PHILLIPS BROOK HOUSE ASSOCIATION INCORPORATED
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Mission Statement
PBHA strives for social justice. As a student-led organization, PBHA mobilizes volunteers in collaboration with Boston and Cambridge partners to address gaps in opportunities and resources. We develop student and community leadership to creatively meet critical needs and advocate for structural change. PBHA seeks to promote social awareness and community involvement at Harvard and beyond. Core Values Love and Compassion. We choose to see people as we see ourselves and to act in a way that upholds every person’s human dignity through mutual empathy. Social Justice. We demand equity and believe that self-actualization results from the coming together of community to ensure the opportunity for each of its members to thrive. Community Building. We believe in the mutual understanding fostered by community, recognizing and promoting collaboration and fellowship as essential parts of service and life. Stewardship. We celebrate an environment of integrity, accountability, and sustainability, mindful of the balance between institutional memory and intentional innovation to meet the changing needs in our communities. Growth of People and Learning. We honor growth and learning as integral to building collective leadership, life skills, and social justice awareness in current and future generations of change agents. Diversity. We endeavor to build a supportive environment that shares power with our constituents through strong relationships built on mutual respect across identity lines and fosters an organizational membership that includes a range of experiences and mirrors the representation we believe should exist through society at large.
About This Cause
PBHA is an independent student-run, staff-supported community-based nonprofit (EIN 04-6046123) based on the Harvard campus. For more than a century, PBHA has offered vital experience to generations of leaders in service while strengthening partnerships between students and local communities. PBHA’s Mental Health Committee, which paired students with patients in mental health facilities, was a model for President Kennedy’s VISTA. At the same time, PBHA developed a volunteer teacher’s project in Africa (Project Tanganyika) that was studied in the creation of the Peace Corps. In the 1970s, PBHA’s Undergraduate Teachers Program (UTEP) was one of the first attempts to use student volunteers to support understaffed schools. Today, PBHA continues to innovate in the relationship between students and public housing communities, particularly through its comprehensive and academically rigorous out-of-school time programming, which provides both year-round (to stem leaning loss) and year-to-year (first grade to graduation) continuity. PBHA recognizes client priorities as it develops programming. Across neighborhoods, PBHA programs fall into distinct categories: adult services; advocacy, health, and housing; after-school; mentoring; and summer. All of PBHA’s youth programs (after-school, mentoring, and summer) work to create safe, nurturing spaces in which committed volunteers reinforce concepts learned in school, foster critical thinking, and encourage a love of learning through tutoring, mentorship, and enrichment, while building the personal and civic responsibility and community awareness of student leaders and others in the community. Out-of-School Time Developed in consultation with the Boston and Cambridge Public Schools, the Boston Housing Authority, tenant task forces, community groups, and families, a large part of our programming is focused on affordable, quality out-of-school time care. Programs serve more than 1,000 low-income youth in Cambridge, Chinatown, Dorchester, Mission Hill, Roxbury, South Boston, and the South End. Youth typically enter our programs through our neighborhood-based summer camps serving 800 young people each summer. All 11 camps challenge campers to build reading, math, and science skills. For seven weeks every summer, they offer enriching and exciting curricula during the three-hour morning session, while afternoons are devoted to educational field trips throughout Greater Boston to complement classroom activities. They employ 130 college students from around the country as directors, senior counselors, and support staff, while 100 at-risk teens, many of them former campers, serve as junior counselors, or full-time teacher’s aides and mentors. During the school year, many of those same campers enroll in PBHA’s free after-school programs, focusing on enrichment curricula, homework assistance, ESL instruction, and recreation for two hours a day, four days a week. They may also choose to participate in one of our mentoring programs, which promote academic achievement, personal development, and racial tolerance. Junior counselors are encouraged to deepen their involvement through PBHA’s term-time Leaders! Program, which offers them one-on-one and group mentoring, college preparation, and leadership development, along with a part-time service placement. The impact of PBHA’s out-of-school time programs does not end once youth graduate from high school. Former participants have gone on the successful college careers at Boston University, Brown University, Bunker Hill Community College, Dartmouth College, Harvard University, Northeastern University, Salem State University, the University of Massachusetts, and Wellesley College, among others. Adult Services In addition to our out-of-school time programming, PBHA’s adult services meet the differing needs of our constituents. Programs run the gamut, from prisoner education, to ESL and citizenship classes, to senior visitation programs, to computer instruction. One of PBHA’s largest growing programs is Alzheimer’s Buddies, whose 60 volunteers build meaningful emotional connections with dementia patients during weekly one-on-one visits. Advocacy & Organizing Social activism is a vital part of PBHA’s mission. We seek to address the root cause of social problems as well as their immediate effects. Advocacy programs adapt and change over time, but they currently include the Small Claims Advisory Service, which provides low-income clients with legal education and advocacy, and the Student Labor Action Movement, which is committed to activism and education in support of social and economic justice. Housing PBHA runs a winter emergency shelter and a summer transitional shelter – the only student-run homeless shelters in the country. A third shelter employs a youth-to-youth model to provide a safe and affirming environment for young adults experiencing homelessness. It has doubled the number of beds in Greater Boston dedicated to that very vulnerable population. Harvard &Beyond PBHA alumni have used the lessons they learned directing PBHA programs to found their own nonprofits all over the country, among them Roger Baldwin at the American Civil Liberties Union, Eric Dawson at Peace First, Katya Fels Smyth at On the Rise and the Full Frame Initiative, Vin Pan and Darin McKeever at Heads Up, and Lindsay Hyde at Strong Women, Strong Girls. Other PBHAers, including a U.S. president, vice president, four senators, an associate justice of the Supreme Court, and a Massachusetts governor, chose a life of public service after volunteering at PBHA.