A common perception of universities is of cloistered academics sitting at a careful distance from the world, producing research that circulates among scholars, training graduates who go on to impressive careers, and leaving the actual work of governance to others. The reality of Harvard Kennedy School is almost the opposite.

Work done here helped shape the Paris Agreement on climate change. Our faculty coined “the China Shock” with research that transformed how the world thinks about trade, globalization, and its consequences. In Jakarta, our researchers worked directly with city officials to improve the bus network for millions of riders. Our Government Performance Lab has worked with cities, counties, and states across America on more than 250 projects, including supporting the effort to tackle homelessness in Detroit. The Bloomberg Harvard City Leadership Initiative has equipped 615 mayors from 594 cities with the skills and frameworks to lead their cities more effectively. Our Transition Term program has placed students with 104 mayors, county executives, and governors across the country. For decades, in domain after domain and country after country, this school has partnered directly with the people on the front lines of governance. 

The practitioners we work with are dealing with problems that scholarship hasn’t solved. Being present where governance is actually happening exposes what the research gets wrong, what it misses, and what questions it hasn’t thought to ask. That feedback loop is what makes the research meaningful and the teaching grounded in the conditions leaders actually face. It is also, for a school with our purpose, what excellence actually means.

For decades… this has been a school that partners directly with the people on the front lines of governance.

We intend to expand this approach, showing up in new places where leaders in government and non-profits are tackling tough public problems and looking for partners. In the United States, that means the state and local level, where most of the authority and resources of governance sit and where the laboratories of democratic innovation have long been. In working directly with the leaders of all 50 American states, we will build on the far-reaching work we are already doing to equip mayors and city leaders around the world with the research, tools, and training they need to better meet people’s needs.

Globally, it means working with governments on their domestic policy challenges, while also addressing the disruptions to the international order that nobody has yet figured out how to navigate. These include the rules of international trade and finance, global development, and international security in a world that existing institutions were not built for. 

Across both domestic and global challenges, we aim to create the research and development infrastructure that the public sector cannot build alone. We will do this by building on the Kennedy School’s rich history of deploying expertise, funding pilots and experimentation, and sustaining partnerships over the years it takes to produce meaningful, lasting results. Working across sectors, we can help to drive the social innovation that’s needed to make progress on the problems people care most about.

This collaborative approach has a long and vital tradition in the United States. In the last century, land grant universities were created to bring agricultural and technical research directly to farmers and communities. Their premise was that a research institution’s civic obligation is to share its knowledge directly with the people who can use it, and that partnership resulted in prosperity for the farmers, for their communities, and for the nation. We aim to scale that model and bring it into the future. 
 

Initial priorities

  • Launch a 50-state platform to tackle the problems that Americans care most about, by supporting governors and their leadership teams with HKS research and insights, executive education, and access to talent — and helping them develop and implement innovative policy solutions. 
  • Expand our new R&D infrastructure — Harvard Impact Labs — that places scholars in public service roles and invests in teams that work directly with public and social sector leaders to design, test and scale solutions to real policy problems. 
  • Convene leading scholars and practitioners to develop new frameworks for international cooperation on peace and security, global trade and finance, and global development, building on HKS’s decades-long tradition of sustained, high-level policy engagement.

Delivering on our Future

The forces reshaping the world are accelerating at a pace unknown to recent generations. We are setting ambitious goals — grounded in four imperatives — to respond to a changing world.

a crowd stands in soft focus in front of a portrait of John F. Kennedy

Create a Path to Public Service for All

Substantially increase our resources for financial aid and make it possible for talented public servants everywhere to learn with HKS, whether on campus or where they live and work.

Leadership for a New Era

A vision for how HKS will lead in this moment — and make the world more safe, free, and sustainably prosperous for all.

Download the Full Vision