Originally from Hopewell, New Jersey, Dhruv Kapadia MPP 2027 began his public service journey as a high school student activist. He now serves as an elected school board member of the Hopewell Valley Regional School District Board of Education, representing Hopewell Township. Because it’s a regional district, it represents three municipalities and has nine elected board members—seven from Hopewell Township, one from Pennington Borough, and one from Hopewell Borough.
Outreach and Belonging Associate Nidhi Nair MPP 2026 spoke with first-year MPP students about their paths to HKS. Having recently completed his summer internship between his first and second year, Dhruv reflected on his trajectory from student activist to elected official, his ongoing service on the school board while at HKS, and his experience as a Dukakis Fellow in the Office of Illinois Governor JB Pritzker. Here’s what he shared.
What first made you want to run for office?
Hopewell is a very racially homogeneous suburb; nine in ten residents are white, median home values top $650,000, and high school graduation rates exceed 95%. Growing up, my brother and I were often among the few students of color in our classrooms. These disparities weren't unique to Mercer County: New Jersey’s public schools rank among the most segregated in the country, yet I rarely heard local or state leaders acknowledge this systemic failure. Politicians were willing to celebrate our public schools without confronting which children the system was leaving behind. Around the time my parents moved there, more South Asian and East Asian immigrants started joining the community. As that population grew, it was clear their political representation did not.
In high school, I pushed our school board to invest in marginalized students and adopt progressive, anti-racist changes to policy and curriculum. I often felt like one of the few voices pushing ideas that represented both my own progressive perspective and those of other marginalized communities in Hopewell.
By the time I was preparing to graduate from Boston University, I hoped others would step up to run for local office, but those gaps remained. So, during my senior year at BU, while I was still serving as student body president, I made the decision to run for an unexpired one-year term on my school board. Ultimately, as a proud progressive 21-year-old South Asian alumnus, I won the election by more than 300 votes.
I was reelected to a full three-year term the following year. While studying at HKS, I continue to travel back to New Jersey each month to attend meetings in person and serve the community that gave me the opportunity to succeed, thrive, and lead.
What drew you to HKS at this point, and how did your elected experience shape what you wanted to learn?
Before coming to HKS, in addition to serving on the school board, I worked as a legislative director in the New Jersey State Senate, so my background is deeply rooted in state and local government. When I was applying, the Taubman Center for State and Local Government and the Bloomberg Center for Cities stood out. I think HKS offers some of the most engaging and immersive state and local opportunities, both in coursework and experiential learning.
Having run for office, I also wanted to deepen my understanding of campaigns and organizing. HKS does a phenomenal job of bringing in professors like Anthony Foxx, Marshall Ganz and Cornell Brooks, who draw on incredible lived experiences and teach these often intangible skills in a structured classroom setting.
“HKS teaches organizational thinking and theoretical frameworks that, when combined with real-world campaign and governing experience, are incredibly powerful.”
Can you walk us through any courses, professors, research centers, or activities that have positively influenced you at HKS so far?
Above all, my Transition Term was a phenomenal experience. As the first year research assistant for the program, I met with newly elected mayors, county executives, and governors across the country. As a 2025-2026 Transition Term Fellow, I returned to New Jersey with Jacob Essig MPP 2027 to support the incoming administration of Jersey City Mayor James Solomon MPP 2012.
Over two weeks, I developed a comprehensive executive order that restricted the use of city property for federal civil immigration enforcement, established modernized protocols and training for city employees responding to ICE activity, and expanded legal support for immigrant residents. I also drafted a citywide rent-control audit designed to identify landlords illegally overcharging tenants, shift the burden of uncovering rent-control violations from renters to City Hall, and create a public database of rent-protected units. As the child of working-class South Asian immigrants, seeing both executive orders signed by the Mayor was one of the proudest moments of my career.
Sharing an HKS connection with Mayor Solomon helped build immediate trust, which allowed us to work on sensitive, high-priority policy issues from his campaign. Even though the term lasted only two weeks, working directly with a mayor in a fast-paced, high-ambiguity environment was incredibly formative and led to meaningful policies for the people of Jersey City.
How have your previous experiences in government prepared you for your time as a Dukakis Fellow?
Before joining the Pritzker administration as a Dukakis Fellow, I had worked across several levels of government—as an elected school board member, as a staffer for Boston Mayor Michelle Wu’s Planning Advisory Council, and as legislative director to New Jersey State Senator Andrew Zwicker. I had not, however, experienced policymaking within a governor’s office.
Each of those roles prepared me differently. In the New Jersey Senate, I regularly briefed my principal before votes, conducted extensive legislative research, and coordinated with advocates and state agencies. My work with Mayor Wu’s Planning Advisory Council taught me how to engage bureaucratic stakeholders within City Hall, identify competing priorities, and build consensus around internal recommendations. Serving in elected office has trained me to consider not only what appears analytically sound, but also how a proposal will affect residents, how it will be communicated, whether agencies can realistically implement it, and how it may be received politically.
What work have you focused on in Governor Pritzker's office?
I had an incredibly dynamic summer working within Deputy Governor Grace Hou’s Health and Human Services portfolio, which oversees ten state agencies and 25,000 state employees.
My work focused primarily on three areas: housing, healthcare, and problem gambling. On housing, I successfully codified transit-oriented development revisions to the Illinois Housing Development Authority’s 2027-2028 Qualified Allocation Plan—the framework used to evaluate developments seeking low-income housing tax credits—to more strongly prioritize affordable housing near public transportation. Public subsidies should not simply enrich developers or produce units that look affordable on paper; they should create homes where working people can access jobs, schools, healthcare, and daily necessities without being forced to own a car.
On healthcare, I helped conduct a cost-benefit analysis of covering GLP-1 medications through the State Employees Group Insurance Program. My central task was to assess the fiscal and public health implications of expanding access to life-changing medications while also protecting taxpayers from extraordinarily high drug prices.
Finally, I developed an in-depth report on the rapidly evolving gambling ecosystem in Illinois and had the opportunity to brief Governor Pritzker directly on my findings. I met with the Illinois Gaming Board, Department of Human Services, subject-matter experts, and counterparts in peer states to develop a suite of potential policy responses. With the expansion of sports wagering and video gaming terminals, alongside the rise of unregulated prediction markets, problem gambling is becoming increasingly prevalent across the country.
What have you learned through this summer internship?
I have learned the real power of policymaking resides in people. In policy roles, it can be easy to get absorbed in statistics, fiscal projections, and desk research, and in the process lose sight of those most affected by the decisions being made. But behind every spreadsheet, memo, and cost-benefit analysis is someone’s life.
Increasing Low-Income Housing Tax Credit funds may help finance more developer projects, but its impact is limited if residents of an affordable development cannot get to work without purchasing a car or walking 45 minutes just to reach reliable public transit. Covering GLP-1 medications may produce flashy headlines, but an analysis of its long-term health benefits is incomplete if it ignores adherence, side effects, unequal access, or the misinformation patients receive from pharmaceutical companies that stand to make billions. Opening casinos, expanding sports wagering, and legalizing prediction markets may generate significant sums of state and local tax revenue. But can that revenue be viewed as a success if it is extracted from low-income Black and Brown communities, people experiencing problem gambling disorders, or young people targeted by an industry determined to make them lifelong customers?
Effective policy analysis, execution, and implementation require centering the people government is meant to serve. In an era of extreme wealth inequality, collapsing trust in institutions, and intense political polarization, policymakers must remember who they are accountable to: economically disadvantaged and politically disenfranchised communities, and the working people whose labor built and sustains this country—people who often never have the chance to enter the rooms where decisions about their lives are made.
Amid the numbers, facts, and figures, policymaking is fundamentally about people. If we are not doing it for them, then who are we doing it for?
What advice would you give to prospective students who are considering HKS after a campaign or an elected experience?
The skills you gain as a candidate or elected official are invaluable, but many of the technical and analytical skills operating in the background can be sharpened at HKS.
HKS teaches organizational thinking and theoretical frameworks that, when combined with real-world campaign and governing experience, are incredibly powerful. You’ll find yourself in class learning a framework or how to write a memo and think, “This would have been really helpful in my last campaign,” or “This will be great for my role on the school board.” The tangible skills from your work and the tools you learn at HKS reinforce one another beautifully.
Quick questions:
- Favorite class: API-203M with Professor Liz McKenna
- Favorite study spot: Red booths in the JFK Jr. Forum
- One bucket list item you want to accomplish before graduating: See U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders, Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, or New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani at the Institute of Politics
Hero and inline images courtesy of Dhruv Kapadia MPP 2027.
