About the lab

Who we are.

The Civic Power Lab is a mixed-methods research lab at the Harvard Kennedy School. We study democracy, civil society, and the organizational practices that make collective action powerful (or fragile).

Mission & commitments

What we're here to do.

Produce rigorous social-scientific research on democratic practice in partnership with the organizations, movements, and civic ecosystems that sustain it.

Build open-source infrastructure, training programs, and measurement tools that organizers can use.

Help train the next generation of researchers who move fluently between methods.

Liz McKenna
Liz McKenna · Cambridge, MA
Faculty Director

Liz McKenna

Liz McKenna is an Assistant Professor of Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School and Faculty Director of the Civic Power Lab. Her 2024–26 Carnegie Fellowship supports research on the reorganization of civic life across democratic-backsliding cases and the construction of the POLIS Database, the largest research dataset of organizing (as distinct from mobilizing) activity in the United States.

The dissertation on which her current book project, The Revolution Will Be Organized, is based received the 2021 American Sociological Association Best Dissertation Award. She has also published peer-reviewed articles in Perspectives on Politics, International Sociology, and American Behavioral Scientist, among other outlets.

Prior to HKS, Liz was a postdoctoral scholar at the P3 Lab and SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University and a predoctoral fellow at Stanford's Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society. Before academia, she worked as a political and community organizer in Ohio and Rio de Janeiro. She earned a B.A. in Social Studies from Harvard College in 2008 and a Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of California, Berkeley in 2020.

Team

Our Team

Sociologists, ethnographers, historians, learning scientists, political scientists, geospatial and network analysts, forward-deployed engineers, teachers, organizers, and a rotating bench of postdocs, RAs, and visiting scholars. Most of us have organizing experience outside the academy.

Team

16
Emily S. Lin
Senior Research Director

Developmental scientist. Ph.D. in Human Development (Tufts). Former Program Director of the Practicing Democracy Project.

Zainab Azim
Research Assistant

Harvard Graduate School of Education.

Yvette Bailey-Emberson
Research Assistant

Harvard Graduate School of Design.

Jason Boyle
Research Assistant

Harvard Graduate School of Design.

Melanie Brazzell
Fellow

Ph.D. in Sociology, UC Santa Barbara.

Christian Caballero
Fellow

PhD student in Political Science, UC Berkeley.

Iris Cheng
Research Assistant

Harvard College.

Jessica De Simone
Faculty Assistant

Harvard Kennedy School.

Patrick Hunter
Research Fellow

Teacher and writer based in Brooklyn, NY.

Noah Johnson
Research Assistant

Harvard Graduate School of Design.

Jae Yeon Kim
Fellow

Assistant Professor of Public Policy, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Dorothy Manevich
Research Fellow

Former postdoc; PhD, Government, Harvard FAS (2025). Now at the United Auto Workers.

Daniel Napsha
Research Assistant

Former field lead with the Mamdani campaign, based in NYC.

Doran Schrantz
Fellow · Practitioner-in-residence

Director of the Organizing Lab. Two decades of organizing in Minnesota; lead architect of ISAIAH and Faith in Minnesota.

Bia Zanforlin
Research Coordinator

Founder, Coral. Engineer focused on learning science and technology. Harvard Lemann Fellow.

Catherine Zhu
Project Coordinator

Harvard Kennedy School, MPP.

Other collaborators

10
Joy Cushman
Collaborator

Research Program Director, DPI Fund. Co-author of the 2025 Civic Power and 2023 Power Metrics reports.

Matt Duell
Collaborator

Data Strategist, State Power Fund. Ph.D. in Political Science, Stony Brook.

Katrina Gamble
Collaborator

Partner at Sojourn Strategies. Ph.D. in Political Science, Emory University.

Marshall Ganz
Collaborator

Senior Lecturer in Public Policy, HKS.

Miriam McKinney Gray
Collaborator

Senior Data Analyst, DPI.

Prentiss Haney
Collaborator

Former Co-Executive Director, Ohio Organizing Collaborative.

Tianyi Hu
Collaborator

Senior Data Analyst, DPI.

Maggie Hughes
Collaborator

Ph.D., MIT Media Lab.

Cristina Pereira de Araujo
Collaborator

Professor of Urban Studies, Federal University of Pernambuco.

Miya Woolfalk
Collaborator

Principal at MW Strategies; Former Director of Research, Analyst Institute. Ph.D. in Government, Harvard FAS.

Alumni & extended family

9
Yong Jung ChoLab alum
Ethan FreyFriend of the lab
Larissa GuimarãesLab alum (former RA) · Ph.D. student in Sociology, Brown University
Vic HoggLab alum · Solidaire Network
Maraya Keny-GuyerLab alum · City of Los Angeles, Office of Strategic Partnerships
Bethany Kirkpatrick WoodLab alum · Speechwriter, North Carolina Office of the Governor
Rebecca LinLab alum (former RA)
Alaina SeguraLab alum (former postdoc)
Caren YapLab alum (former RA)

We hire RAs, postdocs, forward-deployed engineers, and visiting scholars most years.

Express interest →
How we work

Six principles.

01

Co-formulation.

Research questions are often set with the practitioners doing the work, before fieldwork begins. The gap between what scholars want to know and what organizers need to know is itself the question.

02

Mixed methods.

Almost every project combines at least two of: administrative/observational data analysis, pre-posts, survey experiments, archival work, network analysis, interviews, and embedded ethnography.

03

Theory + measurement.

We do not import constructs without testing whether the existing measure works for the population we study. Where established scales miss the phenomenon, we build and validate new ones.

04

Original, long-horizon data infrastructure.

We build datasets the field does not have, and we maintain them.

05

Data sovereignty.

Original data stays with the organizations that produced it. Our data use agreements name the partner as the steward of record; we work on de-identified copies.

06

Multi-year by default.

We design for partnerships of three years or more. One-off studies serve long-term questions or we don't run them.

Organizing partners

Who we work with.

The POLIS network: state-based organizing groups across the country who host the research and help interpret the data. Listed alphabetically.

Collaborators

Beyond partner organizations.

The practice arm of the lab runs through a set of standing collaborations, with funders, intermediaries, and civic-tech peers , to build the field-owned infrastructure the moment demands.

Intermediary · Funder

Democracy & Power Innovation Fund

Long standing partner. Supports (among other things) base-building groups as they collect and analyze organizing data so that they can evaluate their programs, with the goal of improving strategy, practice, and impact.

Field partner

Pro-Democracy Campaign

Field partner on POLIS / We Choose Us project. Provides funding, strategy support, and technical assistance to the state-based organizing groups in the network.

Training · Pedagogy

Organizing Lab

Runs leadership development and organizer trainings with more than 200 groups nationwide, collaborating with the Lab on measuring training effects. Anchor partner on the Groundwork platform vision.

Civic tech peer

The Movement Cooperative

Field-shared data infrastructure for organizing groups; collaborator on movement-side data standards.

Visit & funders

Where we sit, who supports us.

Address
Civic Power Lab
Harvard Kennedy School
79 John F. Kennedy Street
Cambridge, MA 02138

Funders & institutional support

Carnegie Foundation (Andrew Carnegie Fellowship, 2024–26) · Rockefeller Family Foundation (Democracy & Power Innovation Fund) · Rx Foundation · Harvard Lemann Brazil Research Fellowship · State Power Fund · Bloomberg Center for Cities Research Grant · Center for Public Leadership Faculty Research Grant.