Courses

Cross-sector collaborations are a response to the increasing recognition that many of the pressing challenges of our time are complex and requires a systems approach. Such challenges must involve multiple stakeholders, guided by principles of inclusion and equity, and draw on a full range of resources to achieve results that cannot be achieved by working in silos, including stakeholders’ expertise, experience and insights, relationships and networks, and financial contributions.

This course is designed for upper-class undergraduates who have a social innovation project, entrepreneurial business, or CSR idea to develop or implement. Also welcome to the course are students who would like to learn and practice success skills and employment strategies, and are willing to participate in class teams with other students who have project ideas.

This course will explore the fault lines within the field of philanthropy and prepare students to effectively leverage resources for their organizations. The course will examine different approaches to grantmaking including: social entrepreneurship, effective altruism, venture philanthropy, social justice grantmaking, and strategic philanthropy.  Students will learn the differences across these conceptual frameworks and understand how they influence the ways in which foundations establish goals, develop strategies, evaluate grantees, and determine grant awards.

How does someone go about changing the world? What does social change theory suggest are the most effective tactics to change hearts and minds? What can we learn from the past about what it means to be an effective agent of change? How have social entrepreneurs created organizations that become engines of change? How has technology, social media and trends in mainstream media changed the rules of the game?  

We enter any subject of investigation filled with learned viewpoints, opinions, and select facts that we choose to employ. This helps to make the task of uncovering what we mean by Jewish and Jewish community fraught with unusual difficulty. Whatever our background, it will be hard to shake preconceived positions. In addition, the Jewish community seeks to nurture purely voluntary association at a time of little support in the popular culture for sustaining communal norms, existing institutions or unenforceable obligations.

This course introduces students to the main areas of corporate finance and how they relate to policy issues and discussions. The course covers topics in the three main areas of corporate finance: 1) capital structure (financing choices), 2) valuation (project and firm valuation) and 3) corporate governance (optimal governance structures). We will analyze how public policy, through taxes, public expenditures and regulation, affect these aspects of corporate finance.

Multiple regression is the core statistical technique used by policy and finance analysts in their work. In this course, you will learn how to use and interpret this critical statistical technique. Specifically you will learn how to evaluate whether regression coefficients are biased, whether standard errors (and thus t statistics) are valid, and whether regressions used in policy and finance studies support causal arguments.

Data plays an increasingly important role in powering today’s enterprises, governments and society as a whole. With the rapid pace of innovation, data science, advanced analytics and Artificial Intelligence (AI) are becoming increasingly central and critical to business today. Over time, social impact organizations will deem these tools as core to achieving their mission.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the number of U.S. workers involved in work stoppages in 2018 reached its highest point since the mid-1980s. The resurgence of the use of strikes and worker activists withholding labor is set against the backdrop of enormous societal challenges like wealth and income inequality, climate change, and a lack of affordable, quality health care.  

Management and Leadership is designed to empower you with the skills you will need to make meaningful change in the world—whether you care about bike lanes, criminal justice, prenatal care, community development, urban planning, social investment, or something else. Whatever your passion, you can have an impact by leading and managing. In this course, you will enhance the technical, interpersonal, conceptual, and political skills needed to run effective and efficient organizations embedded in diverse communities, policy arenas, sectors, and industries.

The past decade has seen the increasing availability of very large scale data sets, arising from the rapid growth of transformative technologies such as the Internet and cellular telephones, along with the development of new and powerful computational methods to analyze such datasets. Such methods, developed in the closely related fields of machine learning, data mining, and artificial intelligence, provide a powerful set of tools for intelligent problem-solving and data-driven policy analysis.

The past decade has seen the increasing availability of very large scale data sets, arising from the rapid growth of transformative technologies such as the Internet and cellular telephones, along with the development of new and powerful computational methods to analyze such datasets. Such methods, developed in the closely related fields of machine learning, data mining, and artificial intelligence, provide a powerful set of tools for intelligent problem-solving and data-driven policy analysis.

This 7-week course exposes the students to the application and use of data analytics in setting public policy. The course does so by teaching introductory technical programming skills that allow students to learn and apply Python code on pertinent public policy data, while emphasizing on applicability. The course is accompanied by readings for each class in order to contextualize why data analytics supplements but doesn’t replace the student / professional role in setting public policy.

R is a powerful open source language and environment for statistical computing and graphics. R provides a wide selection of statistical and graphical techniques. It is rapidly becoming the leading language in data science and statistics. R can easily tackle linear and nonlinear modelling, statistical tests, time series analysis, classification, clustering and more.

An understanding of government budgeting is critical to understanding the policy process and the workings of government. This course covers the theory and practice of government budgeting at both the national and subnational levels. It reviews how governments raise revenue, the process and procedures by which they allocate funds, and the various budgetary institutions that shape fiscal outcomes.

Advancements in awareness and understanding have led to greater equity and inclusion in society for people with disabilities and health conditions. Developments such as the establishment of Disability Studies as an interdisciplinary field in the 1980’s and the introduction of the Americans with Disabilities Act (“ADA”) in 1990 are key milestones in this journey. However, these achievements alone do not guarantee the extent of attitudinal and behavioral change needed within our communities and organizations to remove the barriers and prejudices that remain.

This course builds on the material from the core Financial Management class to further develop skills in managerial and financial accounting. The course covers the recording process (journal entries, T-accounts, adjusting entries, and closing entries), financial statement modeling, and financial statement analysis. In addition, students will learn more about for-profit accounting and corporate structure, as well as how financial management differs across the government, not-for-profit, and for-profit sectors.

This course examines reproductive rights law and policy in the United States and how advocacy can impact it.

The goal of this course is to train advanced students on the principles, practices, and technologies required for good database design, management, and security. An introduction to the concepts and issues relating to data warehousing, governance, administration, security, privacy and alternative database structures will be provided. The course concentrates on building a firm foundation in information organization, storage, management, and security.

In our increasingly data-reliant and data-saturated society, people who understand how to leverage data to generate insights have the power to change the world. Data visualization and storytelling is a crucial skill for policy and data analysts, communications and marketing professionals, and managers and decision-makers within nonprofits, social organizations and the government. With the advent of visualization tools that do not require coding, data storytelling in the digital age is also an attainable skill set for people with varying levels of technical ability.

Corporate philanthropy and engagement is an evolving space which is critical to the existence and operation of nonprofit organizations. The role of the private sector in helping nonprofits achieve their mission, serve their clients and realize their expected goals and outcomes is unique and very different from the role that government funders and individual major donors play.

This short course will explore the concept of accountability within humanitarian intervention. In particular it will look at the contemporary significance of accountability for humanitarian response – when and why it has become an important concept for humanitarian intervention, and specific events that have led to a shift from donors to recipients of aid as the agents of accountability. 

 

Key questions that will be explored include:  

In this core course in financial management, students will learn the fundamentals of budgeting and accounting for public, health, and nonprofit organizations. Through readings, lectures, real-world case studies, and assignments, students will gain an understanding of how to use financial information in organizational planning, implementation, control, reporting, and analysis. In addition, students will have the chance to develop their spreadsheet skills by using Excel to perform financial calculations and create financial documents.