Courses Typically Offered in the Spring

Corporate Social Responsibility: Social Finance Partnerships and Models

Corporate social innovation is an evolving practice of organizations of varying size and purpose to adapt to business activities with mission-driven models that produce social and environmental outcomes. The course will rigorously explore the evolution and modalities of corporate social responsibility, with particular attention to cross-sector collaboration with government and civil society, often using innovative social finance mechanisms, impact measurement, to get there.

Advanced GIS: Interactive Web Mapping and Spatial Data Visualization

Students will learn the fundamentals of web development with HTML, CSS, and Javascript, and github.   Using Free and Open Source Spatial Data tools, students will learn to bring their maps to life on the web as interactive experiences.  Use tools like QGIS, CartoDB and PostGIS.  Final project will be an interactive web map around an Urban topic of your choosing.

Strategic Philanthropy (EMPA)

This course will explore the fault lines within the field of philanthropy and prepare students to effectively leverage resources for their organizations. The course will examine different approaches to grantmaking including: social entrepreneurship, effective altruism, venture philanthropy, social justice grantmaking, and strategic philanthropy.  Students will learn the differences across these conceptual frameworks and understand how they influence the ways in which foundations establish goals, develop strategies, evaluate grantees, and determine grant awards.

Impact Investing

This course provides an introduction to the impact investing landscape and its evolution, players, and tools. After situating impact investing vis à vis both other forms of investing and other social change tools, we explore what makes an investment impactful - and how one would go about determining that and measuring it. Through a combination of readings, case studies, class discussion, and projects, students will gain deep insight into the perspective of the impact investor and consider how it relates to other stakeholders and to social change writ large.

Multi-Sector Partnerships (EMPA)

Multi-sector partnerships represent a social innovation whereby actors from different sectors intentionally “address social issues and causes that actively engage the partners on an ongoing basis” (Selsky & Parker, 2010:22). They emerge from the recognition that solving today's complex public problems requires engaging multiple stakeholders. While promising, these innovations are not panacea: collaborative work is difficult because of structural and institutional barriers, as well as distinct assumptions, work styles, and disciplinary backgrounds of actors engaged.

Managing Financial and Social Returns of the Social Enterprise

This course will explore best and evolving practices in the financial management and impact measurement of social enterprises.  The class will be taught from the perspective of the social entrepreneur and social enterprise manager and introduce cases to assess financial challenges, fiscal performance and financing strategy of pioneering firms with a social mission.

Performance Measurement & Management

All public and nonprofit organizations must assemble and report information on their performance. The need for performance measures goes beyond legal and regulatory requirements. To provide services effectively and efficiently, managers need information to make decisions. This course focuses on what performance measures are needed, how they should be created and what forms of communication are most effective.

Communications and Branding for Nonprofits (EMPA)

An organization’s brand can help it raise money, create change, and recruit participants as it effectively communicates its mission. But a brand is more than just a logo or a memorized elevator pitch, it is the way both internal and external audiences perceive your organization—and shaping this perception is as essential to the success of nonprofit and public organizations as it is to for-profit organizations.

Corporate Philanthropy and Engagement

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.

The Economics of Public Policy

The Economics of Public Policy analyzes the impact of public policy on the allocation of resources and the distribution of income in the economy. In this course, you will learn how to use the tools of microeconomics and empirical analysis to answer these questions: When should the government intervene in the economy? How might the government intervene? And, what are the effects of those interventions on economic outcomes?