Day of Service connects Harvard to Hub community

Jin-ah Kim

For the last 10 months, the ideas of collaboration and reflection have consumed Crystal M. Fleming. This past weekend, her passions bore fruit, with hundreds of members of the Harvard University community turning out to have a taste.

Nearly a year of work blossomed Saturday into the inaugural University-Wide Day of Service at Harvard, an event that brought together 400 students from 13 of the university’s schools with representatives from a number of Greater Boston service organizations and volunteer programs.

Fleming, a 25-year-old African American and doctoral candidate in sociology, began working with other Harvard students, faculty and alumni last October on the Day of Service, or DOS, a student-led initiative aiming to foster a collective effort across the university to promote civic engagement and social awareness through service.

Saturday’s event kicked off with a breakfast with University President Drew G. Faust, followed by opportunities for students to get involved with 28 different service projects, and speeches and discussions featuring invited guests from Boston and Cambridge, including former state senator and current Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts Foundation President Jarrett T. Barrios.

“This is the first ever [such] activity under the banner of Harvard,” said Fleming, her eyes shining. “We have a tradition of being decentralized at a social level and an academic level.”

Fleming said that as it stands, there are virtually no opportunities for students from different schools within Harvard to work together or get to know each other as a community—as she put it, Harvard students usually only come together when they flock to events attended by a current or former president.

“But something like an activity or doing something constructive didn’t exist before,” she said.

As she sees it, the DOS has the potential to change that culture.

“This is very unprecedented, and that’s why it took so long,” she continued.

The Chattanooga, Tenn., native specializes in cultural sociology, focusing her research on ethno-racial identity and anti-racism efforts. In two weeks, she will become a traveling scholar at the Institut d’Études Politiques (Institute for Political Studies) in Paris, where she will work on a comparative analysis of the commemoration of slavery in France, the Caribbean and the U.S.

But preparations for the DOS didn’t take a backseat to even those advanced studies.

“I don’t want to think about how many hours I spent for the event,” she said with a laugh. “I am a candidate for a Ph.D. in sociology — and I hope I am still.”

Last year, Fleming attended the Ivy Leadership Conference at Dartmouth University with second-year Harvard Medical School student Jason Rafferty as graduate student representatives. There, they learned that other Ivy League schools, including Cornell and Yale, already had similar university-wide service opportunities available, inspiring them to organize Harvard’s own DOS.

“It is not just about a one-day event, and publicity and fundraising,” said Rafferty, co-chair of DOS. “One of the big things for us is that we don’t want it to be [just] one day, and we want this to be continued.”

Fleming and Rafferty said they want DOS to be the first step toward a larger commitment to service for the Harvard community — this is where “reflection” comes in — creating a dialogue that will help galvanize existing community services across the university and get students linked up to the programs on a regular basis. Panel discussions held Monday on interdisciplinary relations and service at Harvard were intended as follow-up sessions to drive home that message.

“It is more like a celebration that Harvard is part of it; it’s included in a larger community,” Fleming said.

The ideas of collaboration and reflection seemed to be well received by DOS participants on Saturday.

First-year business school student Aduke Thelwell, joined 10 other volunteers on a visit to Paige Academy, a small alternative education institution serving the needs of the Roxbury community for over 30 years. While her team painted the academy’s facilities, they learned about the school and how over the years it has met the needs of its student population as its demographics have shifted.

“It gave me a richer sense of community outside Harvard and introduced me to an organization that I hope to build a long-term relationship with,” said Thelwell.

Another participant, business school student Christopher Laconi, volunteered alongside seven other students from Harvard’s undergraduate, graduate, extension and public health schools on a project for Boston Center for Youth and Families. Laconi’s team helped to paint around and clean up the Nazarro Center in the North End.

“I came away feeling that service isn’t a one-way street; the Day of Service wasn’t just about giving, but growing — not just about teaching, but learning,” said Laconi.

“One of lessons I learned is that we don’t just work here and live here, but that we are very much a part of the community of Harvard, of Cambridge, and of Boston,” he continued. “That community extends beyond — and between — our sections, our schools, and across our university and city.”