Don Waisanen

Explores the escalating issue of voter ID laws in the United States, highlighting the challenges they pose for millions of eligible voters. Sheds light on the obstacles faced by voters in states with stringent ID requirements, and advocates for the implementation of clear, accessible, and cost-free national standards to safeguard every citizen's right to vote.

Offers a unique approach to fostering innovation within organizations, combining empirical research, literature reviews, business cases, and interviews to provide a data-driven recipe for innovation.

Offers a new leadership framework for the next generation of nonprofit professionals. Outlines three dimensions and eleven themes for the theory and practice of leadership standpoints, including fostering inclusive practices, performance optimization, and adaptable thinking.

Explores how citizens can be better trained in democratic perspectives and skills, and suggests that improvisational theater techniques can forward the communication, leadership, and civic skills our world urgently needs. Illustrates how improv-based teaching and training methods can cultivate empathy, understanding, and essential communication and leadership abilities, and offers practical tools for educators, civic advocates, communication and leadership scholars, and professionals to enhance democratic engagement and civil discourse.

Offers an investigative, behind-the-scenes look at New York City's participatory budgeting (PB) process, and provides a clear account of issues related primarily to transparency, manipulation, and favoritism that are often overlooked in the PB literature. Recommends substantial reform, specifically as it pertains to a lack of transparency, manipulation by city agencies, favorable treatment of insider proposed projects, and a failure to reveal the basis of project costs.

Explores the challenge governments and similar institutions face in effectively communicating with immigrants to ensure they listen to and act on their messages. Examines the ways in which governments integrate migrants into diasporic political, medical, educational, and other systems, and how migrant-sending countries communicate with their emigrants abroad. Presents strategies and policy recommendations that many governments and institutions can use to engage their citizens or clients ethically and effectively.

Explores the phenomenon of political conversion stories in public discourse, tracing their historical evolution from religious contexts to contemporary political messaging. Examines how these narratives have been employed in the culture wars and analyzes autobiographies that have contributed to their use in U.S. politics. Highlights the prevalence of conversions from the ideological left to the right and discusses the significance of political conversion for democratic communication and communities.