Harvard University, John F. Kennedy School of Government

Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government offers teaching, training, and research on public policy, politics, and international affairs. With this project, staff from the Kennedy School is planning and delivering an intensive course on behavioral insights to Nigerian policymakers, civil society representatives, and academics, especially those involved in accountability and anti-corruption efforts in the country. The expected outcome is that participants are able to integrate elements of behavior change into their activities in order to increase effectiveness and impact. 

The Initiative for Responsible Investment (IRI), housed within the Hauser Institute for Civil Society at the Center for Public Leadership at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, is an applied research center focused on issues underlying the ability of financial markets to promote wealth creation, while creating a stronger society and a healthier environment. Part of an effort to expand and accelerate access to capital for social sector organizations, this grant provides support for two lines of work: (1) building robust community investment systems to help stakeholder groups in cities such as government, investors and social sector organizations understand how to effectively deploy public and private capital for community economic development; and (2) conducting research on the experiences of impact investing actors across the globe to share lessons and priorities. 

The mission of the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University (Kennedy School) is to train enlightened public leaders and to generate the ideas that provide answers to the country’s most challenging public problems. Under the direction of Harvard University Professor Bruce Western, this award allows the Kennedy School to lead a one-year planning process to develop a new Harvard Executive Session on Criminal Justice for the 21^st Century. The award enables the Kennedy School to identify and convene a small group of leading criminal justice scholars and policymakers to craft an agenda for the new Executive Session that aims to: (1) highlight and demonstrate the value of leading efforts to reduce incarceration through local level, front-end criminal justice reform; and (2) foster new thinking about the role of justice agencies in the lives of poor people and communities of color which disproportionately experience the adverse effects of the criminal justice system.

This grant to Harvard’s Hauser Institute for Civil Society supports its Initiative for Responsible Investment (IRI): an applied research center focused on issues underlying financial markets’ ability to promote wealth creation while building a stronger society and a healthier environment. As part of its work to build the impact-investing ecosystem, IRI will help stakeholder groups in cities such as government, social investors and social and nonprofit organizations understand how to deploy public and private capital for community economic development more effectively, and undertake research on domestic and global efforts to design and implement effective impact-investing policy.

Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government will use this grant to launch the Mayoral Performance Analytics Initiative, an effort to document and share promising new techniques and technologies for using large municipal data sets to identify trends and shape more effective public policies. Project staff will create a platform to connect public sector leaders who are developing new ways to use data to build better programs and policies, conduct fieldwork in model sites with advanced data analytics projects, and produce and disseminate a series of publications to help document and spread promising ideas and tools nationwide.