The classroom was Puerto Rico

Professor Judy Pryor-Ramirez spent two years building Leveraging Leadership for Organizational Success, a Wagner travel course that ends with a week in Puerto Rico. This summer seventeen students from Wagner and elsewhere in the university took it, after preparing in class with the island’s history, politics and the ethics of working with communities.

The framing was the “3Ps”: promises, problems and paradoxes. Because Puerto Rico’s status is territorial, students looked at how legal and political limits shape leaders in the social sector, and how those leaders keep innovating through repeated crises. Guest speakers came from community groups and the University of Puerto Rico, among them the heads of Ruta Borinquen, El Puente, Taller Salud and the María Fund.

Students spoke about what the trip changed. Kimberely Jackson-Brown, a nonprofit professional with three decades in the field, called it exactly the learning she needed this late in her career. Manuel Blasco travelled partly to understand how forces on the island shaped his grandmother’s life, which began in Santurce before she moved to New York in the late 1940s.