HKS Magazine — Winter 2022 Feature: Very Local Roots

“[Field labs are] effectively a clinical program at the Kennedy School … based on the concept that the best way to really learn financial management and how to budget … is to do it.”
— Linda Bilmes

VERY LOCAL ROOTS

The urban field lab work stretches back to 2005, when Kennedy School students began heading out to cities and towns for on-the-ground learning and fieldwork. Those students didn’t have to travel far. Just a few miles up Massachusetts Avenue, in not-yet-booming Somerville, a young mayor was eager for help.

Joseph Curtatone, elected the previous year, had bold and practical ideas but scant resources with which to push them forward. He wanted expert advice on designing data-driven, activity-based budgeting. He needed to evaluate the 311 customer service line. And he knew he had to translate data from city departments into usable formats for city programs.

At the Kennedy School, Bilmes wanted to apply her own deep expertise in how governments work (and why they don’t) to give her students more exposure to urban problem-solving in the real world. With Curtatone, she saw an opportunity. Bilmes recalls the day he came to her class, then still mayor-elect, to encourage students to volunteer for projects in Somerville. He told the class, “We want to do all these fancy things, we want to do basic things. We want to turn the city around. However many hours you can spare, I want 10 times that much.”

She thought he’d get a couple of volunteers. In fact, 67 of the 97 students in the class signed up. “They did it all semester, and then through the rest of the year,” she says. “So that was the genesis of the experiential learning project, which has grown into a huge program.”

Jerome Lyle Rappaport, a Boston philanthropist and good-government activist who passed away last year (see p. 60), was keen to support that work. He already had a long track record of connecting city officials in greater Boston with the Kennedy School. Since 1981, he had been sponsoring annual scholarships for city and state officials in the region to earn Kennedy School Mid-Career Master of Public Administration degrees so that they could professionalize Boston-area governance. He had expanded that support in 2001 with the launch of the Rappaport Institute for Greater Boston at the Kennedy School, with programs including summer fellowships for students.

With Rappaport’s philanthropic support and Bilmes’s leadership, the Greater Boston Applied Field Lab took off. Since those first Somerville projects in 2005, the lab has dispatched more than 500 students from across Harvard’s graduate schools to take on issues of vexing technical projects throughout greater Boston.

The curricular educational premise is simple: The students take their classroom learning out to cities and towns for intensive interactions that turn theory into practice, addressing problems from homelessness to mental health crises to sewer system failures. The city officials they work with get ideas and analysis from the graduate students, who often have specialized professional experience.

In the years since, Bilmes has partnered with more than 75 mayors, “and one thing they always say is they are amazed, and I’m always amazed, at how the students become experts in the topic within a few weeks. That’s partly because they tend to be very good in topics that are very data intensive and crunchy — where they can get their fingernails dirty and then they can add value. So it is a win, win.”

Winter 2022 | Harvard Kennedy School