Civic Workshop

Small teams of students will propose and implement projects to provide immediate volunteer civic assistance to a group or community dealing with the effects of coronavirus. We assume most or all of this assistance will be online or otherwise virtual. The first goal of this course is to channel your skills, abilities, and civic impulses to provide immediate practical assistance to communities struggling with new, unsettling, and painful coronavirus realities. The second goal is to allow you to practice leadership, management, problem-solving, and interactive skills in a small team through a project they build from scratch and implement immediately. The third goal is to build and strengthen your interest in participating in leadership roles in the civic layer of society after graduation. Students will form teams of four, either before or shortly after the course begins. A team will propose a target group to assist: a place, a group of people, or a non-governmental civic organization. Your team will interact directly with leaders of that target group to discover what value you can provide immediately and virtually. Weekly class sessions will include some guest speakers and work sessions in which the various teams will share their ongoing efforts, to cross-fertilize ideas and assist each other. Teams will also meet extensively outside of class hours to build and implement their project. This course is an active learning experience. Teams will be evaluated in part based on their ability to deliver rapid results of value to a target community. Doing so will require significant commitment and effort from the team, and a willingness to adapt to difficult, changing conditions. All projects must be targeted entirely at addressing new needs created by the coronavirus crisis, not at solving problems that existed before then. They should be easy to begin initial execution in the first 2-3 weeks of the quarter, to provide rapid assistance to the target group. Projects must be nongovernmental and apolitical: no politics, no government work or government services, no interest groups whose primary purpose is to influence public officials. Teams should instead aim to provide direct benefits to a community in the civic layer between individuals and government including businesses, volunteer groups, community organizations, non-profits, clubs, charities, religious and fraternal organizations. Many of these efforts are arising spontaneously each day; our goal is to foster and amplify this trend. Since projects must be feasible with the team dispersed and in self-isolation, most efforts will be online or virtual, and teams are encouraged to think of creative uses of tools like Zoom, Google Apps, social media, and simple database setups. Interdisciplinary teams from across Stanford graduate programs are encouraged, as long as three of the four team members are from the GSB. International students are strongly encouraged to participate, both in joining teams with an American focus and in forming teams to target communities for assistance outside the U.S. Teams are encouraged to look at opportunities to form bridging capital, aiding groups and communities that might not overlap much with the Stanford student population. We hope several teams will be geographically-focused, targeting the people who live in a specific place for assistance. In addition to the project itself, each student will be expected to keep a project journal and to write an end-of-project memo to those considering similar civic efforts in the future.