Park Cleanup Caps A Week of Public Service Celebration
by JonGlassman on October 30, 2009 in HKS News, News
The Student Public Service Collaborative (SPSC) held its annual Fall Day of Service (FDS) on Oct. 22, asking HKS students, faculty, and staff to leave the ivory tower for a few hours and get their hands dirty maintaining a number of Boston parks.
About 50 members of the HKS community participated in FDS, including Dean Ellwood and about 15 other staff and faculty members. The participants split themselves between Smith Park and Union Joyce Park in nearby Brighton, MA, where they helped collect trash, clean up fallen branches and leaves, and spread mulch.
The event coincided with the end of Public Service Week, a university-wide initiative spearheaded by Harvard President Drew Faust. While many students saw FDS as the culmination of Public Service Week, SPSC and the administration were eager to point out that volunteer community service is just one of many ways in which HKS students are already involved in public service.
“One thing that’s wonderful is that this week we’ve been able to illustrate the variety of ways that people contribute to doing public service and enhancing the public good,” said HKS Dean David Ellwood.
In addition to the FDS parks clean-up, some of the week’s events at HKS included a Hauser Center event featuring George Soros and Michael Sandel and Forum events with Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick, David Axelrod, and present and former leaders of the Carr center. The Office of Career Advancement (OCA) also sponsored a weeklong “Demystifying DC” event series, all highlighting various forms of public service.
In response to student comments that the Public Service Week events at HKS seem no different than any other week’s events, Dean Ellwood said, “if you tell me that’s a typical week at the Kennedy School, that makes me thrilled. We’re all here because we want to make the world a better place, and we can and should be living that every day.”
Some students questioned the wisdom of designating a Public Service Week, pointing out they are already dedicated to public service at HKS. Sarah Wald, chief of staff and senior advisor to Dean Ellwood, said in response, “Public service is not something in isolation that we want to do just one week per year, but it’s important to sometimes take a step back and explicitly point it out and celebrate it.”
The one-year-old SPSC worked hard to celebrate public service at HKS. During the summer, SPSC co-directors Pamela Chan, MPA ’10 and David Baumwoll, MPP ’10 chose the parks clean-up for FDS in order to address the SPSC mission to “integrate public service into the culture of HKS, offer a continuum of service opportunities, and support the pursuit of careers in public service.”
According to Chan, FDS is “a community building event to bring together people who normally don’t get to interact. We came up with the idea for park services because it was something that could be done in one day and that everyone can participate in and that would allow for active interaction [among students].”
Chan added, “The city spends a lot of money trying to deal with falling leaves every year. They were so enthusiastic to have a group of people willing to come out and spend a day to rake up the leaves
and help do some park maintenance. It is a public service that’s helpful for the Boston community, but it’s also helpful for our community as we get to know each other better.”
The administration reached beyond the student body to encourage involvement from the greater HKS community, offering paid time off to HKS staff, continuing a policy started during SPSC’s Spring Day of Service (SDS) event last year.
According to Zara Snapp, MPP ’10 last year’s co-organizer for SDS, “there was a very strong representation of administration and staff. It gave us an opportunity to shed our institutional roles and just hang out and spend time together.”
