The Institute of Politics at Harvard Kennedy School (IOP) was founded in 1966 as a memorial to President John F. Kennedy. Over 50 years since its founding, the IOP is a major force on campus – as the College’s primary hub for politics and public affairs, it now houses 16 student-led programs and two coalitions that reach over 800 students, making it the largest undergraduate group. Our mission is to inspire undergraduates to consider careers in politics and public service through uniting and engaging them with academics, politicians, activists, and policymakers on a non-partisan basis. We not only seek to facilitate political discourse across differences, but also to provide students with meaningful opportunities to both learn about and meaningfully participate in the political process.



Given that the Institute is an endowed pillar of the Harvard community, its expansive network is composed of both student and non-student leadership. The IOP’s Student Advisory Committee (SAC) serves as the Institute’s primary body for student leadership, vision-casting, and program management. It comprises 32 undergraduates, including the Chairs of each of our 16 programs, three pairs of student Co-Directors specializing in IOP-wide priorities – membership management, diversity and outreach, and special projects – and a four-person Executive Team consisting of the President, Vice President, Treasurer, and Communications Director. Each position on the Student Advisory Committee is either elected or appointed by application. The broader body of the Institute is composed of internal program leadership and general members who participate in the aforementioned programs. The non-student branch is further divided into the IOP Staff and the Senior Advisory Committee (“Big SAC”, if you will). The IOP Staff manages institutional coordination and administrative tasks, while the Senior Advisory Committee convenes to discuss the broad vision, priorities, and direction of the Institute.



With numerous layers of leadership and membership at the IOP, there exists no shortage of excitement for our political future. As we round out our first semester of entirely in-person programming since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic – a semester that has included the onboarding of several new student leaders and staff members in addition to the creation of one pilot program and a new IOP-wide service coalition – we’re in a period of reimagining the networks, structures, and processes that existed in a pre-COVID world. As we endeavor to adjust to the needs of our ever-growing family of future public servants, we seek to address the current challenges with the IOP’s existing communication network. From our perspectives as student leaders who have, at times, struggled to navigate this complex network of leadership, it is evident that gaps in communication have the dangerous potential to lead to a misalignment of objectives and vision, in addition to potentially placing a major strain on the students who serve as links between our siloed layers of leadership groups. As such, we seek to better understand the structure of the IOP’s communication network and the existing relationship between student and staff leadership at the IOP in order to improve our collaboration strategies and better support our membership.