About us

Rita E. Hauser Senior Lecturer in Leadership, Organizing, and Civil Society

Faculty Director, Practicing Democracy Project

As Rita E. Hauser Senior Lecturer in Leadership, Organizing, and Civil Society at the Kennedy School of Government, Marshall Ganz teaches, researches, and writes on leadership, narrative, strategy and organization in social movements, civic associations, and politics. He grew up in Bakersfield, California where his father was a Rabbi and his mother, a teacher. 

He entered Harvard College in the fall of 1960. He left a year before graduating to volunteer with the 1964 Mississippi Summer Project. He found a “calling” as an organizer for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and, in the fall of 1965 joined Cesar Chavez in his effort to unionize California farm workers. During 16 years with the United Farm Workers he gained experience in union, political, and community organizing; became Director of Organizing; and was elected to the national executive board on which he served for 8 years.

 During the 1980s he worked with grassroots groups to develop new organizing programs and designed innovative voter mobilization strategies for local, state, and national electoral campaigns. In 1991, in order to deepen his intellectual understanding of his work, he returned to Harvard College and after a 28-year “leave of absence” completed his undergraduate degree in history and government. He was awarded an MPA by the Kennedy School in 1993 and completed his PhD in sociology in 2000. 

He has published in the American Journal of Sociology, American Political Science Review, American Prospect, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Stanford Social Innovation Review and elsewhere. His newest book, Why David Sometimes Wins: Leadership, Organization and Strategy in the California Farm Worker Movement was published in 2009, earning the Michael J. Harrington Book Award of the American Political Science Association. In 2007-8 he was instrumental in design of the grassroots organization for the 2008 Obama for President campaign. In 2010 he was awarded an honorary doctorate in divinity by the Episcopal Divinity School. In association with the global Leading Change Network of organizers, researchers and educators he coaches, trains, and advises social, civic, educational, health care, and political groups on organizing, training, and leadership development around the world.

A frequent speaker, educator, and writer.

Jennifer McCrea is a frequent speaker, teacher, and writer on the topic of money, meaning, and social change and the co-author of the best-selling book, The Generosity Network. For more than 30 years, Jennifer has partnered with philanthropists, board members, and social change leaders to think more creatively and collaboratively about ways to align strategic direction and resources. She was a Senior Research Fellow at Harvard University for over a decade and has worked with more than 500 organizations, foundations, U.N. and government agencies, and movements across the globe.

Some of the organizations Jennifer’s worked with include DonorsChoose.org, Grameen America, Southern Poverty Law Center, ACLU, Council on Foreign Relations, Teach for America, NAACP Legal Defense Fund, Alliance for Youth Organizing, charity: water, Witness, Kiva, IDEO.org, X Prize Foundation, Creative Commons, Solutions Journalism Network, Emerson Collective, Stavros Niarchos Foundation, The Gates Foundation, The World Bank, The World Health Organization and many others.

Jennifer was also the co-founder and CEO of Born Free Africa, a private sector-led global philanthropic initiative working to end the transmission of HIV from mothers to their children, and was a Vice Chairman at the United Nations. She’s been a speaker and led seminars for, among others, Ashoka, Skoll World Forum, TED, Board Source, Social Venture Philanthropy, Draper Richards Kaplan, Open Society Foundations, New Profit, Echoing Green, Harvard Business School, Wharton, and Oxford University. Jennifer is on the Leading Change Network board and the advisory board of the MIT Media Lab and the Blue School. She is an Ambassador for Pioneer Works and is a Henry Crown Fellow at the Aspen Institute.

Co-founder & Principal of Blue Haven Initiative

President of the Foundation for Civic Leadership

Ian Simmons is Co-Founder and Principal of Blue Haven Initiative, where he oversees a portfolio focused on investments that generate competitive financial returns and address social and environmental challenges. This portfolio spans asset classes, including private and public equity, fixed income, direct investments, alternative investments and philanthropic programs.
A champion and practitioner of impact investing for two decades, Ian advances Blue Haven’s investment, research and policy strategies. He is particularly passionate about pursuing solutions to complex challenges, such as clean energy and affordable housing. Ian also advocates for policies that facilitate long-term investing and promote corporate and political transparency and accountability.
Committed to initiatives and corporations that advance investing and strengthen democracy, Ian is the President of the Foundation for Civic Leadership. He also serves on the board of directors of the U.S. Impact Investing Alliance, Social Finance, Issue One, the National Advisory Board for Public Service at Harvard College, and Karibu Homes, an affordable-housing company in Kenya.
Ian graduated with honors from Harvard College in 2000. He lives in the Boston area with his wife, Blue Haven Co-Founder Liesel Pritzker Simmons, and their daughters.

Theatre Artist, Educator, Community Organizer

Focused on Youth Leadership, Neighborhood Action, and Emancipatory Education,

Regional Director & Head of Programs at Ruwwad

Samar Dudin is The Regional Director and Head of Programs at Ruwwad Al Tanmeya, a Community and Youth Empowerment Organization where she leads and designs youth empowerment programs and organizes and coaches community-led campaigns. Samar has been a pioneer of Drama and Theatre in Education in Jordan and a lifelong cultural and social activist since the 90ies. In 2006 she founded the youth empowering initiative Takween Open Spaces in Amman Jordan and has developed several innovative and multi-disciplinary initiatives that integrate education, development, and the arts targeting mainly children, youth, and their caretakers in local communities. 

She is a theatre director with a repertoire of 17 youth and child plays that developed through the co-authorship and co-creation methodology. Samar served as Amman City Council Member -from 2003-2006- where she enabled the creation of the Child Protection Committee and the Executive Agency for a Child-Friendly City which launched Greater Amman Municipality’s first Child Municipal Councils elections. Samar has extensive experience in Community Organizing, she coached campaigns that combat violence and enabled Youth movements in Amman Jordan on leadership, public narrative, and organizing. Samar graduated from Santa Clara California with a Bachelor’s Degree in Theatre Arts in 1985, She is a founding board member of Al Balad Theater, An Advisory Committee member at Al Shams Theatre, A board member of Zad Al Founoun at The Arab Cultural Society, An Arab Ashoka Fellow on Social Entrepreneurship, a Fellow of the International Women s Forum Leadership program.

A member of the Board for the Youth Leadership Center Ministry of Youth -Jordan. She dedicates her time to developing Ruwwad Al Tanmeya’s Programs and Regional Expansion in the Arab World. 

Director within the National Health Service (the NHS). Leads NHS Horizons.

Kathryn leads NHS Horizons, which works with leaders and organisations across the health and care system in England and internationally using movement-based approaches to change.

Until May 2023, Kathryn was the national Director of Improvement Capability-Building and Delivery for the NHS in England. She acted as the Programme Director of a national review of improvement and delivery commissioned by the NHS Chief Executive, which reassessed how the NHS could lead post-pandemic recovery across the service and which led to the creation of NHS Impact. Kathryn coaches, consults and facilitates change work across the wider public-sector both in England and more widely. With Professor Christopher Pietroni, she co-leads the Faculty of the Leadership Centre’s flagship systems leadership programme,

Future Vision. Before joining the NHS, Kathryn spent eight years working in politics and community

organising, including as the Chief Executive of Movement for Change, a social enterprise which worked with communities to organise and win change on a range of issues, from workers’ rights to better housing conditions. A practising barrister (lawyer) by background, Kathryn is a US-UK Fulbright Commission scholar and former visiting fellow at the Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. In addition to LCN, Kathryn is a trustee of the UK-based social enterprise Act Build Change, and she sits on the advisory board of the History Faculty at the University of Oxford.

Founding member of Via Education- Nationwide nonprofit organization based in Mexico

Founding member of Via Educacion (2005), a nationwide nonprofit organization based in Mexico focused on generating social sustainable opportunities through the design, implementation and evaluation of educational strategies.

She has done work to expand educational opportunities for underprivileged children in different contexts, rural, indigenous and urban settings.  Her particular interest of research is the understanding of how children and youth can develop citizen skills and democratic practices through participatory methodologies within the formal educational context and how they can improve their lives as they become agents of change in their communities. 

She has a Master degree from the Harvard Graduate School of Education where she learned about teaching and learning, design of education policies and community organizing.

Combining innovative education theories based on the research of Harvard’s Project Zero and Marshall Ganz’s Organizing framework, she has worked with educators and social leaders to generate spaces of genuine children and youth’s participation in development and environmental care. 

Her work has being applied throughout the Civics and Ethics National Curriculum and she has very much enjoyed working in the Northern Mountains of Durango and the Tarahumara indigenous communities in Mexico. 

She also has served as a specialized advisor for UNESCO-Latin America for the Target 4.7 Global Citizenship and Sustainability of the Sustainable Development Goals.

More recently, she organized a Campaign that successfully helped to reinstate Children’s right of education during and after the pandemic mobilizing more than 90 organizations, that included non-for-profit, private sector, academia and parent based associations that changed the course of education opportunities for children in the state of the country where she lives. 

Organizing and public narrative trainer and a community organizing campaign coach.

Since 2013 she has trained and coached more than 40 organizing workshops for civic leaders in Japan and ASEAN countries to activate local social changes. Her interest is in social justice especially in the area of gender and climate change. She is a founder of CLinked that trains local community leaders in Asia to organize and promote gender equality. CLinked was launched as a part of campaign project for professor Marshall’s Ganz’s “Organizing: People Power and Change” class while she was an Advanced Leadership Initiative fellow at Harvard University. 

She is also a founding member of Community Organizing Japan which trained over 4000 people all over Japan in community organizing. In this capacity she is currently working on organizing training and climate change campaign in Japan. In 2017 she was a teaching fellow for Harvard Kennedy Schools executive course “Leadership, Action and Organizing”. Junko is a graduate of Columbia University’s master in business administration and worked globally in Singapore, Tokyo and New York.

over 150 trainers in community organizing, public narrative and human trafficking prevention in 5 countries (Vietnam, Indonesia, Singapore, Myanmar, Cambodia) in Asia through CLinked, a 5013c she co-founded in 2011. She launched Clinked as part of a campaign project for professor Marshall’s Ganz’s “Organizing: People Power and Change” class while she was an Advanced Leadership Initiative fellow at Harvard University. CLinked coached a successful campaign to create community childminders amongst financially disadvantaged women in Singapore.

She is a founding member of Community Organizing Japan which trained over 4000 people all over Japan in community organizing. In this capacity she is currently working on a climate change campaign and training in Japan. In 2017 she was a teaching fellow for Harvard Kennedy Schools executive course “Leadership, Action and Organizing”. Junko is a graduate of Columbia University’s masters in business administration.

Morris Wasserstein Public Interest Professor of Law
Executive Faculty Director, Institute to End Mass Incarceration

Andrew Manuel Crespo is the Morris Wasserstein Public Interest Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, where he teaches criminal law and procedure and serves as the Executive Faculty Director of the Institute to End Mass Incarceration. Professor Crespo’s research and scholarly expertise center on the institutional design, legal frameworks, and power structures of the American penal system. His scholarship has been honored by the Association of American Law Schools and profiled in The New York Times, with his leading articles appearing in the Harvard Law Review, the Columbia Law Review, and the Yale Law Journal. Together with John Rappaport, he is the author of Criminal Law and the American Penal System, an innovative forthcoming casebook that recasts the traditionally required criminal law course as a class about the role law and lawyers have played in building and sustaining American mass incarceration.

Nationally recognized for his expertise on a range of legal issues, Professor Crespo’s public commentary can be found in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, the Journal of the American Medical Association, and online at Lawfare, Just Security, Take Care, and Inquest, where he is a founding editor. He regularly shares opinions and analyses with print, television, and radio journalists, and has appeared on CNN, NPR’s On Point and All Things Considered, and NBC’s Meet the Press.At the appointment of President Biden, Professor Crespo served in 2021 on the Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court of the United States. He additionally serves on the Academic Advisory Board of the American Constitution Society and on the Standing Advisory Committee on the Rules of Criminal Procedure for the state of Massachusetts. He is an elected member of the American Law Institute. Prior to beginning his academic career, Professor Crespo served as a Staff Attorney with the Public Defender Service for the District of Columbia, where he represented over one hundred adults and juveniles charged with serious felonies, ranging from armed robberies, to burglaries, to homicides. As a member of the Harvard Law School faculty he continues to be active in litigation, authoring merits stage and amicus briefs on various issues, often in close collaboration with his students.   

Professor Crespo graduated magna cum laude from Harvard Law School in 2008, where he served as president of the Harvard Law Review, the first Latino to hold that position.  Following law school, Professor Crespo served for three years as a law clerk, initially to Judge Stephen Reinhardt of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, then to Associate Justice Stephen Breyer of the U.S. Supreme Court, and finally to Associate Justice Elena Kagan during her inaugural term on the Court.  Following his time as a public defender, Professor Crespo returned to Harvard as an assistant professor of law in 2015. In 2019, he became the first Latino promoted to a tenured position on the law school’s faculty.

A philanthropic leader, social entrepreneur and cross sector mobilizer on minority inclusion

President of the El-Hibri Foundation

His work is inspired by democratic values and universal norms shared by faith traditions and his leadership has challenged global extremism and ideologically motivated hate. He is the President of the El-Hibri Foundation, focused on cross sector approaches to foster inclusion across religious and political divides. His work focuses on investing in Muslim leaders in partnership with allies to build capacity and resilience.

Prior to joining the Foundation, he led the think tank Institute for Social Policy and Understanding, where his work included advising White House officials, Homeland Security and other agencies on issues around national security, enhancing religious pluralism and equity. He spent over a decade in higher education focused on inclusion of underrepresented, low-income, and first-generation students. As a social entrepreneur, he founded Strategic Inspirations, a social impact consulting firm. Farhan serves as an advisory member on the Council on Foundations Public Policy Committee and the Executive Committee of the MGP Fund that was launched at Stanford University’s Hasso Plattner Institute of Design (d.school).

As an interfaith leader, Mr. Latif worked with national and local civic organizations to promote religious understanding and inclusion. He is also a fellow of the American Muslim Civic Leadership Institute. He serves as an advisory member on both the Muslim-Jewish Advisory Council and the leadership committee of the ACCESS Campaign to Take on Hate, and is a Young Global Leader of the World Economic Forum. Authors Genieve Abdo and Akbar Ahmad have chronicled Farhan’s journey in combating extremism and working towards inclusion in their books Mecca and Mainstreet: Muslim Life in America After 9/11 and Journey into America: The Challenge of Islam. Farhan has appeared on numerous media outlets, including ABC, FOX, BBC, LA Times, New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Voice of America, Gulf Times and USA Today.

Mr. Latif received an MA from Harvard University, where he completed a specialized interdisciplinary program on Social Entrepreneurship, Philanthropy and Education through graduate coursework at the Kennedy School of Government, Harvard Business School and Harvard Graduate School of Education. He also holds a degree in Business Management and Marketing, and completed graduate work in nonprofit management at the University of Michigan Dearborn.