Nonprofit organizations serve social missions rather than distributing profits. Strategic leadership and values are central to serving those missions effectively while ensuring survival. This course will allow you to examine your assumptions about leadership and learn about the theoretical and strategic issues and the ethical dilemmas associated with leading for social change.

This course is for students who want to build and work within nonprofit organizations to make a positive impact on the world. The students in this course will organize, fund, operate, and govern an imaginary nonprofit over the course of the semester. They will learn about missions, tax exemption, setting realistic goals, measuring an organization?s impact, fund raising, budgets, managing employees and volunteers, and the extent to which they can be involved in the political process.

This course will encourage you to reflect on what you have learned thus far - in your courses, extracurricular experiences, jobs, internships, life - and consider how it will shape your journey forward into your career. It will teach you needed skills to advance your career including networking, resume and cover letter writing, interviewing, negotiating, and embodying professionalism. Ultimately, by looking at your core values and what you have accomplished thus far, you will craft a plan for how to move forward both during your time at UMass and beyond.

This course is designed to help students become better communicators by strengthening their skill as writers since writing is integral to all phases of the policy process. Public policy is concerned with identifying problems, coming up with solutions to those problems, and getting those solutions adopted and implemented. For that to happen, students must be experts in communicating with a variety of audiences. There are three basic ways to do so: speaking, writing, and showing. This course is designed to enable students to do all three, although the focus is on writing.

Not available at this time.

Focus on how public policies are made in the U.S., including the role of citizens, interest groups, and government institutions. Emphasis on the processes by which policies are made in various institutions, including the Presidency, Congress, bureaucracy, and courts. Examples cover numerous public policies, such as campaign finance reform, foreign policy, and the environment. (Gen.Ed. SB)

This course explores the significance of the public sphere - from pamphlets, newspapers and letters to radio, television, the internet and social media - and its relationship to participatory, democratic society. Moving back and forth between the history of the public sphere and contemporary debates about the tensions between media and democracy, students will learn why democracies prescribe protected roles of the media, how media manipulation plays a role in politics, and how media spaces serve as deliberative spaces.