Harvard Hires Urban Expert In Office of Community Affairs

The Office of Government and Community Affairs will hire a new assistant to the vice president to handle relations between Harvard and the Boston community.

Barbara Powell, administrative director of the Afro-American Resource Center for a Boston consulting firm, will assume the new job this week.

Donald C. Moulton, assistant vice president for Community Affairs, said yesterday that his office has previously dealt with Cambridge rather than Boston communities. He said that Powell was appointed to fill that void.

"The aim of her appointment is to make Harvard more easily accessible to the Boston community," he said. "There is so much more Harvard could be doing in that area."

Moulton said that Powell will conclude work begun by other members of his staff. Powell will work, for example, in the Medical School area, where the relation between Harvard and an association of Roxbury tenants is a major problem. He said that Harvard is now formulating plans to renovate a number of Harvard-owned houses in Roxbury. These renovations were first discussed in 1969.

Moulton said that no specific event prompted him to create the position. He said, however, "Unless we become concerned [with the community] we will not know what the problems are."

Powell will have official responsibility for the community relations of the Medical School area. Brigham Circle. Mission Hill, and Allston-Brighton.

Lewis A. Armistead has held similar responsibility for relations with the Cambridge community during the past year.

Moulton noted that since Powell and Armistead will be working with all types of problems, their jobs will probably cross political boundaries.

Powell, a black, 28-year-old urban affairs specialist, served with the Philadelphia Anti-Poverty Action Committee as acting director of social services for the Philadelphia Housing Authority. She was an administrator of an experimental school in San Francisco before coming to Boston with the Institute for the Advancement of Urban Education.