HURRICANE MARIA, which struck in 2017, was the strongest hurricane to make landfall on Puerto Rico in almost a century. In the aftermath, the entire island lost electricity, and access to clean water and cell phone communications was almost entirely knocked out. More than 300,000 homes were damaged or destroyed, and over 200,000 people left the island for the U.S. mainland.
Yasmin Serrato-Muñoz MPA 2021 helped the governor of Puerto Rico in post-hurricane recovery efforts as part of the 2021 HKS Transition Term.
Launched in 2018 by HKS students and run by the Taubman Center for State and Local Government, Transition Term is a nonpartisan program that matches newly elected leaders with teams of HKS students who join them full time during the Kennedy School’s January term. Students help accelerate projects according to their host administration’s priorities and needs during their early weeks of governing. Since 2018, Transition Term has placed nearly 235 students in the offices of 83 newly elected mayors, county executives, and governors spanning the country—from Arizona to Hawaii to Indiana.
“I was in the transition term for Governor Pedro Pierluisi,” Serrato-Muñoz says. “It was amazing to be there, seeing a new administration come in, especially in a place like Puerto Rico, a territory, not a full state. That’s a very unique experience, to learn about the culture, the migration shift, and the way that a territory functions.”
It was because Serrato-Muñoz had experienced the hurricane herself in her hometown of Orlando, Florida, and had witnessed the arrival of many Hurricane Maria refugees that she decided to apply for this project.
“In Puerto Rico, we worked on school reconstruction efforts for the public schools that were either deemed unsafe because of the hurricane or were no longer needed due to the population migration,” she says. “A lot of school buildings were either vacant, underutilized, or just unsafe. My cohort helped to figure out what do we do with these buildings.”
The efforts of Serrato-Muñoz and her cohort contributed to an ongoing recovery process on the island, including infrastructure and construction rebuilding, which is steadily improving conditions in Puerto Rico, despite challenges from annual storms.
(Read more about Serrato-Muñoz and Transition Term in the Summer 2023 issue of HKS Magazine.)
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Bolstering Greater Boston
TWO DECADES AGO, faculty member Linda Bilmes, the Daniel Patrick Moynihan Senior Lecturer in Public Policy, launched MLD-412, “The Greater Boston Applied Field Lab,” an advanced experiential learning course in which teams of students learn rigorous skills in municipal finance and operations by working directly in local communities. The program, sponsored by the Taubman Center for State and Local Government, the Rappaport Institute for Greater Boston, and the Bloomberg program, has enabled more than 600 students from across Harvard University to work in more than 90 jurisdictions, completing projects on hundreds of challenging real-world problems.
Over the last 20 years, these students have gone into local communities to solve public problems. They have worked throughout Greater Boston and the United States, Canada, and Puerto Rico, presenting their findings directly to mayors, members of Congress, and senior city officials. Over two-thirds of field lab alumni go on to work in government at the local, state, regional, or federal level—or in related capacities, such as at government think tanks.
The program has achieved notable successes in working with Boston to open the Harbor Islands ferries and to launch the Hubway bike sharing program (now called Bluebikes), as well as working on projects in Brockton, Cambridge, Everett, Gloucester, Hingham, Hull, Lynn, Newton, Newburyport, New Bedford, Provincetown, Revere, Salem, and Somerville, and at the Perkins School for the Blind, the MBTA, and Massport, as well as state projects including the Department of Revenue, State Infrastructure Bank, and Joint Committee on Education. Teams also worked with the MA-6th Congressional District (Seth Moulton MPA 2011).
One example of the field lab’s impact was its work with Somerville Mayor Joseph Curtatone MC/MPA 2011 for more than a decade (2004–2015) to help transform the city’s budget, finance, and management from serious difficulties into what The Boston Globe dubbed “The Best Run City in Massachusetts.” The field lab students worked in teams, embedded in every municipal department to help convert the opaque line-item budget into a more transparent program-based format, giving administrators and citizens insight into how money was being spent. This enabled Somerville to prioritize key city services such as schools, public safety, street cleaning, and snow plowing, and to make data-based decisions on taxes, fees, contracting, and performance targets. In 2014, Standard & Poor’s raised the city’s bond rating to AA+, the second highest on the agency’s scale.
The field lab program is highly selective, and many of the students pursue dual degrees in design, urban planning, or business. In the past five years it has grown to encompass a second field lab focused on local governance issues, DPI-325, “Urban Politics Field Lab,” taught by Associate Professor Justin de Benedictis-Kessner. The program also includes follow-on summer fellowships.
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Banner image: A mother holds her baby at their makeshift home in Puerto Rico after being mostly destroyed by Hurricane Maria. Photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images
Inline image: Linda Bilmes and Justin de Benedictis-Kessner (third and fourth from left) used virtual reality headsets to demonstrate to city planners the redevelopment possibilities in the city of Everett. Photo by Jessica Scranton