KSG Students To Aid Clean-Up

This spring break, 18 Harvard students will apply the knowledge and skills they acquired in the classroom to help one New Orleans neighborhood recover from Hurricane Katrina.

The Kennedy School of Government (KSG) announced last week that it will send students from three Harvard schools to the Broadmoor neighborhood next Sunday to continue a project that started a year ago.

KSG sent 23 students to Broadmoor last spring, and another six over the summer of 2006. While the previous volunteers concentrated on helping to organize the reconstruction of homes and schools, the focus of the coming trip will be gathering data to measure the effectiveness of the neighborhood’s redevelopment efforts.

Henry Lee, a lecturer in public policy at KSG and the faculty chair of the project, said that this year’s focus on data collection is motivated by a need to convince outsiders of the benefits of investing in the area.

“A lot of foundations are saying, ‘We want a little more evidence before we put up big money to help New Orleans,’” Lee said.

Doug Ahlers, a fellow at the KSG’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs and a former resident of New Orleans, began the Broadmoor Project last year when he was looking for one neighborhood in which to focus Harvard volunteer work and resources.

Broadmoor was chosen out of the 49 New Orleans neighborhoods that were flooded by Katrina because its demographics most closely resembled those of New Orleans as a whole, he said.

Ahlers added that, in his experience, focusing aid on just one community had proven to be a more effective approach than more centralized methods of rebuilding—and this has been borne out in Broadmoor.

“What’s really quite amazing is that compared to the other neighborhoods, Broadmoor is showing tremendous signs of actual, physical, on-the-ground progress in terms of its recovery, and that can be measured with a walk or a drive down the street, those sounds of hammers and buzzsaws, the number of people moving back in,” he said.

Carolyn E. Wood, an assistant academic dean at the Kennedy School who volunteered in New Orleans last year and will return again with the upcoming trip, said that the results of the trip will be valuable to “all other regions affected by disaster.”

The Broadmoor Project will also provide seven or eight residents of the neighborhood with the chance to come to Cambridge and participate in executive training programs this summer.

For this year, the Broadmoor Project has received a grant of $500,000 from the Shell Exploration & Production Company, Lee and Ahlers said.

—Staff writer Brenda C. Maldonado can be reached at bmaldon@fas.harvard.edu.