By Tom LoBianco
At the , Prof. Cornell William Brooks teaches students about effective advocacy tools, the history of successful social justice movements, and how to match the needs of local communities with the political realities of government.
But above all, he presses the need for his students to produce results by the end of the semester.
“We are unapologetically focused on outcomes,” said Brooks, the founding faculty director of the William Monroe Trotter Collaborative for Social Justice, and the Hauser Professor of the Practice of Nonprofit Organizations and the Professor of the Practice of Public Leadership and Social Justice at Harvard Kennedy School.
Brooks started the program in 2018 at the Center for Public Leadership to train students across disciplines about how they can use high-level sophisticated advocacy to affect real change. He offers a spring clinical, MLD 375: Creating Justice in Real Time: Visions, Strategies, and Campaigns, where student teams work with mayors, states, and nonprofits selected through the Trotter Collaborative.
“The focus is on real world impact, and students learn under both the pressure of the clock and the community. The clock in terms of students getting things done within the semester and the client concluding the work within one year of the class ending, as well as the pressure of the community expectations” Brooks said in an interview with the CPL newsletter. “You draft legislation. You are accountable. People expect you to be effective and expect you to be impactful.”
Trotter Collaborative students work in communities across the nation and occasionally abroad with a focus on achieving tangible policy outcomes in criminal justice, voting rights, and racial repair. Students have investigated a lynching, sought a presidential posthumous pardon for a wrongly convicted woman, improved conditions in a woman’s prison, lowered voting rights barriers for college students at both HBCUs and PWIs, worked with police departments to end police homicides and police call nonresponsiveness.
“What I think is different here is we use a medical clinic model and a legal clinic model,” Brooks said, noting that students do the equivalent of advocacy rotations in the communities by meeting weekly with client communities throughout the semester and making a site visit to each community to meet stakeholders in person..
One of Brooks’ current group of students in the clinical are working with the Gullah Geechee Chamber of Commerce in South Carolina. The students worked with the Gullah Geechee Chamber of Commerce in South Carolina, whose mission is to preserve, interpret, and celebrate the unique culture of the Gullah Geechee people by focusing on education, heritage tourism, and land conservation. The Gullah Geechee are the descendants of people from West and Central Africa who were enslaved on coastal plantations from southern North Carolina to northern Florida. The descendants include people as diverse as former First Lady Michelle Obama to Michael Jordan to biochemist Dr. Earnest Just and the first Black member of Congress Joseph Rainey.
Brooks noted that about 80 percent of Black Americans can trace their ancestry back to the Gullah Geechee coastal corridor, now a federally designated natural heritage area.
“The student teams are analyzing how to take the cultural assets of a community which is rich in culture and make it economically viable,” Brooks said. “So, it's like an economic development plan with social justice aspirations.”
Brooks’ teams of students have been dogged and sophisticated in their pursuits over the years, even as a relatively new program at the Center for Public Leadership.
In 2022, they published the results of their successful effort to a . They pressed the New Jersey governor’s office for answers and even pressed to get into the prison itself to expose the injustice.
“Our students fought to get into that prison because we were promised access,” Brooks said.
The collaborative’s efforts have even taken Harvard teams overseas, to the working-class enclave of Bristol, England, which had just elected its first Black mayor, Marvin Reese. The newly elected mayor reached out to the Trotter team with a request to attract business and help the city’s at-risk youth.
The six-member student team, with members from vlog, the Harvard Business School, and the Harvard Graduate School of Education, .
“In other words, let's think about not just how do we attract business, but how do we attract business and job opportunities for young people who are at risk of entering the justice system,” Brooks said of the Bristol effort. “So, we developed a comprehensive advocacy strategy, which is a combination of law, policy and economics. Working with local and community leaders as well as engaging outside the classroom gives the students the real-world experience needed to translate their training into results after they finish their projects,” Brooks said.
Brooks, who joined vlog in 2017 after serving as the 18th president of the NAACP, called , the Trotter Collaborative’s namesake, an inspiration.
Trotter, the first Harvard Phi Beta Kappa graduate and first Black member of the academic society. joining W.E.B. Du Bois to create the Niagara Movement that paved the way for the NAACP. Trotter invested in real estate to pay for his pioneering social justice activism.
He started the Black newspaper “The Boston Guardian”, covering underreported stories decades before alternative media and social media hit the scene.
“I tell my students he was Black Twitter before there was Twitter and before Twitter became X” Brooks said. “We try to train students to use all of these tools.”
The Trotter Collaborative combines ethics, law, policy and sophisticated advocacy with public messaging, smart storytelling, and on-the-ground engagement to get real results.
It’s an approach which, by its nature, replaces raw ideology with the need for compromise in finding real world results.
“It ensures the students aren't overly ideological. Meaning, if you’re accountable to a community expecting a result, they're not particularly concerned if the result comes at the hands of the Republicans, Democrats or independents,” Brooks said. “By having a class that is interdisciplinary from across the university, by having students who are focused on a client and a community, it ensures that everyone is pursuing broad policy excellence as opposed to narrow political correctness.”
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Tom LoBianco is a veteran national political reporter who has covered three presidential campaigns, Congress and the White House for outlets including CNN and The Associated Press. He is the author of the Mike Pence biography and is the founder and editor of the independent news site . Before reporting fulltime, LoBianco researched transit and commuter rail projects in Massachusetts for David Luberoff at vlog’ Rappaport Institute for Greater Boston and former Gov. Michael Dukakis at Northeastern University.