By Nicole Morell, Taubman Center for State and Local Government
Late last year, a small group of people gathered in front of the Belmont, Massachusetts Select Board to present possibilities for the future of an underdeveloped area of the town. The presenters were deeply invested in sharing the community-driven vision, which they’d spent multiple months working on. But this group wasn’t made up of consultants or Belmont residents—it was a team of students from Harvard Kennedy School and Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD)’s Urban Politics Field Lab, an experiential learning course that connects students with local leaders to help solve real, near-term issues facing communities in Greater Boston.
Kennedy School students Alisa Bhakta MPP 2027, Marin Furuyama MPP 2026, and Sebastian Fernandez MPP 2026, along with Graduate School of Design students Claudia Sachs and Pranav Subramanian, represented Team Belmont, one of six student teams from the Fall 2025 course working on projects ranging from rat-proofing waste collection to preserving community harbor access. Team Belmont worked closely with town stakeholders to strategically shape a vision plan for a corridor in Belmont to increase commercial development to mitigate its current overreliance on residential property taxes.
While each student team focuses on the needs of one specific community, the solutions they develop often have applications beyond city borders. “I was excited to be a part of the Belmont team because what the town is facing seems to be very applicable to a lot of suburban development and the challenges of balancing taxes and development,” says Subramanian.
A history of community solution building
The Urban Politics Field Lab, a fall offering, was launched by Emma Bloomberg Associate Professor of Public Policy Justin de Benedictis-Kessner as a companion course to the popular spring semester Greater Boston Applied Field Lab, created and led by Daniel Patrick Moynihan Senior Lecturer in Public Policy Linda Bilmes. Both courses are funded in part by the Phyllis & Jerome Lyle Rappaport Foundation through the Rappaport Institute for Greater Boston. “I’m grateful to the Rappaport Foundation for making it possible for us to expand the field lab to a year around program—so we can train dozens more students and assist far more local communities, including Belmont,” says Bilmes.
The Greater Boston Applied Field Lab centers on budget and finance, while the Urban Politics Field Lab covers a broad range of challenges facing city politics. In both courses—which are open to students enrolled in HKS and GSD—students use their skills and insights to deliver actionable plans to stakeholders. “When I first came to HKS, I knew that our students wanted to be prepared to work in government or adjacent fields,” says de Benedictis-Kessner. “I wanted to give them the best tools to do that, and I knew that actually working in government was the best way to do so.” In addition to on-the-ground work, the courses also feature guest lectures on topics relevant to projects.
In the Fall 2025 course, student teams worked on projects in Belmont, Brookline, Provincetown, Boston, and Portland, ME. “When communities hear about the chance to partner with Harvard students, they’re really eager to do so,” shares de Benedictis-Kessner. “Past communities that have worked with the Field Lab students always want to work with them again and recommend them to other cities and towns.”
Building connections with residents, developers, and stakeholders
In Belmont, students partnered with Select Board Member Elizabeth Dionne and Director of Planning and Building Christopher Ryan, who served as the team’s client contacts for the project. Dionne and Ryan met with the students frequently and were on call to answer any questions. Outside of these client meetings, students research, assess, and meet with stakeholders to build a framework for deliverables, including a final presentation and a memorandum.
Team Belmont students used analysis of existing spatial and survey data, additional surveys, focus groups, meetings with leaders from peer cities, and one-on-one meetings to support development of a vision that incorporated local values, needs, and priorities in planning for potential commercial redevelopment in the corridor. “We were very deliberate in making sure everyone felt heard through our work,” shares Fernandez. “Even in the last weeks of the project we were adding interviews with people because we wanted to stand up there and present and be confident that we had actually spoken to as many people as we could.”
In December, all project teams from the course presented their final projects to stakeholders. Bhakta, Fernandez, Furuyama, Sachs, and Subramanian presented to the Select Board at a public meeting, which included a full room of residents, with more watching virtually. “We had such great clients in Elizabeth and Christopher, that when it was time to present, we weren’t nervous, because if we got pushback, we knew what to expect,” says Furuyama.
In their final presentation and memorandum, Team Belmont presented a vision plan that incorporated feedback from community members, developers, and stakeholders, highlighting a menu of options to help the city move forward in deciding the development path for the parcel. Many of the student team’s deliverables have been included in the Vision Plan for corridor, which the Belmont Planning Board will vote on adopting this month. If adopted, the plan will inform a zoning overlay for the corridor.
Ryan says that the work of the students was instrumental in moving forward with potential zoning changes that can drive development. “This vision plan was really important because it’s a great foundational piece for the zoning and provides a lot of justification for the project,” he says. Dionne notes that even before students shared their final presentation, she could see the impact of their work. “I began to feel really good about this as the project was going along, because we had some stakeholders, especially a couple of developers, who were very skeptical,” she says. “And after speaking with the students, the attitude was a 180 shift, where they were excited by the students' thoughtfulness and the questions that they raised.”
While the deliverables for the cities conclude with the final presentation, what students take away from the course threads through their HKS experience. “I learned from the Urban Politics Field Lab just how inherently interdisciplinary this kind of work is,” says Bhakta. “Addressing the challenge we worked on in Belmont required combining multiple skill sets and perspectives and using a range of tools (including community engagement and quantitative analysis). Having teammates from different backgrounds, like Pranav and Claudia from the GSD and Marin and Sebastian as second-year public policy students with experience under their belt, as well as the expertise from the teaching team, client contacts, and stakeholder engagement, really underscored how interdisciplinary collaboration was essential to producing a thoughtful and practical work product.”
Though their time working in Belmont is complete, the students are eager to keep an eye on the conclusion of their work. “I think it'll be fun to watch and see how this moves forward,” says Furuyama. “I imagine his project will get a lot of attention, and it'll be interesting to see it all unfold.”
This story originally appeared on the Taubman Center for State and Local Government website.
