Stories of Impact
Local Partnerships Research & Impact
Featured Stories
Building college awareness among Boston's youth
As part of a University-wide effort to support local Boston and Cambridge youth programming that builds college and career awareness, Harvard hosted middle and high school students through several campus programs in Fall 2022.
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Middle Schoolers Make a Green Impact on Their Community
The Ed Portal's new Environmental Ambassador's club focused on empowering students to make a difference in their community by transforming their school's recyclable items for new uses, cleaning up the Charles River, and learning to debate important issues respectfully.
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Visit Harvard Mobile App
The Harvard Visitor's Center has launched a new Visit Harvard mobile app that will provide free, self-guided, self-paced themed walking tours of the University. The first tour released on the app is a historic walking tour of the Cambridge Campus.
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Creating Community through Public Art
A group of artists and public art professionals joined a community conversation about the importance of public art, how communities are addressing public art that may no longer reflect community values, and what the future of public art looks like.
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Exploring Harvard's History
In March 2020, the Harvard Visitor Center was confronted with a new challenge: "How can we welcome people to Harvard in the passionate way we have so far, with these new circumstances?" Together they created the virtual student-led tour.
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The exploration never stops
In the middle of summer vacation, local students excitedly hopped onto Zoom ready to explore topics from biodiversity, to the seasons through art, to theatre and acting through the Harvard Ed Portal’s Summer Explorations program.
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Summer in the Arts
The Harvard Ed Portal has geared up for multiple arts and culture offerings for all ages throughout the summer, including activities for youth, concerts, an interactive mural, and public art exhibits.
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Folding Chair Book Club
The virtual series invites members of the Allston-Brighton and Cambridge communities to join together and discuss a common book.
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Community Education
Public art has the potential to make a community a more vibrant and welcoming place. Free and accessible to all, it also has the power to provoke debate about our shared cultural experience. As engaged citizens call for the removal of certain public monuments that evoke harmful systems, the conversation about the role of public art in our communities gains momentum.
This panel, including City of Boston Chief of Arts & Culture Kara Elliott-Ortega, Harvard Graduate School of Design professor Sara Zewde, and Cambridge-based artist Katherine Megumi Shozawa, came together for a discussion (moderated by Art in Between co-founder Brian Hone) focused on the future of public art and its potential to express our collective public values.
A year into the coronavirus pandemic, Allston-Brighton and Cambridge small business leaders and nonprofits gathered to examine how they've managed to preserve the vibrant mosaic of businesses that characterize their communities, and consider what the future will look like.
This panel, led by Karen Gordon Mills, Harvard Business School Senior Fellow and former Administrator of the U.S. Small Business Administration, featured opening remarks by Ayanna Pressley, U.S. Representative for Massachusetts’s 7th congressional district, and included Joseph Charles, owner of Rock City Pizza; David Maher, President & CEO of the Cambridge Chamber of Commerce; Aidan McDonough, Executive Director of Brighton Main Streets; and Rachel Miller Munzer, Big Dipper Hospitality (State Park, Mamaleh’s, Café du Pays/Vincent’s Corner Grocery).
Days before Election Day 2020, a powerhouse group of local women leaders gathered to discuss the importance of civic engagement, local participation, and why voting matters.
The panel, led by Danielle Allen, James Bryant Conant University Professor and Director of the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University, included Cambridge Mayor Sumbul Siddiqui, Michelle Tassinari, Director and Legal Counsel of the Secretary of the Commonwealth’s Elections Division, Eneida Tavares, the Interim Commissioner for the City of Boston’s Elections Department, and Tova Wang, a Democracy Visiting Fellow at the Ash Center at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government.
Read More in the Harvard Gazette
Local Partnerships
An Asylum in Allston
Harvard University welcomed Artisan’s Asylum, a local nonprofit arts collaborative, to Allston, where it will make medical gowns used as personal protective equipment (PPE).
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Harvard's Chef Hayde Cooks for the Community
Harvard's Chef Akeisha Hayde has turned her culinary skills towards feeding some of Boston’s homeless community.
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Harvard Chan students connect with isolated local seniors
Amid the pandemic, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health students are connecting with seniors at Roxbury Tenants of Harvard.
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COVID-19 Dispatch: Karen Mills
Harvard Business School Professors Bill Kerr and Joe Fuller talk with HBS senior fellow and former Small Business Administration director Karen Mills, about the effects of COVID-19 on the future of work.
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A Joyful Sorrow
Rev. Erica Rose Long, MDiv ’16, and Sarah Byrne-Martelli, MDiv ’02, discuss being on the front lines of the COVID-19 pandemic, partnering with doctors and nurses, and providing comfort and support both to Coronavirus patients and those who care for them.
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A time of need and a desire to help
The COVID-19 crisis has brought disruption, loss, and jarring change, but it has also fired in many students the desire to help and inspired creative ways to make a difference. New initiatives include Feed the Frontlines NYC, CovEducation, and Bike Harvard.
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Helping to feed the community
Harvard continues to donate food for distribution in Cambridge and beyond.
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Research & Impact
7 million face shields and counting
The Wyss Institute produces face shields at a pace of up to 400,000 per day, and over 7 million face shields have been shipped both locally and nationally for use in the health care, food service, manufacturing, and academic research communities.
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$16.5 million awarded to projects to fight COVID
A scientific consortium formed to fight COVID-19 has awarded $16.5 million to 62 research projects focused on aspects of the pandemic ranging from vaccines and treatments to explorations of immunity to divining its still-unknown reach across society.
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Volunteers juice COVID testing at Beth Israel
An outpouring of volunteers and equipment from the Harvard medical community have helped a Harvard hospital testing lab meet COVID-19’s challenge.
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How MBAs are bringing PPE to Boston Hospitals
PPEople First—a group of Harvard Business School students who are bringing critically needed PPE to Massachusetts healthcare workers—has successfully connected the PPE supply in China with the demand in Massachusetts.
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GSD begins PIH design & fabrication alongside ongoing PPE efforts
As of May 7, the Harvard Graduate School of Design's Fabrication Lab was able to produce 2,200 face visors via 3-D printing, and 3,194 shields via laser-cutting for Mass General Hospital.
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Pilot Project for COVID-19 Testing in Nursing Homes
The City of Cambridge announced a partnership with the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard on a pilot project to test for COVID-19 in nursing facilities.
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Design School turned 3D printers into PPE producers
With more than 100 3D printers, fabrication technologies, and expert guidance, the GSD is creating PPE for frontline medical personnel.
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Harvard to
help track
the virus
Students from Chan School are helping to boost the volunteer public health workforce.
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Organized to fight the pandemic
To stem the coronavirus crisis, Harvard Medical School scientists forge ahead on six key fronts.
Alumni Making a Difference
A COVID-19 battle with many fronts
Alumni spearhead public health campaigns, data visualization maps, and outbreak plans for Native American tribal leaders.
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In the trenches
Harvard alumni Judy Salerno, S.M. ’76, M.D. ’85, S.P.H. ’85, Tony Dajer ’78, and Mallika Marshall ’92 are among the thousands of medical professionals working nonstop to care for patients as the COVID-19 pandemic sweeps the nation.
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Global race to a COVID-19 vaccine
Harvard's coronavirus vaccine efforts by alumni and beyond join the race to develop a vaccine that could help end the coronavirus pandemic.
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From a care of souls to the care of bodies
Kevin Cranston, M.Div. ’86, and his team of epidemiologists and lab scientists are working hard tracking cases of COVID-19 and helping advise local and state officials on policies to best mitigate its spread.
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Harvard Gazette: In the Community
Explore more stories in The Harvard Gazette about lifelong learning, shared achievements, and opportunities on Harvard's campus and surrounding communities.