Our Civic Leadership Fellows program syllabus provides a wealth of readings on a range of topics. You can find it under “Documents” or here.
Model Programs
We readily assume that because one program doesn’t work, all similar ones are likely to be equally unsuccessful. Yet the opposite may often be true. It’s a complex world. There are a hundred reasons why programs fail and a hundred configurations that can fail. But the point is to find the one in 100 that works and understand it.
There are a number of sites that are particularly useful:
- New York Times, Fixes (Tina Rosenberg and Dowser’s creator, David Bornstein)
- Stanford Social Innovation Review
- HuffPost Impact
- CityLab (Atlantic)
- Rand Corporation’s Promising Practices Network (inactive but archived)
- Harvard Family Research Project: Evaluation, family involvement in education, out-of-school time & more
National Issues
Global warming, terrorism, growing inequality and the loss of middle-class jobs, inter-generational poverty. What’s your issue? Is there a way to work together on the range of key issues or is our attention to limited? Part of the broader context for building leadership in communities is to build a foundation for tackling larger national issues, too.
Learn more:
- Climate Change
— NASA’s summary of the evidence that climate change is real
— Climate Panel Cites Near Certainty on Warming – New York Times, Aug. 20, 2013
— What You Can Do (Earth Policy Institute) - The Economy, Growing Inequality, Under- and Unemployment, & Automation
— The typical American family makes less than it did in 1989 – Wash.Post, 9/16/2013
— How Technology Wrecks the Middle Class – New York Times blog, 8/24/13, Autor & Dorn
— For retailers, low wages aren’t working out – Wash. Post, 08/20/2013 – Meyerson - Persistent Inter-generational poverty
— Status of “Dropout factories” and graduation rates
— US poverty on track to rise to highest since 1960s – Assoc. Press, July 2013
— Education Gap Grows Between Rich and Poor, Studies Say – NY Times, 2/10/2012 - A Divided Ungovernable Nation
— What Americans really want from their lawmakers – Pew Research Center, June 2013
— On the Hill, what’s happened to the art of the deal? – Wash. Post, July 2011