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CLASSACT NEWS

  • April 08, 2019 12:45 PM | Anonymous member (Administrator)

    Interested in the panels, speakers, and events happening this Friday? Click here to find and share the program for the 2019 Weatherhead Assembly!

  • February 18, 2019 8:02 PM | Anonymous member (Administrator)

    On Saturday, April 13th, the South Asia engagement group of HKS will hold the South Asia Symposium - Challenges Facing the Leaders of Tomorrow. Come to discuss common problems being faced by the region such as insufficient energy, lack of youth participation in politics, corruption in governance, the implications of regional peace and human rights in business.  

  • February 18, 2019 7:11 PM | Anonymous member (Administrator)

    On April 12, 2019, the Benazir Bhutto Leadership Program will host a symposium, co-sponsored with the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, to consider democratic institutions in the Middle East and South Asia against the backdrop of assessments of democracy in America.

    In the course of the day, BBLP will convene experts on democratic institutions in the U.S. and abroad and bring them together with ClassACT HR73 affiliates, BBLP’s inaugural Fellows at HKS, BBLP Associates from the broader Harvard community, and the general public. Together and in panels and working groups, we will explore the motives and means to deliver on the ideals that drove Benazir Bhutto’s career and generate next steps for the BBLP community.


  • February 07, 2019 11:35 AM | Anonymous member (Administrator)

    Classmate Erum Khalid Sattar writes in Newsweek about managing Pakistan's water resources. Read her article here!

  • January 28, 2019 11:47 AM | Anonymous member (Administrator)

    BBLP Fellows are on to great things! Read up on Natasha Jehangir Khan's Tribune article on tolerance, diversity, and inclusion in Pakistan. 

  • January 17, 2019 3:44 PM | Anonymous member (Administrator)

    We want to extend a big thank you to the many classmates who donated in 2018! We couldn't have done it without you! See donor list below.




    John Adams   

    Earl Bennett   

    Joe Bertagna   

    Gary Bond   

    Marion Dry   

    James Engell   

    Mark Ferguson   

    Julia Frank   

    Peter Galbraith   

    Sallie Gouverneur   

    Sara Greenberg   

    David Griffin   

    Leigh Hafrey   

    Sharman Haley   

    Jerome Harris   

    Debi Hendler   

    Thomas Howell   

    Terry Hunt   

    Andrea Kirsch   

    Alice Kleeman   

    Fritz Klein   

    Rob Lawrence   

    Anne MacKinnon   

    Peter Mazareas   

    Tom McNamara   

    Steve Milliken   

    Roger Myerson   

    Debi Neipris Hendler   

    George Putnam   

    Tina Rathborne   

    Patricia Rosbrow   

    Nick Sakellariadis   

    Joshua Schwartz   

    Charles Sink   

    Jonathan Sprague   

    Therese Steiner   

    Phil Straus   

    Leslie Tolbert   

    Seth Waxman   

    Helen Weeks   

    Juliet Wheeler   

    Henrietta Wigglesworth Lodge   

    Alfred Williams

  • November 20, 2018 12:47 PM | Anonymous

    ESPN2's Defy the Odds tells the story of the Sports Analytics Club formed by inner city youth at Edmondson-Westside High School in Baltimore and their data analytics research project to get alum Marvin Webster, "The Eraser," elected into the National Collegiate Basketball Hall of Fame.

    Click here to watch the video and read this article from The Undefeated!

    The Sports Analytics Club Program concept, the brainchild of HR73 classmate Bobby Clayton, is designed to address the underrepresentation of African American and Latinx young men and women in STEM advanced studies and STEM relevant careers. Bobby has enlisted Professor Ben Shields of MIT Sloan SchoolFaculty Advisor to the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference, as his lead partner. While underrepresented students remain a priority, the initial concept has been broadened to embrace youth, regardless of ethnic, racial, or socioeconomic status. In the 2018-19 academic year, the Program has established Sports Analytics Clubs at 14 high schools across the nation, partnering with 18 major universities. A University Advisor is selected for each Club to collaborate with the STEM Teacher Advisor, Professor Shields and SMEs (Subject Matter Experts) from the professional sports teams to design the actionable sports analytics research projects to be completed by the Club members.

    The University Advisor partnerships include such major universities as American, HowardTufts, Morgan State, George Washington, Tulane, University of Maryland Baltimore County, University of Akron, University of New Orleans, Xavier University of Louisiana, Southern and Tuskegee.

    ClassACT has gone to bat for this one. Over two dozen HR73 classmates across the country have been helping out with planning, networking, and business development.

    If you are interested in helping out with this ClassACT initiative and would like to learn more, send us a note.

    Read Marvin Webster’s bio and check out The Baltimore Sun’s story.

  • October 02, 2018 7:48 PM | Anonymous

    In August 2018 after five years in development the Osiligi Medical Dispensary officially opened, the first major step in a larger plan to bring medical care to over 200,000 members of the Maasai community in the Narok District of Kenya.

    On the Dispensary’s opening day, fifty-six patients were evaluated for their glucose level and hypertension, and eye glasses were distributed to those in need. David Weeks, Global Education Director from the Glenelg Country School and his former student, Kikanae Punyua of the local Maasai community, were joined by Dr. Tayo Awotunde, a pharmacist from Greenbelt, Maryland, who supplied medication and assisted in patient evaluations. Martin Punyua, a local Maasai medical student, supported the glucose and blood pressure evaluations. An additional pharmacist, a nurse, a lab technician, an HIV/AIDS counselor, and a nutritionist counselor, all funded by the local Narok Health Department, were also able to attend the opening. The local doctor for the Osiligi Medical Dispensary arrived the following day to meet with Weeks, Kikanae Punyua and the Dispensary governing committee of local Maasai elders.

    David Weeks and community members stand in front of the Osiligi Medical Dispensary

    The Osiligi Medical Dispensary consists of two rooms for labor/delivery and recovery and two rooms for emergency care and consultation, along with a small pharmacy, medical lab, waiting room and washrooms. By the beginning of October the facility will be open full time. 

    David and community members take a break from their work to smile for the cameraDavid Weeks, Kikanae Punyua and the Maasai elders of the Dispensary governing committee met with a local contractor to discuss the plans for the construction of a new medical facility, to be separate from the Dispensarywith an outdoor covered seating area to accommodate waiting patients and their familiesand contain a pharmacy with storeroom, a medical lab for preparing traditional Maasai medical remedies, a dentist’s office,  a vision center and an indoor waiting room. Having viewed the floor plan and determined the location for the center, the contractor and his crew began to break ground for the facility’s foundation.  Approximately $35,000 US has already been raised for construction of this new facility, expected to cost $60,000. With the development of this new Maasai Medical Center the Narok Health Department will be able to provide more comprehensive medical support to the local community. 

    Plans have already been made for constructing the Osiligi Hospital Ward to be located across from the Osiligi Medical Dispensary. This facility will provide overnight accommodations for patients and their families as well as medical personnel.  This new medical complex that will not only serve the approximately 600 students in the neighboring Ole Punyua Primary School but also the 200,000 members of the Maasai community in the Narok District of Kenya. 

    For more information contact David Weeks by email at weeks@glenelg.org or by cell at 443-794-4302.


  • September 27, 2018 10:49 AM | Anonymous

    A Tale in 2 Voices

    ClassACT reunites colleagues and friends after 41 years

    ClassACT is proud of our efforts to not only change the world, but reconnect classmates through this good work. We are excited to have reconnected colleagues and friends Charles Bush and Steve Milliken after 41 years. In this article, they reminisce on their work together as students with Phillips Brooks House, and discuss their continued efforts to make the world a better place with ClassACT.

    Steve Milliken and Charles Bush reuniting at a ClassACT event in New Orleans. Image Credit: Rick Weil

    Charles Bush begins the tale: It was the summer of ’71, a time of an emerging sense of social responsibility for me and many of my colleagues on the Harvard campus.  At Harvard, social responsibility was signified by Phillips Brooks House (PBH); where student activism and social needs were melded in the form of outreach programs.  When the State of Massachusetts announced that it was considering creative alternatives to juvenile detention facilities, PBH responded with a novel proposal: PBH to sponsor and host a pilot program in which incarcerated, juvenile offenders would be released to the custody and daily responsibility of Harvard students.  Guided by the need for a summer job no less than a desire to continue my involvement with PBH outreach, I leapt at the opportunity and was selected as a Counselor along with three of my colleagues, including one Steve Milliken.

    Novel and ambitious, even by PBH standards, the program proved to be bred of unseasoned idealism and prematurely born (in other words, we were in way over our heads). We quickly discovered that classroom etiquette was a poor prescription for our young assignees’ street smarts and institutionally-honed survival skills.  

    Steve Milliken chimes in: Schooled to believe remedial education was one key to these teens’ successful reentry, I remember engaging a windowless Harvard classroom one morning to teach math. The minute I turned to the blackboard, the boy nearest the door flipped off the lights, and by the time I had fumbled my way over to the switch, the whole class was scattered. We spent the rest of the day and night searching for our charges all over Harvard Square and beyond.

    CB: With all their ivy ambiance, the Harvard Yard and the hallowed halls of PBH were no panacea. Likewise, our daily tutoring, counseling, mentoring, and guidance failed to effect the wholesale, miraculous transformation that I, for one, had so naively assumed. Still, we hung on and hung in, trying, testing, and stretching ourselves to new limits and learning to satisfy ourselves with a small breakthrough here or there. With the program’s phase out at the end of the summer, rather than swear off the concept, Steve and I huddled up and drafted a proposal to improve and extend it the following summer.  

    SM: One positive aspect of the program was our commitment to engage these young people in their homes and communities.  While our ‘formal’ program at PBH only lasted the Summer, I stayed with several of the boys in the coming years. One young man, Tommy from Jamaica Plain, was the son of an alcoholic, who beat him regularly and severely as he drank more and more quarts of Pabst Blue Ribbon. At Christmas, Tommy asked if I’d come over to help him pick out a present for his father. When he took me into a bar, I asked whether getting his father alcohol made any sense. Tommy said nothing and just took me to the backroom fence, where the burgled inventory rivaled any retailer’s. The last police officer to arrest Tommy was also there doing his Christmas shopping.

    My time with Phillips Brooks House, and with Charles, as well as with classmate Donna Brown (and another counselor I’ve entirely lost track of), taught me more to prepare me for a life in the trial courts and as a judge than any course or other experience at Harvard. I recall advocating for one of these children at the Roslindale Detention Center to keep him home, when so many had no one in their corner. 

    The greatest learning for me, sadly, was the depth of northern racism. I had been raised naively to believe that racism was a ‘Southern Problem.’ I had equally naively assumed the youth with whom we worked would join together, but fights between Black and White children were so spontaneously explosive that we ended up separating the groups for different program elements. I shouldn’t have been surprised, especially given what we continue to learn of this pernicious nationwide heritage.

    CB: Somehow that effort faded in the haze of academic demands and eventual graduation, and along with it, any contact between Steve and me over the next forty-one years.  

    Then, in the spring of 2014, an inspired message cropped up in my email from ClassACT ’73, bearing the heading: “It's not too late to change the world.” So blatantly ambitious and improbably idealistic, the concept invited comparison to the PBH experience I shared with Steve forty-one years earlier.  I recall initially thinking, this too is probably bred by unseasoned idealism. Then came the mention that one of ClassACT’s selected Bridge programs was a non-profit foundation called JusticeAid - improbably founded by one Steve Milliken. After confirming through ClassACT that this was in fact my former PBH program colleague, I signed on with the ClassACT entourage attending JusticeAid’s 2015 concert at the New Orleans House of Blues. Over the course of the weekend events, I reunited and reminisced with Steve; all of which flowed naturally into a renewed friendship and just as naturally to involvement with JusticeAid. Over the past four years, that involvement has expanded from attending JusticeAid’s benefit concerts to serving on its Host Committees. Discovering this gratifying work and rediscovering a lost friend after so many years, have been an inspiring reprisal of purpose for me. Thanks ClassACT ’73.

    Charles Bush living it up with ClassACT in NOLA!

    SM: This to echo the great joy I took in reuniting with Charles Bush in New Orleans, 41 years after what he so aptly describes as our “novel and ambitious” efforts at Phillips Brooks House to change the lives of teenage boys released from Massachusetts ‘reform’ schools. We know what road good intentions pave, but I hasten to add that we vastly reduced the recidivism rates for these young folks who, at the time, faced well over a 90% chance of returning to detention.

    I could not have been more delighted to meet up with Charles in New Orleans, and I am profoundly grateful to ClassACT for reuniting us, and for bringing many classmates to JusticeAid for events in DC and in NYC as well. 

    - Charles Bush and Steve Milliken, Class of ‘73

    Edited by Sallie Gouverneur, pictured left with Steve Milliken in NOLA. Image credit: Rick Weil


  • September 16, 2018 12:16 PM | Anonymous

    by Sallie Gouverneur

    About 7 years ago, during an HAA breakout session about alumni engagement, Bob Bowie mentioned Early College Awareness, and Peter Mazareas asked, Whats that? In Bobs words, heres how ECA happened: Over thirty years ago Bob Clagett of the admissions office and I became obsessed with the middle-school kids from less advantaged backgrounds and their barriers to college. We put together a program in Baltimore and filmed it. The HAA let us put it on and the HAA adopted it.

    According to Peter, at the time he asked about it, there were 8 programs that Bob had set up and structured. Now there are over 36 across the country and internationally, from Greater Boston to Seattle as well as Central and South Florida to Phoenix and beyond, thanks to Peter and Larry Kahn 83, Co-chairs of ECA

    So heres some useful background data: the ratio of students to guidance counselors in high schools in America is 478/1. The average time a guidance counselor spends with a high school student? 22 minutes. AND according to the US Department of Education, as of 2016, 1 in 5 high schools have no guidance counselor at all. Low-income and first-generation students clearly need help!

    Audience listens intently to the presenter at an ECA event.Peter says its really gratifying to see the growth in the program, but added that perhaps his most personally gratifying experience was the first high school presentation he ever made, at his own urban Massachusetts high school. To speak to 475 freshmen, he put together a panel of  5 young, diverse first-generation speakers (including a football player who Peter had interviewed for Harvard, who had been living in his car in high school and too embarrassed to tell anyone. 4 years later he was unanimously elected on the first ballot to be Captain of the Harvard Football Team) to talk about the benefits of assuming you can go to college and planning for it. The students were  so focused  they didnt even look at their phones!

    This is NOT about getting kids to go to Harvard, and its not even principally about getting families to plan for paying for it (even though he co-authored the book Plan and Finance Your Familys College Dreams, and helped write and pass the legislation for 529 programs across the country).  In fact this story is not about Peter Mazareas, except to celebrate the sensation he had at that first presentation of knowing he made a difference. Getting kids attention by talking about the cost of not going to college, about relative income gaps and unemployment rates over a lifetime and that College is possible for them, he said, was most rewarding, most gratifyingI know I touched lives.

    ECA events can help any kids where theres no guidance at school or home, hence they are particularly important for reaching immigrants and students in underserved communities, out with the College is Possible message. Since financing is independent of the planning, paying may be less of an issue for low-income kids who should be eligible for scholarship funds; its more imperative to emphasize the planning process: that they can go to college if they set their sights on the goal.

    The ECA program is a model of flexibilitythe effort can be undertaken by individual classmates, entire classes, local Harvard clubs and SIGs in no fewer than 4 different forms. Bob Bowie and Peter hope HR73 classmates will be interested in participating with ECA. So Peter is eager to emphasize that the program can make it convenient for classmates to adopt: there are all sorts of resources available, including Power Points and an ECA Tool kit, and the different ECA models range from developing a classroom speakers program, to assemblies, to half-day community programs. Whatever the approach, Peters philosophy is 1 student at a time. And NOT a Harvard outreach, he said. I dont even mention Harvard except for acknowledging the Harvard-connected sponsorship of the event.

    ECA students listen intently.Click here for lots of useful information about ECA.

    Bob Bowie gets the next-to-last word: Peter has been the great leader of ECA. He is the best spokesperson for us and it now. Peter has made it his project, focused it, shaped it and has made it relevant and international. He deserves all the credit for what it has become.

    And in an After-you, Alphonse sort of dance, Peter claims that he and Larry Kahn just executed Bobs vision.

ClassACT HR ‘73
Classacthr73@gmail.com

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