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Dear Mr. [John] Bilafer,
Thanks for your inquiry on behalf of the Town of Arlington about service projects the Harvard Kennedy School (HKS) has been doing for local municipal governments. There are several avenues through which Arlington might attract some HKS students to work on specific projects you identify as priorities.
The most intensive work, and the work you are probably most familiar with, is the work done through Professor Linda Bilmes’ spring course on Advanced Applied Budgeting. This is an advanced course where 4-5 teams of students spend the entire semester tackling a series of related real-world budget and/or municipal management projects for a local government client. The work is extremely high quality because Prof. Bilmes and I spend a lot of time coaching the students to produce professional quality results. Students typically spend a great deal of time working in city offices understanding process, reviewing data, and interviewing staff. The client is always the Mayor, but he/she must assign a deputy who is our day-to-day contact to field questions and address any challenges that may arise. We’ve worked for
Newton, Somerville, the Somerville school system, and Boston. Past projects have included converting line-item budgets to activity-based budgets to help make the budget more transparent, developing a customizable 20-year debt model to support financial decisions around building a school, designing a fee-for-service structure to help sustain an after-school program that was losing grant funding, and evaluating the cost of maintaining streetlights in-house vs outsourcing to a private contractor. For this coming spring, it’s likely will work with Boston again, but if you have ideas for specific projects, it’s worth an email just to let us know. I’ve copied Professor Linda Bilmes on this message so you will have her email info as well. Here’s a link to an article on our Boston project last year:
Another option is to define a specific project and submit it as a potential topic for a thesis project (we call it a Policy Analysis Exercise or PAE). Our 200+ second-year Masters in Public Policy (MPP) students are all required to complete a client-based PAE. They do it alone or in teams and they are advised by a faculty member and guided through the process via a required research seminar. Students generally pick the client in the fall, work intensively in January, and submit the final document in March. It may be too late to attract a PAE student this year, but you can learn more by contacting Laura_Homokay@harvard.edu. Here’s some more info on the PAE process: http://www.hks.harvard.edu/rappaport/service/pae.htm
Each summer, the Rappaport Institute for Greater Boston, a university-wide research center based here at HKS, provides several funded 10-week summer internships for students to work in state and local government. My understanding is that most students define their own projects and pitch them to government clients, but if you have specific needs, you should contact David Luberoff, their Executive Director, so he can alert students who approach him for guidance in identifying topics. Their web site is as follows: http://www.hks.harvard.edu/rappaport/service/fellows/program.htm
Finally, we are experimenting with a small number of 2-week immersion projects in January as a non-credit option for students wishing to apply their class-room training to a real world issue. This would involve little faculty oversight as it’s primarily a student project, but it’s a good way to get 3-4 bright young people to spend 2 weeks looking at your issues and writing up some findings for you. It’s too late to participate this year, but you can contact me if you want to submit an idea for next year. Here’s the link to the listing of this year’s projects: http://www.hks.harvard.edu/degrees/teaching-and-courses/academic-calendars-and-schedules/january-session#heading_03
Please don’t hesitate to contact me if I can be of further help.
Best regards,
Carolyn
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Carolyn Wood
Assistant Academic Dean
Harvard Kennedy School
79 John F. Kennedy Street, Mailbox 68
Cambridge MA 02138
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