Rachel Swaner is the senior director of research at Think of Us, where she conducts research that centers the lived experience of people impacted by foster care to help transform the child welfare system. She is the former senior director of research and policy at the Center for Justice Innovation, where she led a department doing local, national, and international research and evaluation projects related to decarceration, violence prevention, community well-being, and youth development. She was previously a researcher at the Harlem Children’s Zone, where she evaluated social, educational, and health programs for children and youth. She is on the advisory board for the Participatory Budgeting Project. Rachel received her PhD in Sociology from the CUNY Graduate Center, and her Bachelor of Science and Master of Public Administration from New York University, and has been teaching at Wagner since 2007.
Research is an important part of the policy process: it can inform the development of programs and policies so they are responsive to community needs, it can help us determine what the impacts of these programs and policies are, and it can help us better understand populations or social phenomena. This half-semester course serves as an introduction to how to ethically collect data for research projects, with an in-depth look at focus groups and surveys as data collection tools. We will also learn about issues related to measurement and sampling. Students will create their own focus group protocol and short survey instrument designed to answer a research question of interest to them.
Though the policymaking process is complex, with a host of actors and competing interests, public policy is traditionally shaped by elected officials, administrative agencies, and organized interest groups. There are many avenues for policies to be informed by the lived experience of members of low-income and marginalized communities; however, their participation is often hidden and/or undervalued. Public servants and policymakers can provide proactive opportunities for communities to assert their own priorities and rights through mechanisms like public planning processes or participatory budgeting. Similarly, marginalized communities can self-organize and even form common cause with broader interests to create more just public policies. In this course, we will explore strategies for initiating participatory policymaking from above (e.g., government/ policymakers initiating participatory approaches to decision-making) and below (e.g., grassroots communities mobilizing to influence policy), and the democratic tradition of challenging traditional power structures. We will also examine the essential concepts of power—what it is, how it is used, how groups and communities can expand and strengthen their political power, and how public officials can share theirs.
This course serves as an introduction to those evaluation tools most commonly used to assess the performance of programs, services, and policies in both the public and private sectors. Topics include needs assessment; explication and assessment of program theory; implementation and process assessment; research design, measurement, and sampling for outcome and impact evaluation; and the ethics of conducting program evaluation. The focus is on critical analysis and understanding of both the underlying programs and their evaluations.
Research is an important part of the policy process: it can inform the development of programs and policies so they are responsive to community needs, it can help us determine what the impacts of these programs and policies are, and it can help us better understand populations or social phenomena. This half-semester course serves as an introduction to how to ethically collect data for research projects, with an in-depth look at focus groups and surveys as data collection tools. We will also learn about issues related to measurement and sampling. Students will create their own focus group protocol and short survey instrument designed to answer a research question of interest to them.
Though the policymaking process is complex, with a host of actors and competing interests, public policy is traditionally shaped by elected officials, administrative agencies, and organized interest groups. There are many avenues for policies to be informed by the lived experience of members of low-income and marginalized communities; however, their participation is often hidden and/or undervalued. Public servants and policymakers can provide proactive opportunities for communities to assert their own priorities and rights through mechanisms like public planning processes or participatory budgeting. Similarly, marginalized communities can self-organize and even form common cause with broader interests to create more just public policies. In this course, we will explore strategies for initiating participatory policymaking from above (e.g., government/ policymakers initiating participatory approaches to decision-making) and below (e.g., grassroots communities mobilizing to influence policy), and the democratic tradition of challenging traditional power structures. We will also examine the essential concepts of power—what it is, how it is used, how groups and communities can expand and strengthen their political power, and how public officials can share theirs.
Though the policymaking process is complex, with a host of actors and competing interests, public policy is traditionally shaped by elected officials, administrative agencies, and organized interest groups. There are many avenues for policies to be informed by the lived experience of members of low-income and marginalized communities; however, their participation is often hidden and/or undervalued. Public servants and policymakers can provide proactive opportunities for communities to assert their own priorities and rights through mechanisms like public planning processes or participatory budgeting. Similarly, marginalized communities can self-organize and even form common cause with broader interests to create more just public policies. In this course, we will explore strategies for initiating participatory policymaking from above (e.g., government/ policymakers initiating participatory approaches to decision-making) and below (e.g., grassroots communities mobilizing to influence policy), and the democratic tradition of challenging traditional power structures. We will also examine the essential concepts of power—what it is, how it is used, how groups and communities can expand and strengthen their political power, and how public officials can share theirs.