Engaging Our Broader Community

From the beginning, this school has met every moment of upheaval with a decision to lean in and develop new knowledge, train new leaders, and engage directly with the hardest problems of each era. The four imperatives described here are our commitment to do the same for this one. And we will only be able to deliver on them because of the people who define this school.

Harvard Kennedy School is more than a campus. We are a community of 80,000 strong. We are 100+ faculty dedicated to developing ideas that advance society and 600+ staff who elevate and sustain the work of this institution. We are approximately 30,000 degree program graduates and 50,000 executive education alumni who have carried the HKS experience into every level of government, every sector, and every corner of public life across the globe—from community leaders to elected officials to corporate executives. We arrive at Harvard Kennedy School in different ways, at different moments in our lives, from different perspectives, and we go back out into the world with a shared conviction that governance matters, that public institutions can work better, that every sector has a role to play, and that the gap between the societies we have and the societies we deserve is worth spending a career trying to close.

The full Kennedy School community is an extraordinary platform. It is also one that we must more deeply and thoroughly engage. The school has trained remarkable people and sent them into the world, but can do more to build the infrastructure to sustain a real, lasting relationship with them. There is room to support alumni as their careers evolve, learn from what they are doing, and invite their experience and judgment back into the classroom and our research agendas. Our ambition is a lifetime of engagement with everyone who has been part of this community, a genuine partnership that begins when someone walks through our doors and deepens throughout their career. The exchange between this school and the world we are trying to improve is the virtuous cycle at the heart of what we do, and it is powered by our community.

Our mission has reach beyond our alumni. It includes everyone who believes that the work of improving public institutions and bringing a commitment to the public good into every sector is urgent and necessary, and that this work is ultimately how we will build the societies worthy of the next generation. The ambitions laid out in this document cannot be fulfilled by the people on our campus alone. They require all of us in the Kennedy School community and people everywhere who share our commitments to contribute to what comes next.

With that powerful community—grounded in our rich history, and committed to seizing the extraordinary possibilities of the future—there is nothing we cannot achieve.

This is the path to our second century. The next ten years will define it. The work is already underway.

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Image credits for HKS 2036: Raychel Casey, Barry Donahue, Encyclopaedia Britannica/UIG/Getty Images, Lydia Rosenberg, Martha Stewart, and Kayana Szymczak