New partners, new projects in 2016

The Dukakis Center has been engaging in quiet but effective outreach since last summer. Our intention has been to strengthen the new identity we established for the Center in 2014, in terms of expertise and of capacity. The results of our efforts are evident on our website.

For one thing, we have new many partners. Dukakis Center staff have attended events hosted by leading institutions in Paris and Brussels, such as Breugel, France Stratégie, the Institut des Relations Internationales et Stratégiques, the European Council on Foreign Affairs, and La France s’engage. There is every reason to believe that scholars from one of these institutions and others throughout Europe and the US will take part in the near future in events we will organize in Thessaloniki and in Athens. more

Additionally, the Dukakis Center has become an institutional member of several professional networks, notably in the field of democracy promotion. These include the Talloires Network, Tufts University, the International Observatory on Participatory Democracy in Barcelona, Participedia, at the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation, Harvard, and the Network of Democracy Research Institutes, National Endowment of Democracy, Washington, DC.

Finally, we have collaborated with several local and national partners to organize our most recent events, including the French Institute of Thessaloniki, TV100, the Navarino Network, the Kalliopi Koufa Foundation, the Public Opinion Research Unit of the University of Macedonia Research Institute, Fulbright Greece, and Social Impact Hub Athens.

Meanwhile, we continue to diversify the contributions we make to the scholarly and practitioner communities of which we are a part. Among the new projects under way we point to two that are carried over from last year, "The future of democracy and "Public service in the 21st century," both with discrete service learning components. The first is the main theme of the Second Festival of Civic and Urban Culture, to take place throughout April 2016. The latter is the inspiration of several of the Festival’s actual activities, notably two new Dukakis Masterclasses and a workshop in civic engagement tentatively scheduled for April 19.

We call ourselves a think tank, largely for want of a better term. In fact the Dukakis Center is fast becoming a prototype for a new kind of academic and outreach center, one which will give new meaning to public service in the coming decades.