“Democracy is not something you have, but something you do. It is a verb. And we are creating it, or un-creating it, all the time.” – Marshall Ganz
The Practicing Democracy Project (PDP), led by Faculty Director Professor Marshall Ganz and housed at the Center for Public Leadership, enables people to work together to develop the leadership; build the community; and create the power to fulfill the democratic promise of equal, inclusive, and collective agency.
We do this by supporting educators, researchers, and practitioners in engaging with questions of shared identity, self-governance, and people-centered power across three interdependent domains of democratic practice: leadership development, pedagogical development, and development of organizational capacity.
We develop leadership—accepting the responsibility for enabling others to achieve shared purpose under conditions of uncertainty, through practices of civic relationship building, values-based public narrative, constituency-based strategizing and mobilization of collective action, and the structuring of democratic organization.
