Making Service Mainstream

Brian C. Conroy ’05 had time to fill. He wanted to get involved in something outside academics, but nothing sparked his interest—and, honestly, he wasn’t sure any of the options at super-serious Harvard would.

So when his friend Edmund M.F. Rogers ’05 encouraged Conroy to audition for CityStep, the public service group whose red tennis shoes conspicuously dot Harvard’s Ivy landscape, he was skeptical. “I didn’t really want to join a club that was just a serious, kind of boring, endeavor,” he says.

But a year’s worth of prodding from Rogers convinced Conroy to show up for CityStep auditions in the fall of 2002. “[Rogers] roped me in by telling me just to audition, because auditions are fun,” he says. “And they certainly were.”

Conroy is in his second year in City- Step, and he’s hooked.

In maybe the last place he thought to look for a social outlet, Conroy found what he calls a “huge social force” in his life. Most public service isn’t known for its parties, team cheers or matching outfits—but that is exactly what 50 red Converse-clad undergraduates have found in CityStep.

Last fall, community-service giant Phillips Brooks House Association (PBHA) suffered what it called its most severe shortage of volunteers in recent memory. By September 2002, PBHA was 250 members short of its usual size and worrying it might have to downsize. Today, PBHA President Kristin M. Garcia ’05 says the group has remedied the shortage. “But,” she adds, “we’re always looking for more volunteers.”

Meanwhile, CityStep, which operates outside of PBHA, as part of the University-run Public Service Network (PSN), was turning away wannabe members by the dozens. This year, about 90 students applied for only 20 positions. And the program’s directors were receiving phone calls from colleges across the country who wanted to build similar projects on their campuses.

CityStep has succeeded in making public service mainstream. People like Conroy, who says he probably wouldn’t have considered community work if it weren’t for CityStep’s uber-visible presence, have been recruited into a world usually dominated by a different kind of Harvard animal— “a totally different set of people,” according to PBHA Vice President Chinwe S. Kpaduwa ’05.

Tacking guaranteed social capital onto meaningful community work, CityStep reels in the otherwise service-disinclined.

Building on that success, CityStep Executive Director Laura E. Weidman ’04 sent in an application this year to the Pforzheimer Fellowship program proposing to start a CityStep clone at the University of Pennsylvania (UPenn). The proposal went through. After she graduates, Weidman will move to Philadelphia and begin laying the groundwork for UPenn’s CityStep.

The cult is spreading.

They Like to Party

CityStep members spend the year teaching Cambridge Public School students an original dance piece, which the young Cantabrigians—flanked by their Harvard teachers—perform in an annual show every April.

But in many ways CityStep is more like a sports team than a public service program. They don’t just mentor; they bond, fraternize and fete—and they have the whole campus watching them do it. “CityStep is an intense service opportunity, but a structure socially also—for the teachers,” says Michael H. Kalin ’05, one of seven executive directors on force. The organization is divided into “teams” of seven each. Each team works with one classroom of fifth- or sixth-graders for the entire year.

“The main thing is teamwork,” Weidman says. And the team mentality extends outside their teaching duties. In between its two matinees Saturday, the entire CityStep company—six classrooms worth of Cambridge Students and all of the Harvard CitySteppers—let loose on the fields behind the school, eating cake, playing basketball, tossing footballs and just generally hanging out.

Later that evening the CityStep Harvard contingent let loose again, but this time minus the braces-wearing, lunch box-toting set.

At a list-only after-party, the Harvard CitySteppers showed just as much enthusiasm and energy on the Spee Club’s dance-floor as they had exuded on Cambridge Rindge and Latin’s stage that afternoon. And they earned just as much attention. Unaffiliated laymen downstairs at the Spee could clearly hear the unmistakable echoes of “ooh, ahh, CityStep…” coming from upstairs.

It certainly wasn’t the first Saturday night they’d partied together. CityStep members rave that the organization has connected them to a close social network. “You spend such an inordinate amount of time with these people, it’s impossible that they wouldn’t become a big part of your social life,” says Executive Director Abigail L. Fee ’05.

The cult aspect is all the more powerful because of how loudly it’s broadcast. When the CitySteppers enter a party, they make their presence known. And they make it fairly clear all prospective dance partners better clear the floor.

The public image is only calcified every time CitySteppers enter any campus dining hall, chanting that notoriously nagging cheer and stomping their bright red shoes. And when the troupe members talk about their largest commitment, they like to emphasize it offers a special kind of niche. “CityStep is unique in a lot of ways,” says Weidman, “but a big one is the amount of cohesion and community felt among company members.”

Of course, CityStep isn’t the only service group—or extracurricular club, for that matter—to forge bonds as an after-effect of its institutional borders. It’s just one of the best at advertising that.

“Of course there’s bonding [in PBHA programs]!” says Kpaduwa. “Of course people are having a good time and doing their service.” In particular, Kpaduwa mentions the Freshman Urban Program (FUP), run under PBHA’s watch. Though it attracts a different kind of Harvardian, in many ways FUP is the alternative set’s CityStep; notoriously incestuous, famously social, FUPpers have a bond the rest of us will just never understand.

But CityStep offers the same kind of valuable community work to which FUPpers probably would have gravitated even if service weren’t institutionalized in a broad-reaching organization like PBHA.

The Service Side

Bi-weekly meetings provide members teacher-training and give the separate teams a chance to exchange stories and management strategies from their respective classrooms. That support was especially welcome this year for one team, whose students posed discipline challenges CitySteppers said were unprecedented in the group’s recent history.

Laurie A. Maranian ’07 says that she had one student who was especially difficult. But after brainstorming sessions with the company, she tried a new tact. “I had a breakthrough with [him] when I asked him to teach me to Crip-walk,” she says.

All members interviewed by FM said the social-club side of CityStep wouldn’t be so powerful if it weren’t matched by the group’s service commitment.

“I wanted something outside of academics that would be fun and also would have a little bit of meaning,” says Conroy. “[CityStep] fulfilled both of those goals.”

Kalin agrees. “CityStep is a lot of fun, but we are working towards concrete and important goals,” he says.

For Maranian and her team, a year’s worth of struggles with verbally and physically aggressive fifth-graders ended on a high note that made the whole thing worthwhile.

The same child who had posed perhaps the largest challenge—the one Maranian connected with through a memorable Crip-walk—turned out to be the one she’ll consider her biggest success.

After their final performance, City- Steppers traditionally exchange programs, signing their best wishes to their fellow dancers and teachers. “On the last day, he wrote, ‘Thanks for believing me’ on my program,” Maranian remembers. “It made me melt that he actually opened up to me.”

She plans to return to the company next year.