Sustainable Support

Claudia’s and Roger’s careers reflect their shared passion for creating thriving, balanced, and livable environments. Roger, whose professional focus was on the built environment, received his Master’s in City Planning in Urban Design from Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD) in 1977. He is now retired after serving 35 years as Cambridge’s director of urban design. Claudia, who describes her career path as “winding and multifaceted,” received her Mid-Career Master’s in Public Administration from HKS in 1996. She is a nonprofit leader and educator who most recently served as the founding president and executive director of Grow Native Massachusetts, a nonprofit that advocates for the importance of ecological land stewardship on all lands, whether large or small, urban or rural, or public or private. She believes that sustaining biodiversity and addressing climate change are the two critical environmental issues of our time, and that they can be solved only with broader civic engagement by all of us exercised in the context of healthy democracies. 

“I grew up in upstate New York on the Massachusetts border in a rural context, so a love of the land has always been at my heart,” says Claudia. Roger is from Arkansas; after earning his Bachelor of Architecture degree at the University of Arkansas, he taught architecture in French in Tunisia as a member of the U.S. Peace Corps. “I loved the cosmopolitan world,” he says. “Upon returning from North Africa, I had never been to Boston, but I packed up everything and came here.”  

Claudia was a schoolteacher in New York state when, she says, she moved to Cambridge in part because of the women’s movement. “It was 1977, and there was this wonderful energy here; we were changing the world.” She focused her professional efforts on environmental education: Over the years, she worked as director of education for the Appalachian Mountain Club and as director of the Drumlin Farm Wildlife Sanctuary for Mass Audubon; she also served on numerous boards, including the New England Wild Flower Society. 

Her longtime passion for photography and the arts led her to earn her first master’s degree from the Rhode Island School of Design. After RISD, Claudia’s interest in shaping public policy coincided with her work as a communications designer. She founded a national project intended to drive demand for recycled paper; in 1992, MIT Press published her book, Recycled Papers: The Essential Guide, a comprehensive resource for printers, designers, and others that promoted best practices and dispelled myths about recycled paper. It also served as an important resource for government officials, informing work at the federal and state level to develop policies that regulated misleading environmental marketing claims and promoted genuinely recycled products.  

Claudia says her interest in HKS was spurred by attending a Forum event where the special vibe left an impression. “I was just blown away and so excited. The energy, the people … I fell in love with the Kennedy School.” To help weave together the many experiences of her career, she decided to pursue another graduate degree, this time at HKS. “I loved the interdisciplinary community of professionals, the balance of theory and practice, and my diverse classmates. These were real-world folks coming from different perspectives, from many countries and from national, nonprofit, military, government, and corporate jobs,” she says. 

Roger was similarly impressed by the Kennedy School. “My background is as an architect, a planner, and an urban designer, and I was a government servant for most of my career. So I obviously appreciate the strength of the Kennedy School.”

As Cambridge’s director of urban design, Roger helped to shape the city today, including the HKS campus. “I focused a lot of my work on master plans and the importance of the complex urban fabric and connections within it. When I was a student at the GSD, no one thought of Harvard Square as being close to the river, because the connections were so poor. Now you can go from the renovated T station, down through Brattle Square, and down that wonderful passageway between the Charles Hotel and the Kennedy School through the park and on to the river.”

The couple, who recently relocated to Maine, lived in West Cambridge for decades, where they created a natural oasis at their two-family home. “By creating a healthy native plant landscape throughout our relatively small property, we documented 81 species of birds using our gardens,” says Claudia. “What I was creating in this urban context was beyond my wildest dreams, even as an educator in ecology. This truly informed my current thinking about the importance of every piece of land to biodiversity and to sustaining life on earth, and how humans have so much potential to have a positive impact.” 

Roger says the gradual improvements and renovations to their Cambridge home over many years serve as a metaphor for the city’s evolution. “In 1979, when I started to work for Cambridge, we had acres and acres of rust belt, industrial areas. Little by little, we got to the point where Cambridge is today—a vibrant, livable city with mixed-use development, urban parkland, accessible transit, and pedestrian connections.” The important role that Roger played in this evolution was recognized in 2009 by the American Institute of Architects, when he was honored with the national Thomas Jefferson Award for “lifetime achievement as a public architect.” 

Claudia and Roger are determined to help the next generation learn the skills they need to actively champion a sustainable world—and are hopeful that others will build on their generosity to support future Kennedy School students who are committed to this mission. Says Roger, “I'm really pleased to be supporting the Kennedy School because we need greater civic leadership in every part of government and throughout the institutions of society at large if we are to meet today’s challenges and to help us get through this fraught world.” 

Citing the example of young climate activist Greta Thunberg, Claudia says that while we can’t predict who our next leaders will be, “nurturing this capacity at every level is so important. And I think the School is one of the best institutions that I know of for doing this.”