Introduction to Python and APIs

The purpose of this 5-session workshop is to equip students with the basic foundations necessary to leverage the Python programming language and Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) in a public policy setting. As such, this course will cover variables, dictionaries, lists, loops, functions, and other concepts required to interact with a RESTful API.

Building Effective Teams - Advanced Strategies (EMPA)

This four-day course aims to develop your ability to build, lead, and participate in high-performing teams. We will draw from research in psychology, management, strategy, behavioral economics, and sociology to discuss best practices for designing, launching, participating, and coaching in-person and online teams.

Building Effective Teams - Advanced Strategies

This four-day course aims to develop your ability to build, lead, and participate in high-performing teams. We will draw from research in psychology, management, strategy, behavioral economics, and sociology to discuss best practices for designing, launching, participating, and coaching in-person and online teams.

Public Management II

Open only to students in the MSPP program. This course provides MS in Public Policy students with an overview of contemporary public management. We review important management and leadership concepts that are required to approach public management. The course will focus on specific problems that leaders may face and tools that you can use. A major objective of the course is to develop skills in critical analysis necessary for practice.

Public Management I

Open only to students in the MSPP program. This course provides MS in Public Policy students with an overview of contemporary public management. We review important intellectual and constitutional foundations of the administrative state and construct a theoretical approach to the study and practice of public management. A major objective of the course is to develop skills in critical analysis necessary for practice.

Project Management Workshop

This workshop provides participants with the fundamental steps of how to plan and implement transformation initiatives using the PMP methodology and best practices. Project Management forms the basis for effectively delivering improvements to business processes, deploying new technologies, transformation using data and metrics and communicating change management.

Urban Plan Practicum

This experiential course is designed to examine the nexus between real estate development and urban planning. Building on a case study designed by the Urban Land Institute (ULI), students are placed on teams of 4-5 students and assume the following roles on a private development team: finance director, marketing director, city liaison, neighborhood liaison, and site planner. Student development teams respond to an RFP to redevelop a 5 ½ block site from a hypothetical city with unique combinations of residential, office, commercial, and community facility uses.

Environmental Finance and Social Impact

This course will provide students a thorough understanding of how key environmental challenges can be addressed through innovative financing and investment strategies.  Topics will include an overview of the main financial instruments and the key thematic areas of the growing field of environmental finance.  Students will be introduced to instruments, structures and investment approaches to achieving positive environmental outcomes and impact including, but not limited to private market investments, renewables, climate and green bonds, water investments, and conservation finance.

Lean Approaches to Social Innovation

Affordable housing that's 40% less expensive to build. Three times as many soup kitchen clients served each hour. Hospital ER wait time cut by 90%. This is the type of impact social innovators aspire to achieve by applying the method called "Lean."

Comparative Analysis of Health Systems

What would the best healthcare system look like? How would you know it is the best? What systems in wealthy nations today come close to matching this ideal? We begin this class with short documentary films that cover some of issues raised by these questions. We read and discuss articles about conventional health system models around the world and alternative perspectives for studying them and evaluating their performance. We discuss how so much of the literature draws on selective evidence to evaluate health care systems in the U.S. and abroad.

Participatory Policymaking

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.

Institutions, Governance, and International Development

This course introduces the theory and practice of institutional reform in developing and transitional countries. It reviews the evolution of international development paradigms, examining how the role, structure, and management of institutions, the public sector, and non-governmental organizations have changed in response to shifting economic and political trends, with a particular emphasis on accountability. The focus is on major institutional and managerial reforms intended to promote good governance as less developed economies liberalize and their societies democratize.