How I Learned that Small Changes Can Lead to Big Differences with HKS Professor Marshall Ganz By Kanoko Kamata, 2012 MPA, HKS Reprinted from Japan Business Press, December 25, 2012
At Harvard Kennedy School, I was privileged to take Professor Marshall Ganz’s popular course “Organize People, Power, and Change.” Professor Ganz left Harvard College before graduation and became a prominent civil rights activist in Mississippi. He devoted his life to activism to make social change by ordinary citizens possible.... Read more about Ash Center: If Not Now, When?
Over the course of two months of my Ash Fellowship at the Department of Labor, I was directly involved with three project streams and exposed to many others. My primary duties involved working on the Department’s Customer Service program, its Open Government initiative, and its efforts around data liberation. I also used the opportunity presented by working within the Office of the Deputy Secretary to learn more about the Department and its people.... Read more about Ash Center: HKS Student Reflects on Fellowship with the U.S. Department of Labor
In the developing world, more than half of all adults do not have a bank account. Of those that have an account, less than 10 percent make at least three withdrawals a month*. For the unbanked, it can be a challenge to increase savings, improve credit, and accumulate assets when managing money outside of the traditional financial sector. For financial institutions, it is a struggle to understand this untapped market of consumers and aid them in money management.... Read more about Ash Center: Bridging the Gap: How Can Banks Reach the Unbanked?
Comparing the Musrenbang Participatory Planning Process and the National Program for Community Empowerment
By Tara Grillos, Ph.D. Candidate, HKS
The goal of this trip was preliminary research toward my Ph.D. dissertation—to get a better sense of the participatory processes currently at work in Indonesia and explore the possibility of using Indonesia as a site for more extended fieldwork later this year. My research questions address participatory development from two angles:
First, how do differing motivations for the adoption of participation alter the de jure and de facto form that these institutions ultimately take on?
HKS Student Works with NYC’s Business Integrity Commission
By Iain Watt
As an Ash Fellow at the New York City Business Integrity Commission (BIC), I spent nine weeks learning how a city agency regulates private industry, the motivations for regulation, and the dynamic relationship between the social goals of government and the needs of the business community. BIC’s mission is to regulate industries in New York that are traditionally impacted by organized crime: commercial waste hauling, the city’s public wholesale markets, and shipboard gambling.... Read more about Ash Center: Balancing the Diverse Goals of Public Service
William Overholt Explains How He Protected Korea’s Most Popular Opposition Leader
By William H. Overholt
After the Kwangju incident in 1980, my employer, Bankers Trust, sent me to Korea to evaluate the situation. I reported back, as I had in the past that South Korea was strong and resilient and that Kim Dae Jung’s media reputation as a leftist radical was entirely unfounded. I said that his economic views were quite sensible and that his political position, while strongly opposed to the dictatorship, was actually far more conservative than that of Park Chung Hee. In fact, Kim Dae Jung represented the old landlord and Christian elite against the egalitarian challenge of Park’s radical reforms.... Read more about Ash Center: Keeping Kim Dae Jung Alive
Social Services, Social Media, and the Role of the Private Sector
By Kate Hoagland – Communiqué: Spring 2013, Volume 12
The “Challenge and Cooperation” conference and the Dean Ellwood delegation’s visit to China held earlier this year were especially timely as interest in China’s good governance continues to rise.
“I think there is a growing realization that China’s focus on economic development over the last few years has come at a high social cost,” said Julian Chang, executive director of the Rajawali Foundation Institute for Asia. “A lot of concerned publics are interested in innovations in public policy—how to provide better services for the poor, elderly, sick, and uneducated.”... Read more about Ash Center: Good Governance in China
Mark Moore’s 1997 book Creating Public Value, widely acknowledged as a groundbreaking work in the field of public management, provides public sector executives with a practical framework for improving the performance of government agencies by focusing their attention on the changing external environment of political aspirations and substantive, material challenges, and helping them to imagine, test, and pursue a value-creating strategy through a series of political and operational innovations.... Read more about Ash Center: Recognizing Public Value
Agents of Change Acts as Classroom Tool for Mapping Out Innovations Process
By Kate Hoagland – Communiqué: Spring 2013, Volume 12
Social innovators have made great strides towards transforming the way societies solve their social problems. In the Netherlands, Bère Miesen created a country-wide system of Alzheimer Cafés which has brought international attention to dementia as a major social problem. In New Orleans, Leslie Jacobs led the charge for a new accountability system to weed out chronic public school failure, which eventually allowed a record number of charter schools to take over.... Read more about Ash Center: How Do Social Innovators Achieve Results?
Poverty, Inequality, and Social Protection in Asia
Rapid economic growth has delivered rising living standards across Asia. Poverty rates have fallen dramatically in most countries in the region, and important improvements have also been recorded in other quality of life measures, notably educational attainment, life expectancy, and child and maternal health.... Read more about Ash Center: Asia Public Policy Forum – A Look Back
The Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation is being lauded by two presidents for its three decades of efforts to rebuild relations between the United States and Vietnam. In a joint statement issued at the White House on July 25th, President Obama and Vietnamese President Truong Tan Sang expressing their shared belief in the importance of bilateral relations while also recognizing the success of the Fulbright Economics Teaching Program (FETP)—the flagship initiative of the Ash Center’s Vietnam Program—and endorsing plans currently underway to create the Fulbright University Vietnam.... Read more about Ash Center: U.S. and Vietnam Presidents Praise Ash Center’s Efforts in Vietnam
Ash Democracy Fellow Shauna Shames Explores Why Women and Minorities Don’t Run for Political Office
By Kate Hoagland
The numbers are startling. Less than 20 percent of all US political leaders are women, and only 10 percent of all leaders are from a racial minority group. White men hold the vast majority of all nationally-elected political offices, despite representing only 33 percent of the US population compared to women at 51 percent and minorities at 33 percent. Why do women and non-white minorities remain largely outside of politics?... Read more about Ash Center: A Game Stacked Against Them
Ash Center Summer Fellow Alex Lawrence, MPP 2014, served in the Boston Mayor’s Office of New Urban Mechanics (MONUM) during the summer of 2013. In the slide presentation below, she reflects on her experience with Mayor Thomas Menino’s innovation team, where they design and pilot “high potential ideas with maximum public impact with minimal public cost.”... Read more about Embedded in a Government Innovation Team: HKS Student Alex Lawrence Reimagines City Services
Ash Center Summer Fellow Sylvia Leung, MPP 2014, served with the Healthy San Francisco (HSF) program—a finalist for the Innovations in American Government Award—during the summer of 2013. In the slide presentation below, she reflects on her firsthand experience helping to create a strategic plan for the city and county of San Francisco as they embark on implementing the 2010 Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.... Read more about HKS Student Sylvia Leung Reflects on Local Implementation of National Innovation
