Lecturer on International Health, HSPH

About Yuanli Liu
Dr. Yuanli Liu is senior lecturer on international health at Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) and founding director of the HSPH China Initiative. The China Initiative aims at helping advance health and social development in China by carrying out series of applied research studies, regular policy dialogues and senior health executive education programs. More than 300 health policy makers and hospital CEOs from China have graduated from the Initiative’s Senior Executive Education Program. Professor Liu has been teaching and conducting research in the areas of health financing and health system analysis since 1994 at Harvard. He was profiled in 2003 as one of six “Future Leaders in Public Health”. He is also an adjunct professor of health policy and management at Tsinghua University and the founding director of Health and Development Institute at Tsinghua School of Public Policy and Management in Beijing. He serves as a policy advisor to the Chinese Ministry of Health as well as several provincial governments such as Shanghai and Hainan Province. Professor Liu has conducted extensive studies on health policy and health system reforms in developing countries, particularly in China. Dr. Liu served on the United Nations Millennium Development Taskforce on HIV/AIDS, Malaria, TB, and Access to Basic Medicines. He consulted for many international agencies including the World Bank, Asian Development Bank, UNDP, UNICEF, WHO as well as global corporations.... Read more about China’s Health Reforms: Global Trends and Chinese Characteristics

2010 Apr 19

China’s Leaders in Development (2010)

(All day)

Location: 

Harvard Kennedy School and Tsinghua University, China

Established in 2001, China’s Leaders in Development program is widely recognized by the Chinese government as one of the best overseas training programs for government officials. Taught both at Tsinghua University, China, and Harvard Kennedy School, this eight-week training program is specifically designed to help prepare senior local and central Chinese government officials to more effectively address the ongoing challenges of China’s national reforms.... Read more about China’s Leaders in Development (2010)

2010 Apr 15

Increasing Civic Participation Through Democratization of Data

5:00pm to 6:30pm

Location: 

124 Mount Auburn Street, Suite 200-North, Cambridge, MA

Adrian FentyJulia Bezgacheva and David Strigel
Washington, D.C.’s Office of the Chief Technology Officer

About the Seminar
Designed to increase civic participation, government accountability, and transparency in government practices, the city of Washington, D.C. created an initiative making virtually all current district government operational data available to the public in its raw form rather than in static, edited reports.... Read more about Increasing Civic Participation Through Democratization of Data

2010 Apr 14

Citizen Compliance and State Legitimacy in Rural China

4:10pm to 5:30pm

Location: 

124 Mt. Auburn Street, Suite 200-North, Cambridge, MA

Chinese lanternsLily Tsai, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

About the Seminar
In consolidated democracies, democratic decision-making processes and positive citizen evaluations of procedural justice are robustly correlated with higher levels of citizen compliance with state authority. Citizens who participate in the selection of government officials and who believe that government officials solicit and incorporate citizen input in their decision making are more likely to abide by those decisions.... Read more about Citizen Compliance and State Legitimacy in Rural China

2010 Apr 13

Transforming Affordable Housing Through Innovation

4:00pm to 5:30pm

Location: 

124 Mt. Auburn, Suite 200-North, Cambridge, MA

New York City's Acquisition FundRafael E. Cestero, Department of Housing Preservation & Development
John B. Rhea, New York City Housing Authority

About the Seminar
The nation’s economic crisis has put pressure on cities to increase the amount of affordable housing available to low- and moderate-income residents. Often already faced with housing shortages, cities must now address new challenges doing more with less. As leaders are being tasked to be more creative and innovative than ever, they are evaluating the past, looking at new programmatic ideas, and most importantly, establishing new cross-sector and cross-agency partnerships to expand the capacity and potential for affordable housing solutions.... Read more about Transforming Affordable Housing Through Innovation

2010 Apr 12

Water Scarcity: How Technology Can Help Solve the Problem

12:00pm to 1:00pm

Location: 

124 Mt. Auburn Street, Suite 200-North, Room 226, Cambridge, MA

Mapping evapotranspiration imageryRichard Allen, University of Idaho
William J. Kramber, Idaho Department of Water Resources

About the Seminar
Because over 90 percent of Idaho’s water is used for irrigating agriculture and rainfall amounts remain low, regional water supply disputes continue to grow. In collaboration with the University of Idaho, Idaho’s Department of Water Resources was the first government agency in the nation to develop and use satellite-based evapotranspiration imagery to enhance the understanding of agricultural water usage in the state. Originally intended to track water evaporated from soil and transpired from vegetation, the state of Idaho has enjoyed multiple uses for evapotranspiration data beyond what was originally conceived, including improving wildlife habitats and settling litigation, and it has also resulted in significant cost savings.

The program has become a nationwide model for solving water-resource conflicts and improving water management, and it won the Innovations in American Government Award in 2009.... Read more about Water Scarcity: How Technology Can Help Solve the Problem

2010 Apr 08

International Diffusion of Microfinance

5:00pm

Location: 

124 Mt. Auburn, Suite 200-North, Room 226, Cambridge, MA

Lightbulb dollar signProfessor Guy Stuart, Harvard Kennedy School

About the Seminar
In the past 30 years microfinance has evolved from small experiments in lending to the poor in Latin America and Bangladesh to a global financial services industry with access to global capital markets. In this seminar, Guy Stuart will argue that the diffusion of microfinance across the globe is the tale of two dynamics: one in which credit-led microfinance easily diffused throughout the developing world “beneath the radar” of regulators, and another in which savings-based microfinance has struggled in many countries to take hold because of the lack of an appropriate enabling environment, most prominently government regulations.... Read more about International Diffusion of Microfinance

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