UNC MPA faculty members Charles Szypszak, Maureen Berner, and Jonathan Morgan will discuss what the MPA is, who it is for, and how it relates and differs from the J.D. degree and Public Policy degrees.

Differences in curriculum and career outlooks will be discussed.

PUBA 767 will look at the relationship between Government, Nonprofit, and Private sector organizations through collaboration theory and a system thinking framework that allows for a deeper look at what influences how these networks of relationships work, to challenge how we think it works, and bring awareness and understanding to develop the public service leadership skills and strategies needed for effective community level collaboration.

This course is designed to help students develop a deep understanding of concepts, techniques and theories of nonprofit fundraising. After an introduction to philanthropy, students will utilize tools and resources for fundraising and analyze and evaluate fundraising methods. This course is applied meaning it is important to have a relationship with a nonprofit organization where you can access current fundraising collateral and apply principles of fundraising to the improvement of fundraising methods/products.

In this course we will examine theories and concepts of nonprofit organizational governance structures. Through this course, students will develop a foundational understanding of board governance fundamentals, board development, board leadership, and common practices of high performing boards.

Social capital can come in many forms (trust, civic engagement, community attachment, and social networks) and has become one of the most contested concepts in social sciences. This course is designed to balance theories, methods, and applications, drawing on literatures from sociology, public policy, public administration, communication, media studies, and management.

This skills-based, half-semester course familiarizes professional program graduate students with insights into effective data communication, exposes them to a communication framework, and allows them to hone new skills through the completion of various assignments. Covered topics include developing clear messages, designing effective graphs and tables, formatting written documents, and creating multimedia presentations. While new tools and techniques feature in this course, the overarching goal is a timeless one: the sharing of ideas.

This course examines mediation principles, and the role, ethics, and techniques of ombudsman in public sector. Models of mediation are compared, and students share in class their application and/or adaptation of mediation to their current or desired public sector duties.

NOTE: Students may take either PUBA 768 or 772.

This foundation course introduces students to the historical and contemporary social, economic, political, and ethical context of public administration and governance in the United States. Students gain an understanding of public institutions and values and develop skills for interpreting and critically evaluating American public service issues.

PUBA 747 requires students to reflect on and demonstrate how they apply and integrate their learning from five required MPA courses and their professional public service work experiences to successfully respond to an applied research problem. Students will select from a list of applied research problems, conduct a literature review, collect data, and identify their preliminary findings. These steps will be informed by their professional public service work experiences given the applied research needed to produce their thesis substitutes, which will be written and evaluated by a three-person committee during PUBA 748.

In PUBA 748, students will continue to work on their applied research problem from PUBA 747. Students are expected to enter PUBA 748 with a complete (clean) dataset, including a preliminary analysis that has been revised to include the feedback from PUBA 747 instructors. In this course, students will continue with the data analysis, discuss the findings, and develop recommendations.