Harry Boyte

Harry C. Boyte is co-founder with Marie Ström of the Public Work Academy and Senior Scholar of Public Work Philosophy, founded at Augsburg University. He also founded the international youth civic education initiative Public Achievement, the Center for Democracy and Citizenship at the University of Minnesota, now merged into the Sabo Center for Democracy and Citizenship at Augsburg University, and the transdisciplinary field of Civic Studies.

From 1993 to 1995 Boyte coordinated a group of higher education institutions and civic groups in an initiative called "Reinventing Citizenship," working with the White House Domestic Policy Council to analyze sources of the gap between citizens and government and to propose solutions. In 2012 Boyte coordinated the consortium of universities and colleges, the American Commonwealth Partnership on invitation of the Obama White House. The partnership, on the 150th anniversary of the Morrill Act which established land grant colleges, sometimes called "people's colleges," developed strategies to strengthen the public purposes of higher education.

Boyte’s most recent book, Awakening Democracy through Public Work, Vanderbilt University Press 2018, recounts lessons from more than 25 years of revitalizing the civic purposes of K-12, higher education, professions, and other settings. In the 1960s, Boyte was a Field Secretary for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the organization headed by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and subsequently was a community and labor organizer in the South.

Boyte has authored ten other books on democracy, citizenship, and community organizing and his articles and essays have appeared in more than 150 publications including The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Political Theory, Chronicle of Higher Education, Policy Review, Dissent, and the Nation.