FOR 50 YEARS, The Bipartisan Program for Newly Elected Members of Congress has brought together new leaders to learn from HKS faculty members as well as current and former members of Congress. The Institute of Politics at HKS has held these special sessions every two years since 1972. Some of these attendees are HKS alumni as well—more than 50 members of Congress on both sides of the aisle have graduated from the School.
Among the attendees of the Bipartisan Program for Newly Elected Members of Congress this December was Michael Baumgartner MPA/ID 2002, a Republican representing Washington state’s 5th District. He said, in describing the experience to the Harvard Gazette, “I was really pleased to hear the dean recommit to viewpoint diversity and intellectual diversity and to making sure that conservative Republicans feel like they have a place at the Kennedy School, too.”
Janelle Bynum HKSEE 2019, a Democrat representing Oregon’s 5th District, who had previously taken an HKS executive education program, attended the convening and told the Gazette that a panel on AI “spun up a lot of different thoughts like moral authority and who gets to participate in that research or in that ecosystem; the financial impact of what’s being developed in AI.” The program reconvened the new members in Washington, D.C., in July—including Baumgartner and Bynum—and has another gathering planned for fall.
HKS has also long trained leaders at the state and local levels. The Program for New Mayors: First 100 Days is run by the Bloomberg Center for Cities at Harvard University in collaboration with the Institute of Politics at Harvard Kennedy School and the U.S. Conference of Mayors. It builds on programming that started in 1975 at the IOP. In its new configuration, the third cohort of the Program for New Mayors: First 100 Days took place in December 2024, hosting 24 newly elected U.S. mayors. Representing 11 states and more than 5 million residents, the mayors were trained by Harvard faculty, learning tools to manage their transition periods and build successful teams to serve their cities. Since 2022, 75 newly elected mayors from a wide range of U.S. cities—from Eugene to Des Moines, Akron to San Francisco, Raleigh to Scottsdale, Chicago to Nashville, Burlington to Racine, Missoula to Richmond—have participated in the program.
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Banner image: Participants and HKS faculty at the 2024 Bipartisan Program for Newly Elected Members of Congress program. Photos by Martha Stewart