Wagner Students Tackle Public Service Projects Across the Globe as Part of Capstone Program

By Robert Polner

      The historic African American community of Soria City, Mississippi, was the destination for a team of Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service students who set out to reverse the town’s economic decline. The students, retained by the Mississippi Center for Justice, have surveyed residents’ needs and created a viable plan to attract business investment to the community, which, to add to its woes, was hit hard by Hurricane Katrina.
      “It came at a perfect time to get this community going,” civic leader Dorothy McClendon told the local paper of the student’s infectious enthusiasm and dedication.
      The students’ teamwork contributes to the public good and to their preparation as public service leaders, and is one aim of Wagner’s groundbreaking Capstone program, an experiential learning program that all Wagner students complete before graduation.
      Started in 1995, the Capstone program’s geographically and institutionally diverse list of client organizations reflects its vitality, ranging from community-based nonprofits to city, state, and federal agencies, and from major health enterprises to the United Nations and nongovernmental organizations. Seventy-one organizations will rely on Wagner students this year to help them identify opportunities and address challenges, or to conduct research on a pressing social question. At the same time, the competition to be a Capstone client organization has grown. Only 42 percent of all proposals from prospective client organizations for the current academic calendar were accepted.
      “Over the years we’ve gone from begging and pleading for clients to seeing an extraordinarily competitive process,” says David Schachter, assistant dean for student affairs, who administers the Capstone program with Erica Foldy, assistant professor of public and nonprofit management.
      The program is learning in action, a replacement for the conventional final examination or final term paper of old. Under the guidance of faculty, teams of three to six students are charged with getting up-to-speed quickly on a problem and an issue that their client organization deems important. The students keep tabs on how to best serve their Capstone client, but they also surface and analyze their own processes of planning, managing, communicating, and developing their capacity to reflect on practice—an important component of experiential learning. In the end, the teams produce a “deliverable.” One notable example was a 2006 plan for bringing malaria treatment options to the rural poor in Cameroon, which may help save millions of lives.
      Early on, the Capstone program worked largely with New York City governmental and nonprofit agencies. During this academic year alone, in contrast, Capstone teams are also working with organizations in several states, and overseas as well—in Senegal, Ghana, Ecuador, Mexico, Nicaragua, Cote d’Ivoir, Austria, South Africa, Jordan, Angola, Morocco, Jamaica, Abu Dhabi, and Uganda.
      In one Capstone project this year in the Middle East, a team is creating a bicycle loan system to serve the future NYU satellite campus on Saadiyat Island in Abu Dhabi. In West Africa, students are conducting a scan and an analysis of a Cote d’Ivoir hospital’s community health initiatives to align them with national health priorities. Back in the states, others are providing the Congressional Research Service with data on Iraq war veterans seeking disability compensation payments. The resulting report will help frame congressional debate on whether vets face excessive delays, and why.
      Charles Brecher, professor of public and health administration, oversees three teams of Wagner students who are working with New York City’s economic development agency, a private organization measuring the carbon footprint of corporations, and a major labor union that is exploring what the “green” revolution in residential construction means for the future of building maintenance employees.
      “The students get a lot out of it,” says Brecher, calling the Capstone program an education in teamwork, client and boss relationships, and the substance of policy. “It requires students to take on an issue that isn’t pre-packaged by an instructor and to take up problems with no answer set, which is what the real work and the rest of their career will be about.”
      Davin Sweeney, a student in Wagner’s Public and Nonprofit Management Program, is part of a Capstone team looking for ways to increase participation in recycling in economically diverse Stamford, Connecticut. This work, he says, complements his goals of managing operations for a state or local government after graduation. Fellow student Nupur Chaudhury’s Capstone project sent her to Ecuador last summer to develop a case study for the Inter-American Development Bank on successful water management in Quinta. The project is among the first Capstones to take place partly during summer and is connected to a class on water scarcity that was taught by professor Natasha Iskander.
      “I’m an urban planner interested in the intersection between urban planning and public health,” says Chaudhury, who hopes to launch her public service career in India. “That’s why I’ve been so passionate about my Capstone project and the Capstone program.”