OPINION: Tracing my journey to public service through mentoring
Last year, I received a beautiful note from a young man I first met 29 years ago. He told me that the time we spent together those many years ago had changed his life.
What he didn’t realize is that he changed my life as well.
The career that has taken me to City Hall in New York began at the Mission Hill Housing Projects in Roxbury, Boston. During my freshman year in college, I began volunteering at an after-school program run out of Phillips Brooks House, Harvard’s public service organization. The children I met were as smart, energetic and filled with promise as my Harvard classmates, yet their path to the American Dream was littered with roadblocks, simply because of where they lived.