Live Online

Session Date

October 13, 2026 - November 12, 2026

Application Deadline

September 15, 2026

Program Fee

$2495

Faculty Chair

Matthew Andrews

John Donahue

Program Director

Tatyana Schlehuber

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Group Enrollment: Tuition discounts are available for groups of five or more. Learn more here.

Executive Certificate: This program is a core program in the Public Leadership concentration. This program can also be used as a third program for several concentrations in the Executive Certificate series.

Program Overview

The public and private sectors often do their best work together. To drive change for your organizations or communities, your best bet can be cross-sectoral collaboration. Harvesting collaboration’s benefits, though, means navigating risks, hazards, and complexity. Collaborating for Public Value, an online executive education program chaired by Harvard Kennedy School faculty Jack Donahue and Matt Andrews, equips you for the full lifecycle of collaboration—from deciding when working together beats acting alone, to crafting effective structures, to overcoming the complications of government–business and government–civil society relationships.

Professors Jack Donahue and Matt Andrews are particularly well positioned to guide practitioners through these cross-sector relationships, and you’ll learn from their expertise over the course of five transformative weeks. You will gain practical tools for alignment, accountability, adaptive management, and building durable collaborative capacity across diverse institutional environments. Through the power of productive collaboration, cross-sector relationships can leverage each sector’s strengths to maximize public value.

illustration of the schedule - It's 5 weeks with 3 hours or independent work, 1 live faculty session, and overall 4-6 hours per week. — Online schedule

Format

The program is five weeks long. Each week there will be independent asynchronous work (approximately 3 hours per week) and one live session on Thursdays at 10:00 am ET

Learning Objectives

This program will empower you with the skills needed to collaborate across sectors, including how to:

Make strategic collaborative decisions. Recognize the two main forms of collaboration--contracting and partnership--and determine when each model is the best fit with the mission and the context.
Build collaborative capacity. Recognize what your organization needs to be good at to launch and sustain value-creating relationships with contractors and partners.
Design and structure effective collaborations. Create the roles, rules, and structures that let you maximize the payoffs of the collaborative approach and that ensure sustainable, long-term success.
Manage risks and ensure accountability. Identify key risks and implement processes to maintain performance, transparency, and trust.
Lead and adapt collaborative initiatives. Apply adaptive management practices to navigate complexity, respond to change, and improve outcomes.

Applicant Information

Ideal participants include:

Government managers
Policy designers
Nonprofit leaders
Foundation program officers
Social entrepreneurs
Private-sector partners engaged in public-purpose work

Leaders responsible for commissioning, partnering, contracting, co-producing, or stewarding collaborative initiatives will benefit, especially those confronting coordination challenges, accountability pressures, or the need to integrate multiple actors into complex delivery systems.