20th Anniversary Symposium
Date and Time
On June 18, 2025, with the generous support of the Rappaport Foundation, the Taubman Center, Harvard Kennedy School, and the Bloomberg Cities Initiative, we convened an immersive, participatory symposium to celebrate and reflect on the Applied Field Lab’s twenty years of success. The symposium brought together nearly 200 program alumni and city partners, together with a group of distinguished speakers that included Congressman Seth Moulton, Lt. Governor Kim Driscoll, and former Mayor Joe Curtatone. The symposium’s innovative format included experiential mini-workshops and “participatory panels” that reflected the Lab’s pedagogy of active problem solving. Topics included capital budgeting, climate resilience, artificial intelligence in government, federal and state funding gaps, and infrastructure plan implementation.