As consumers, we often assume products are ethically sourced, but human rights violations persist in transnational corporations' supply chains. Caroline Rees, alongside Professor John Ruggie, championed the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, laying the foundation for global legal frameworks to hold corporations accountable for human rights violations throughout their supply chains.

Traditional corporate ownership structures exacerbate societal inequities. Jenny Everett, Mark Hand and Natalie Reitman-White explore a new ownership model empowering businesses to align with their missions, benefit communities, and ensure long-term sustainability.

Finding emerging climate market opportunities can be challenging. As generative AI moves into the mainstream, Harvard Business School Professor George Serafeim shares how it can transform the way stakeholders and investors unlock new insights to better evaluate a company’s climate solutions, next generation innovation investments, and potential downstream risks and opportunities impacting business performance, human capital, and industry disruption.

Nonprofits struggle to harness the influence of grassroots donors. Henry Carroll and Taylor Greenthal recommend leveraging political fundraising strategies and collaborative efforts to efficiently build a broad grassroots donor base, ensuring successful navigation of the digital fundraising transformation.

The surge in New York City's homeless population, exacerbated by the expiration of pandemic-related measures, poses a critical challenge, with numbers reaching unprecedented levels. Christine Quinn urges upholding the "right to shelter," faster transitions to permanent housing for cost savings, and collaboration to address the multifaceted crisis.

A conversation with Brian Trelstad, newly appointed Faculty Chair of Harvard’s Advanced Leadership Initiative. A Senior Lecturer at Harvard Business School, Trelstad discusses his vision, priorities, challenges and goals as he takes over as the third Faculty Chair of the first interdisciplinary academic fellowship program created for experienced third stage leaders to help them address society’s pressing challenges through social impact strategies and projects.

Small organizations can often provide the most effective approaches to helping youth who face serious barriers to employment. Andrew McKnight, Executive Director of The Challenge Program and CP Furniture, describes the advantages of being nimble and innovative, along with the realities and challenges of being a small nonprofit working with this population of youth.

The scaling of innovations in development often involves system transformation. Siddhant Gokhale and Michael Walton delve into how using an Adaptive Evaluation framework offers practitioners essential tools to drive impactful change through informed actions.

OPINION COMMENTARY:

To combat the homeless crisis in America, bureaucratic obstacles that hinder those in need must be overcome. Harvard ALI Fellows Melinda Giovengo and Betsy Schwartz critically examine HUD's Homeless Emergency Assistance and Rapid Transition to Housing (HEARTH) Act and showcase how the Coalition for the Homeless of Houston, Texas has successfully implemented a multi-stakeholder approach.

The Big Myth, by Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway, makes a compelling and well documented case that under the guise of protecting individual freedom, corporations and influential individuals organized to resist efforts to regulate industry. Oreskes and Conway peel away the cloak to expose concerted efforts across broad spectrums of society to propagandize against government efforts to protect the common good, to a point where any government intervention into the marketplace is labeled anti-capitalist. The book is not an assault on capitalism, but an assault on the myth that equates capitalism with freedom.

In the Bay Area, many transformational business innovations have started in a garage. By converting often under-utilized garages into upscale living units, Rebecca Möller, founder of SYMBiHOM, takes the challenge of garage innovation quite literally and seeks to provide new affordable housing at a transformational scale.

HEALTH & HOMELESSNESS SERIES:

The Biden Administration’s plan to reduce homelessness by 25% by 2025 is focused on preventing homelessness before it occurs in the first place. Jeff Olivet, executive director of the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness, discusses how they are urgently addressing basic needs of people in crisis, and expanding housing and support to help people get and stay housed.

HEALTH & HOMELESSNESS SERIES:

Many think mental illness leads to homelessness, but a bidirectional relationship exists, and homelessness can lead to mental illness as well. Katherine Koh, MD, a practicing psychiatrist at the Boston Health Care for the Homeless Program and Massachusetts General Hospital, discusses how her innovative practice of street psychiatry supports our unhoused neighbors.

HEALTH & HOMELESSNESS SERIES:

Inside Safe, Los Angeles’s program to reduce homelessness, recently achieved its ambitious goal of housing 1,000 people in its first 100 days. Dr. Va Lecia Adams Kellum, CEO of Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, discusses the nature of the challenge, the approach, and the city’s early progress.

In Sub-Saharan Africa, the problems of malnutrition and poverty are inextricably intertwined. Dr. Ayoola Oduntan, an ambitious social entrepreneur, is tackling both of these problems with his dual purpose breed of chicken, the Noiler.

FUTURE OF WORK SERIES:

Millions of people languish at the margins of the workforce despite nearly two open positions for every unemployed job seeker. Kate Markin Coleman, 2017 Harvard ALI Fellow, offers principles for a data-based, stakeholder-driven, collaborative approach to modernize the nation’s workforce development system.

FUTURE OF WORK SERIES:

The world is facing a shortage of workers. Wieteke Graven, the founder of HPP, summarizes the employment situation in the Netherlands, and details how HPP is helping employers to shape the future of work.

SOCIAL EQUITY SERIES:

How can investing in gang members transform our communities? Michelle Caldeira and Mark Culliton discuss the counterintuitive approach that Uncornered takes to address violent crime.

SOCIAL EQUITY SERIES:

Closing the racial wealth gap is a generational challenge. Khamla Erskine, the executive sponsor of The Fellowship Initiative, details how JPMorgan Chase is bridging the divide, one community at a time.

SOCIAL EQUITY SERIES:

How does a leading wire and cable manufacturer become a source of transformation for at-risk students? Burt Fealing from Southwire and Ethan Rouen from the Harvard Business School describe the 12 for Life program and how it has partnered with communities and achieved collective success.