I’ve known for a while that I want to be a community developer, and I want to start that work in my hometown of Detroit. I desire to create beautiful spaces and experiences for people that enhance the fabric of a neighborhood, community, and city. Having been involved in community-based organizations and non-profits since I was child, and working in public service in New York City after college, my pivot to HBS was to dive into the hard skills and action-based work that I was missing to make my community development goals more realized in a more fulfilling way. I plan to do this through real estate development and business investment. Having studied architecture before transitioning to urban and African-American studies in my undergraduate program, it was a relief to discover that developers, not architects, actually build buildings – a lesson that came alive this summer as I worked on a community-based real estate project in Detroit. [...]

In November of 2015 I set in the upper deck of Faneuil Hall in Boston, looking on 300 people from 80 countries congregated to take their oath as the newest crop of US citizens. Among them was my girlfriend, now fiancé, who had navigated her own journey to the US as an asylum seeker 14 years prior, arriving here with no contacts and no English, ready to start a new life. Seeing her would have been an emotional experience no matter what, but having been supported through chemo for the prior few months, arriving together on the other side, healthy and ready to celebrate her accomplishment, elicited one of the most powerful feelings of gratitude I had ever experienced. [...]

I launched my HBS journey this summer as a Social Enterprise Summer Fellow in the Office of Massachusetts Governor Charlie Baker. After completing my first year of the MPP/MBA joint degree program at the Harvard Kennedy School this past spring, I was eager to spend my pre-HBS summer working in government, applying my background and newfound policy analysis toolkit in the public service arena. Prior to graduate school, I had spent six years as a strategy consultant at Oliver Wyman and FSG. These experiences had ignited my passion to help organizations solve complex social problems at scale. While my past consulting engagements spanned the corporate, nonprofit, and philanthropic sectors, I had yet to immerse myself in the public sector. Through the HBS Social Enterprise Summer Fellowship, my goal was to learn how government works from the inside, and to develop a deeper appreciation of the opportunities and hurdles involved in effecting change at the policy level. [...]

Imagine if, when it came to delivering city services online, your local government thought like a Silicon Valley tech company. Just like Amazon anticipates that people who bought tennis rackets might also want some tennis balls, the City might anticipate that people applying for a moving permit might also need to figure out their trash pick-up, parking passes, and voter registration. [...]