Established in 1938 as the Graduate School of Public Administration, the School Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service was named for the three-term New York City mayor Robert Ferdinand Wagner, Jr. in 1989 after having received a major donation by the Wagner family. In 2004 Wagner relocated to the Puck Building, a well-known New York City landmark in the city's SoHo neighborhood.
Wagner is home to special research and policy centres, institutes, and initiatives that focus on solving urban problems and strengthening public policy and public service nationally and internationally. These centres and institutes create an environment of dynamic thinking, purposeful questioning, and thoughtful reasoning on today's most complex public service issues. With a reputation for quality research and evaluation, research centres keep faculty and students current, make tangible contributions to critical public service areas, and attract funding and talent that greatly enhance the school's effectiveness.
One of the nine research centres operated by the school is the Research Centre for Leadership in Action.
Housed within the NYU Wagner Graduate School of Public Service, the Research Center for Leadership in Action (RCLA) creates collaborative learning environments, foster needed connections and networks, and yield new and practical insights and strategies. The Centre engages the leadership of a diverse spectrum of public service organizations from government agencies to nonprofits large and small to community-based and social change groups, both across the country and around the world.
Launched in 2003 with core funding from the Ford Foundation, RCLA crafts and runs customized, experiential leadership programs that both expand individuals' skills and strengthen the organizations in which they work. The research centre develops structured convenings where leaders explore the complexity of the challenges they face and together advance their efforts to make change possible. As an academic center, it conducts rigorous social science research, employing a variety of innovative and participatory methodologies to the issues of contemporary leadership.
All of its work exemplifies NYU Wagner's core commitment to integrating theory and practice. The programs sheltered, developed from the "ground up" in collaboration with leaders in the field, draw on the best of the leadership literature, practitioner wisdom, and peer-learning.
RCLA's efforts in the United States and globally garner broad support from a wide range of partners. These have included-in addition to the Ford Foundation-Rockefeller Foundation, Open Society Institute, Annie E. Casey Foundation, AVINA Foundation, Edna McConnell Clark Foundation, Centre for Creative Leadership, Centre for Action Research in Professional Practice, Accenture, and a broad network of leaders in the field.
RCLA scholars move beyond questions of who is a leader and what leaders do, to how leadership is practiced and how leadership makes change possible. We conduct research with leaders rather than on leaders to uncover and cultivate insights that describe leadership clearly and with an authentic voice.
At NYU Wagner's Research Center for Leadership in Action, we are opening up new possibilities for understanding how people at all levels of organizations and across all sectors of society can contribute to leadership for the public good. This work radically expands our notion of how people can lead and enables more people to see themselves reflected in the leadership recognized in the world. By deepening and diversifying the pool of people taking up leadership on issues of public importance, we are strengthening organizations, communities and ultimately, democracy.
To achieve this vision, RCLA is committed to advancing breakthrough scholarship on leadership for the public good and to developing a deep and diverse pool of public service leaders. We offer customized research and programs that expand individuals' knowledge and skills and strengthen the organizations and systems in which they work.
As the leadership center at NYU's Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service, a nationally top-ranked school for public affairs, RCLA works across the diverse domains of public service, attending to both the individual and collective dimensions of leadership. Our greatest asset is our unique ability to partner with leaders to translate ideas into action, generating breakthroughs in both scholarship and practice.
RCLA has created projects and programs that help build fresh insights into collective leadership. Its work, which is rooted in a collaboration of practitioners and social scientists striving to expand practical experience into applicable theory, takes place in four areas of expertise listed below.
Research and documentation
Developing, documenting, and sharing new knowledge about leadership practices is an essential part of RCLA's mission. Through structured dialogues and participatory methodologies, the Centre collaborates with practicing leaders to cultivate insights that describe leadership clearly and with an authentic voice. RCLA shares these insights with both the academic and practicing communities through an extensive series of reports, papers, articles, booklets, as well as seminars, lectures, and presentations. The Research & Documentation component at RCLA believes that the knowledge gathered and shared will eventually shift the traditional discourse about leadership from a heroic and individualist view to a more collective, relational, and inclusive view.
• Leadership Development
Helping organizations to maximize leadership capacity, as well as to nurture and develop the talent already within their own ranks, is a vital part of the work at RCLA. The Centre partner with Foundations and public service organizations to co-design leadership development programs that meet the particular needs and structure of each organization. Leaders are helped to develop their management skills through tailored, hands-on leadership experiences. These experiences are based in action learning, collaborative action research, and reflective practice methodologies that provide opportunities for leaders to come together with colleagues, share strategies, and collectively develop new knowledge about what works in their organizations.
Convenings
RCLA provides spaces for reflection and action learning where social scientists, practitioners, and others active in community and public service leadership, both nationally and internationally, can work together on challenging and often provocative issues in the field. Convenings may occur in the form of roundtable discussions, meetings using a participatory methodology, such as cooperative inquiry or narrative inquiry, or as conferences, breakfast series, and similar structures organized around central strategic and managerial questions.
Teaching and Training
RCLA teaches and trains current and future leaders through undergraduate and graduate coursework and partnership programs with other educational institutions and organizations both nationally and abroad. The Centre partners with faculty at the NYU Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service to encourage students to examine how history, culture, and context impact their own ideas about leadership. We share different models of leadership and invite student to learn more through presentations and roundtable discussions with respected leaders in business, nonprofits, and government. RCLA also provides training programs on various participatory, action-research, and facilitation methodologies to help practitioners and organizations hone the leadership skills that are vital to making change in their fields of work.
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