Public Narrative: Leadership, Storytelling, and Action is a transformative online program through which you can strengthen your capacity to lead. You learn how to tell a story of self that enables others to “get you”; a story of us that enables your community to “get each other”; and a story of now that turns the present moment into one of challenge, hope, and action. It is a groundbreaking practice that for years has proven an invaluable tool for senior public leaders, community organizers, students, and leaders across a range of organizations.

UPCOMING SESSIONS
September 14, 2020 – December 18, 2020

https://www.hks.harvard.edu/educational-programs/executive-education/public-narrative-leadership-storytelling-and-action-2

Fulfilling the democratic promise of equity, accountability, and effectiveness requires the participation of an “organized” citizenry able to formulate, articulate, and assert its shared interests. Organizing, in turn, requires leadership: accepting responsibility for enabling others to achieve shared purpose in the face of uncertainty. Organizers begin by asking three questions: who are my people, what challenges do they face, and how can they turn their resources into the power they need to meet these challenges? Organizers identify, recruit, and develop leadership; build community around that leadership; and build power from the resources of that community.

Questions of what I am called to do, what is my community called to do, and what we are called to do now are at least as old as the three questions posed by the first century Jerusalem sage, Rabbi Hillel:

• If I am not for myself, who will be for me?
• When I am for myself alone, what am I?
• if not now, when?

This course offers students an opportunity to develop their capacity to lead by asking themselves these questions at a time in their lives when it really matters . . . and learning how to ask them of others.

Teaches leaders of civic associations, advocacy groups, and social movements how to organize communities that can mobilize power to effect change.

CURRENT SESSION
February 10, 2020 – May 25, 2020
https://www.hks.harvard.edu/educational-programs/executive-education/leadership-organizing-and-action

This module builds on its predecessor, Public Narrative: Self, Us, Now. In the first module you began learning the practice of public narrative: exercising leadership by translating your values, and those of others, into the emotional capacity to respond to challenges with strategic agency, as opposed to reacting with avoidance or fear. In this module we focus on how to meet the leadership challenge of building an empathetic bridge through which we can enable others to respond with agency to four key forms of disruption: loss, difference, domination, and change.