Courses

The goal of this course to is help Executive MPA students learn financial tools to apply to decision-making within mission-driven and governmental organizations.

Throughout this four-session workshop, students will use their experiences and education as the context for a series of career-related analyses based on the following four lenses: Issue, System, Organization, and Role. All discussions will be brought back to Composing Your Career (CYC), a framework for maximizing one’s time at Wagner based on the SEER strategy: Smart, Experienced, Engaged, and Reflective. All of this will lead to an action plan to maximize one’s time at Wagner in the pursuit of a successful public service career.

 

Only open to students in the Executive MPA Program.

In today’s world, being an impactful and effective leader requires us to move beyond a focus on goals and metrics, and towards creating environments where everyone feels valued, seen and recognized, and where diverse talents and skills come together to deliver exceptional outcomes. There is a strong alignment between the skills needed to be an adaptive leader, able to lead teams and organizations effectively through difficult and changing times, and those that are associated with an inclusive leadership mindset.

In today’s world, being an impactful and effective leader requires us to move beyond a focus on goals and metrics, and towards creating environments where everyone feels valued, seen and recognized, and where diverse talents and skills come together to deliver exceptional outcomes. There is a strong alignment between the skills needed to be an adaptive leader, able to lead teams and organizations effectively through difficult and changing times, and those that are associated with an inclusive leadership mindset.

Developing and executing an organization’s marketing strategy can be a complicated process, but is integral to raising money, increasing visibility, recruiting brand ambassadors/influencers/advocates/supporters – and building momentum to achieve its mission. It is also affected by issues of the day and time, whether the COVID virus, racial and social injustice, the political climate and world events. 

This course is appropriate for students interested in the role that leadership plays in advancing social innovation and social change in the context of democratic governance.

Corporate philanthropy and engagement is an evolving space which is critical to the existence and operation of nonprofit organizations. The role of the private sector in helping nonprofits achieve their mission, serve their clients and realize their expected goals and outcomes is unique and very different from the role that government funders and individual major donors play.

For better or worse, both affordable housing and renewable energy projects in the US are mostly built and owned by private developers and corporations. These private developers in turn are reliant on private capital provided by investors, corporations and banks. Almost all these investors rely heavily on federal tax credits.  90% of affordable housing in the US receives a subsidy through the low-income housing tax credit (“LIHTC”). Virtually all large-scale wind and solar projects receive tax credit subsides as well (“ITC” or “PTC”).

Students will have an opportunity to learn about fundraising, as well as philanthropy more broadly. This introductory course will examine the range of ways to raise funds from government, individuals, foundations and corporations. The importance of stewardship, program evaluation, and the role of the board and staff in developing effective fundraising strategies will be addressed.

This half-semester course will focus on the analysis of data. We will discuss cleaning raw data – including trimming, variable transformations, and dealing with missing data – before turning to complex survey data. We will discuss how regression analysis differs when using complex survey data. Students will take real data and produce a cleaned version, as well as perform simple analyses using multiple regression. One key skill you will learn in this class is Stata, a commonly used statistics package.

The goal of this course is to establish a first-principles understanding of the qualitative and quantitative techniques, tools, and processes used to wield data for effective decision-making. Its approach focuses on pragmatic, interactive learning using logical methods, basic tools, and publicly available data to practice extracting insights and building recommendations. It is designed for students with little prior statistical or mathematical training and no prior pre-exposure to statistical software.

Organizational storytelling both effectively communicates an organization’s mission and builds empathy for its cause. A story is more than an exposition, climax, and resolution. Effective storytelling weaves a narrative that tells a systemic story about the social justice movement. The course will offer an overview on how to strategically use values-based communications, helping students understand how to move persuadable audiences to garner support for social justice issues.

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.

Understanding geographic relationships between people, land use, and resources is fundamental to planning. Urban planners routinely use spatial analysis to inform decision-making. This course will introduce students to Geographic Information Systems (GIS), a tool to analyze and visualize spatial data. The course will emphasize the core functions of GIS: map making, data management, and spatial analysis. Students will learn cartographic best practices, how to find and create spatial data, spatial analysis methodology, and how to approach problem solving from a geographic perspective.

Over the last few decades, disparities in income, wealth, and mobility have widened in the United States, but the U.S. fares worse in wealth inequality than income inequality. Wealth, in particular, is crucial to many functions across the life course and between generations, including but not limited to: spending on healthcare and education, acquiring and retaining investments for profit, weathering unexpected expenses or shocks, ascribing social status, and transferring assets to children and/or other family members.

This is an introductory course in urban transportation planning. The course is divided into 3 parts. Part One is a foundational review of theories and research about the complex relationships among transportation, land use and urban form.  Part Two examines certain key factors that today’s transportation planners deal with as transportation and land use interact in the context of planning and projects. Part Three involves a review of some of the most notable transportation and land use plans, projects and problems facing the New York City metropolitan region.

Sustainability requires the efficient use of resources.  The least carbon- and energy-intensive pattern of settlement today is in compact, walkable cities whose integrated networks of infrastructure that allows us to move, eat, drink, play, and survive extreme weather.  As our population shifts to urban and coastal areas, we will need to build more infrastructure systems to accommodate growth and to increase sustainability.  Yet we are building too little, too slow to maintain our existing infrastructure, let alone to facilitate next generation systems that will accelerate ou

This course examines key ideas in the history and theory of planning. We start with some challenges of 21st-century urbanism to activate our conversations about the history and theory of planning. Does the historical and theoretical apparatus of planning equip us to deal with 21st-century urban formations and problems? Are the forms of contemporary urbanism categorically different from those of the past? Are the techniques and methods of planning bound to the American context, or are they also suitable for other social and political contexts?

In this course, we will study “shari’ah,” the primary legal and ethical tradition of Islam. First, we will briefly cover the historical development of shari’ah. Then we will turn to the contemporary era, and examine the articulation of shari’ah in regard to a variety of concrete issues. It is hoped that by the end of the course, the student will have a greater appreciation for the complexity of shari’ah, and its continued relevance in today's legal and ethical debates both nationally and internationally.

This course will train students to obtain, clean, manipulate, analyze, map, and visualize spatial and non-spatial data to support their work throughout their urban planning careers. The course emphasizes the critical role of design and communication in effective data storytelling. Students will practice the open-source tools R and QGIS in depth. The course will help students build a strong foundation in working with data that will allow them to learn and master additional programs, languages, and tools toward future goals.

In the context of an increasingly polarized American society, this course seeks to train students to mobilize diverse faith communities together for the greater good. Unleashing the power of their own story, students will articulate their values and explore the ways it can be shared. The course will draw on case studies from historical and contemporary faith leaders who have achieved success in creating sustainable change, as well as interrogating relevant current affairs as they arise.

In study after study, people lying on their deathbeds overwhelmingly say they regret five things at their end of their life: 1. Not living a life of authenticity 2. Working too hard at the expense of their relationships 3. Not having the courage to express their feelings 4. Not staying in touch with friends. 5. Not letting themselves be happier. For leaders, it's not any different.

In a complex and difficult world, some idealism is needed to energize meaningful change. This course is for aspiring policy-makers who want to combine a necessary sense of optimism with real-world understanding of how to get things done. Each session will focus on specific examples of how practical solutions were found to seemingly intractable problems.