The Merrimack Valley Transit Authority needed data on travel patterns for local workers. The city of Somerville, Massachusetts, needed an inventory of vacant business fronts and a plan for responding to them. Provincetown, Massachusetts, needed a town satisfaction survey. And Hartford, Connecticut, needed to study the success of their youth programs.
HKS students dove right in.
In Professor Christopher Avery’s class, “Experiential Learning at the State and Local Level,” students don’t just learn about the work of state and local government. They do the work of state and local government.
To prepare for the course, Avery, who is the Roy E. Larsen Professor of Public Policy, carefully built a robust network of willing government officials, like the chief medical officer of MassHealth Quality, the executive director of the MBTA Commuter Rail, and the town manager of Needham, Massachusetts—and asked what they needed help with. What was a small, semester-long project that they’d love to complete but didn’t have capacity for? Where could they use a public policy student’s advice?
Avery also asked students about their interests—what did they care about? What had they learned, theoretically, that they wanted to test out in practice?
He then matched students with government officials—many of whom he found through the HKS alumni network—and they got started. Students only had one class session a week; one of the government officials would give a lecture about their work. The class was locked in and eager for the wonky details of managing a government—a session on procurement, for instance, got rave reviews. Students were expected to use the time they’d normally spend in a second class session working on their projects. They also worked in small groups with a set of course assistants Avery called “superstars,” each of whom had completed a summer fellowship working in state or local government themselves.
Bridges and connections
Avery has a few goals for the course. As faculty director for the Master in Public Policy program, he sees the class as a “bridge” between the more theoretical work MPP students do as first-year students and their more implementation-based capstones during their second. He’s focused on making “students feel that the problems that are important to them are more tangibly connected to what we were teaching them.”
He’s also hoping to help students build connections and gain informal mentors in fields that interest them. In a tough job market, these mentors can offer crucial advice, ideas, and further contacts—or perhaps end up as a connection to a job themselves.
Finally, Avery wants to give students a chance to explore a potential career. Do they enjoy the project they’re working on? Would they want to do it full time?
“Everything sounds good on paper, but everything also sounds daunting and far away on paper. So it could go both ways,” Avery explains. “Sometimes, you’d say, ‘I’m not doing that.’ Well, great. Now you’re not going to go down that wrong path.”
Other times, he says, a student might leave the project thinking, “‘that would have so much meaning for me. I’d love to see if I could do that.’”
He wants to give them the chance to consider different paths. It felt especially important, he said, to focus the class on state and local government right now.
“The world’s getting more complicated, the problems are getting more pressing, and there’s fewer federal dollars and initiatives to address them,” he explains. More students are looking for jobs in state and local government, and Avery wants to make sure they have the templates for what that could look like.
“The world’s getting more complicated, the problems are getting more pressing, and there’s fewer federal dollars and initiatives to address them.”
“I was mind-blown”
Georgie Carey MPP 2027 was one of those students. She already had a strong template for the work of an elected official; she’d been deputy mayor in her town of Mosman Park, Australia. But she wanted to learn about the administrative side of government.
Also, she says, “I consider myself a bit of a local government nerd.” She was matched with Peter Lombardi, town manager of Brewster, Massachusetts. Lombardi and his team asked Carey to conduct a needs assessment for a community center, as Brewster had recently acquired a large plot of land.
Carey dove into research and helped put together the request for proposal (RFP) for the center—adding that the RFP process was “really fulfilling—strangely fulfilling.”
She came away proud of the project, confident she could call on Lombardi for career advice, and excited to bring back what she’d learned to her work in Australia.
“Brewster has a town meeting style of governance, which was completely new to me. As someone that’s really interested in direct democracy and participatory democracy, I was mind-blown,” she said. “It gives me food for thought about other governance styles out there, and when I go back home to Australia eventually, I want to take some of the learnings from that.”
“Beyond exciting”
For Jacob Sher MPP 2027, the chance to deep-dive into local government was part of the draw not just of Avery’s class, but of HKS in general.
“It was a huge reason why I came to grad school in the first place,” he explained, “to have hands-on experience, beyond just things I’ve researched before.”
Sher worked with the transportation planner for the city of Malden on their Safe Routes to School Program. He was particularly moved to see the short-term recommendation the city had for making school routes safer, like repainting crosswalks or adding temporary physical barriers for cars. These were simple, fast fixes that could make a real difference for students right away.
“That is the kind of thing that doesn’t really happen at other levels of government. You don’t have that level of creativity, and, willingness, and excitement, and urgency to act,” Sher explained. “Even though the long-term projects will come, seeing the short-term projects in the meantime, and people’s drive to get them to happen, was beyond exciting.”
The experience helped solidify Sher’s sense of what he’ll do when he graduates next year.
“It reaffirms that I would like to work specifically in city and local government, going forward,” he said. “Learning about it in a classroom is one thing, but seeing what goes into it, and how it actually feels to implement things, and discuss proposals, and see the people they impact, is totally different.”
Celebration and connection
As the semester came to a close, Avery invited Carey, Sher, and their classmates to a celebratory breakfast. It was 8:30 am on a Friday morning, a week before exams—and the room was full. He’d invited government officials to show up too, and all across the tables, students were connecting with their mentors.
A small group of students gave one-minute presentations on their projects, and their mentors got the chance to celebrate them. Dhruv Kapadia MPP 2027 described his work with the Massachusetts Senate Ways and Means Committee on how to deploy roughly $1.25 billion in surplus Fair Share Amendment revenue, focusing on one-time capital investments in K-12 education. Morgan Snyder MPP 2027 shared how she worked with the Boston Mayor’s Office of Women’s Advancement as they assessed how to fund and provide menstrual products across all the city’s public schools. Sitara Pal MPP/MBA 2028 talked about her work helping a state housing stabilization program streamline elements of its application processes.
After the presentations, students and their government official mentors shared coffee and bagels. Isha Bodas MPP 2027 explained how instructive her project—working with the MassHeath Office of Long Term Services—was for her.
“I come from the private sector; I didn’t have any public sector experience, so this was a really good opportunity for me to get actual first-hand exposure to the areas I’m interested in working in after I graduate,” she explained.
At the breakfast, she reunited with her government mentor, Christine Peterson MPP 2021, who is the director of operations and finance in the MassHealth Office of Long Term Services (and a HKS alum). Bodas had joined her on a project to streamline the provider cost reporting process, and she was impressed.
“She came in and asked smart questions right away. She understood what we were trying to get at,” Peterson explained. “For people in public service right now, the thing that we are so short on is time—to think creatively and sit down and own something. For somebody to take an issue that’s been on our to-do list forever and come at it with fresh eyes and renewed enthusiasm for public service is fantastic.”
Carey’s government partner, Lombardi, spoke of the importance of their collaboration, too.
He said Carey’s work advanced a “priority initiative” for their town, and said her work added “meaningful value” to their final project. He was also hopeful about what Avery’s class means for the state at large. “This new class and its focus on experiential learning helps build connections with local and state government in Massachusetts in areas where developing the next generation of leaders is critical,” he said.
For Avery, this feedback isn’t surprising. He believes deeply in his students, and he knows their work matters. He also feels it’s urgent, and he has a clear message he wants them to leave his class knowing:
“Start going after the thing you care about—because the world needs you to do it.”
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Inline photograph by Steph Stevens
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