Leadership and Diversity Program

The Leadership and Diversity Program [1] focuses on making the content of policy education more genuinely reflective of the diversity of the world’s peoples, policy concerns, and varied modes of problem solving.  Its locus is the long history of the struggle to open up higher education in America to people from all socio-economic, ethnic and national backgrounds, and the parallel expansion of subject matter in the heuristic process to intentionally embrace this diversity.

The methodology of Leadership and Diversity is the Case Study, in particular crafting new and exciting examples that link the twin principles of leadership and diversity for use by faculty and students in public policy, social welfare, urban planning, business, and nonprofit programs.  The case studies expand the backgrounds and viewpoints of the protagonist in each particular story or ‘secular parable,’ in order to find more imaginative solutions to complex policy questions.  The cases also offer valuable practical templates with which to broaden the strategies used by leaders as they look creatively “over the horizon”  to deal with complex issues.  Additionally, the project provides a pedagogy of inclusion, through the medium of detailed case teaching notes for professors.

Case study topics range from formal politics—writing a new constitution for a unified Cyprus, for example—to leadership succession in community-based economic development nonprofits, to strategic decision-making, to crisis problem-solving, to dealing with the quasi-legal exclusion of groups from public benefits.

Importantly, Leadership and Diversity materials can also be used as a platform for executive training programs that expand problem solving skills, concepts, and approaches to tackle deep social and organizational divisions rooted in inequality.  

Click here [1] to view the Leadership and Diversity Program's website.