Leadership, Organizing and Action: Leading Change

OVERVIEW

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Watch alumni of Leadership, Organizing, and Action tell the story of how they got involved in organizing, what brought them to the course, and their takeaways after completing the program. Visit Faculty Chair Marshall Ganz's "Leading Change Network" YouTube channel to view additional videos featuring alumni of the online program.

Leadership, Organizing and Action: Leading Change is an online opportunity to learn how to organize communities to mobilize their resources to create the power they need to make change. Effective organizing requires learning to identify, recruit, and develop leadership, build community around that leadership, and build power from the resources of that community.

This course offers a unique opportunity to learn on line by interacting with leaders of civic associations, social movements, advocacy groups and nonprofits around the world and Professor Marshall Ganz of Harvard Kennedy School. Professor Ganz and his associates have coached people to use community organizing and leadership practices in social movements, electoral campaigns, community organizing, classroom instruction, workshops, lectures, writing – and now Executive Education Online.

As reflective practitioners, participants in this program will learn from critical analysis of their leadership of an organizing project for which they are responsible. An organizing project requires (a) mobilizing a constituency to (b) collaborate with each other, to (c) achieve a real change. Students learn why this approach is most effective in addressing problems of power: enabling people to mobilize the power/resources they need to solve their problems by working together or by challenging others who hold power over them. A successful organizing project solves a community problem, creates new community capacity, and develops new community leadership. Please find below an example from our class last year.

LOA 2012 Sample Case Study

VIDEO: Watch a session of Leadership, Organizing, and Action, and hear from participants in this past year's program discuss their organizing projects - a key aspect of the online program's curriculum.

Read about a past participant's experience from beginning to end of Leadership, Organizing and Action.

"This course was the best learning experience I have had since I graduated from college in 1988. It taught me more about increasing my effectiveness than any job I have had. I truly cherished the experience."

-Karen Olson, Moscow, Russia - LOA 2012 Participant

"The course and staff really was different from all the other courses I did so far, inspiring my heart, hands and head for this campaign and campaigns I will do in the future and I'm sorry for all the projects I did without the learning of this course."

-Iris Koopmans, Amsterdam, Netherlands – LOA 2012 Participant

Read and listen to an NPR report on the project of a 2011 LOA alumnus.