Eviction Notice

Three years ago, I worked with the Harvard Progressive Advocacy Group (HPAG) on a bill currently making its way through the Massachusetts State House. The bill seems extraordinarily mundane to most casual observers: It seeks to regulate companies that store the belongings of those who are evicted from their homes, prohibiting arbitrary fees and holding the companies liable for damaged property. But what I remember about it is emphatically not mundane—I couldn’t tell you about the details of the bill or the facts and figures that comprised the argument for it, but I could vividly recount to you the stories of two women I met named Rosemary and Margaret, whose belongings were all but destroyed after a no-fault eviction from their Dorchester home.

As I sat in their kitchen years after the eviction, they told me, a freshman at Harvard who had grown up in an upper-middle class suburb, how a poorly regulated system of eviction storage had forced them to pay thousands of dollars in arbitrary price increases, and ultimately allowed most of their belongings to be destroyed without compensation. More importantly, they told me how a public policy issue that before had seemed abstract and theoretical had actually had a very real impact on their lives.

Too often, such real-world experiences are missing from political and public policy work on this campus. A student involved in almost any political group will be likely to gain valuable experience working on campaigns, researching policy, planning events, gaining knowledge of the legislative process, or organizing their peers. An education in the human consequences of public policy, however, the kind of education that can only come from direct work with those who most directly bear the brunt of bad policies, is often missing. This can lead to a two-dimensional understanding of issues that is heavy on facts but light on real understanding.

Those involved in political groups never question the moral worth of direct service work, but tend to believe that more lasting and broadly-based change can be achieved through the political process. While this is a perfectly valid perspective, it works best when supplemented with the experience that can best be gleaned from hands-on work: seeing first-hand the consequences of eviction storage regulations through HPAG, or a struggling health care system through Project Health, or an underperforming school through a range of tutoring programs offered on this campus, can both inform and motivate in a manner entirely distinct from a policy paper or statistical study.

In addition to providing a greater understanding of the issues, such experiences can be helpful in determining and balancing priorities. Politics is a business where compromise is essential and unavoidable, and those who pursue it must be tethered to a sense of pragmatism in deciding when to compromise and when to stand firm. A worldview based mainly on an academic or secondary understanding of politics may lead to a set of beliefs that, like a house of cards, will blow over when an assumption is challenged, when funding for one program must be balanced against funding for another, or when an attractive job offer is made for a dubious cause.

The remedy for this lack of experience lies in both individual action and organizational efforts. On the individual level, those involved in political groups might consider volunteering, either on a short-term or long-term basis, for any of the vast range of community service opportunities offered by the Phillips Brooks House. On the organizational level, political groups would do well to organize community service days designed to educate their membership about an issue they’re working on. Additionally, they might extend such efforts, many of which happen already, to formal partnerships with direct-service groups that frequently undertake this sort of work—and then, perhaps, invite those groups to work with them on a political project of some form.

Students involved primarily in community service work can also do a great deal to see that political and policy work on this campus is informed by knowledge of the real-world consequences of policies. Those involved in direct-service work often feel that it is a more effective means of achieving positive social change, and look at politics either as a corrupt practice or a secondary priority. But by bringing their experiences and backgrounds to political work on this campus and beyond it, they can improve its depth and keep it honest.

The current divide between political and direct-service work on this campus impoverishes the understanding and integrity of the former and limits the potential of the latter to achieve more permanent change. Just as students hoping to craft public policy should learn about its real-world consequences, students hoping to make progress directly on issues should consider the ways that they can use their knowledge to work for permanent change. Otherwise, service groups will be in danger of producing well-intentioned advocates working in a system without the tools to shape it, and political groups will be in danger of churning out aspiring policymakers who have never met a homeless person.

Greg M. Schmidt ’06 is a social studies concentrator in Eliot House. His column appears on alternate Tuesdays.