Tammy Dong: Reflecting on my 2023–2024 NLC Menino Fellowship

The Menino Fellowship has been an amazing experience and widened my perspective on the work done by municipal leaders across the country. During the 2023-2024 school year, I was a senior finishing my degree in International Relations. I hadn’t taken any classes in urban policy before, so the research that I did during the course of the fellowship was a chance for me to expand my knowledge and really get to know some of the amazing work being done to improve life for people living in cities, towns, and villages across the U.S.

The first part of the fellowship was a Directed Study under Professor Loretta Lees during the fall semester. I wrote a paper titled “Renovation or Demolition: The Fate of NYCHA Public Housing.” Throughout the semester, I researched the history of repair and renovation of the New York City Housing Authority’s (NYCHA) public housing system from its inception in 1935 to the present day. I focused on a plan proposed by NYCHA at the beginning of 2023 that entailed demolishing the Fulton and Elliott-Chelsea Houses in Manhattan and replacing them with new high-rise buildings for the current tenants. This recent plan is based on the reasoning that some of the current public housing stock is in such a state of disrepair that it is more financially viable to demolish and rebuild it than to try to fix all the underlying issues.

I chose to do my Directed Study on a topic close to home for me. I was born and raised in New York City, where rising rent prices and homelessness are major issues. Throughout the research process, I received guidance from Professor Lees, who has a great deal of knowledge on urbanization and housing. For example, she lent me a few helpful books that enhanced the depth of my knowledge on public housing in America. One of them was “Purging the Poorest: Public Housing and the Design Politics of Twice-Cleared Communities” by Lawrence J. Vale.

One of my favorite aspects of this fellowship is how it tailors the experience to your personal interests and growth. It was my first time doing a Directed Study, and I’m really glad I could do it on a topic I was passionate about. I also felt like the internship component of the fellowship really contributed to my professional growth, as I was able to pick what projects I wanted to do and build connections with the people I met.

For the second part of the two-semester fellowship, I was in Washington, D.C., interning at the National League of Cities (NLC) while taking evening classes with the other BU in DC students. It was my first time in D.C. During my semester there, classes were held in the BU DC office at Dupont Circle. The office was right next to many prominent think tanks like the Brookings Institution and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. One of the great things about living in D.C. is the access to a variety of think tanks, Smithsonian museums, and government buildings. One piece of advice I would give to someone who is doing the BU DC internship program and has never been to D.C. before is to set specific goals at the beginning. As the semester progresses, juggling both work and evening classes can drain your energy, so I think prioritizing what you want to accomplish in the approximately three months you have is helpful. There’s so much that one can do in D.C. that I felt like the semester flew by quickly.

At the same time, my internship was an unforgettable experience that I will forever cherish. I worked on two main projects with different teams in NLC’s Center for Leadership, Education, Advancement and Development. Everyone there was welcoming and supportive. I still remember my first day in the office, nervous but excited, as my supervisor took me around the office and introduced me to everyone. Although different teams were working on different things, everyone believed in the value and impact of the work they did, which I found very inspiring.

For my first project, I looked into the impact of existing opportunity youth and young adult (OYYA) programming on promoting the safety and pro-social behavior of 16- to 24-year-olds. Although safety is hard to define, I focused on health, mortality rates, and juvenile and criminal justice system involvement. The term opportunity youth refers to young people between the ages of 16 and 24 years who are neither in school nor employed. Reengagement centers try to reach out to and assist opportunity youth with going back to school or career training, but not every city has one. Besides reengagement centers, other programs and organizations are geared towards opportunity youth, so we chose to use the broad term of OYYA programming. One of the challenges I faced in my research was that there isn’t much evaluative data on opportunity youth programs, making it hard to conclude whether they successfully promote safety and prosocial behavior. One of the many impactful experiences from my internship was the opportunity to join the NLC reengagement team and a group of city officials on a site visit to the Moco Reconnect Re-engagement Center in Montgomery County, Maryland. Places like Moco are such valuable resources to youth in need. For the center’s visitors, many of whom are homeless, the resources provided (laundry, showers, basic necessities like food, safe spaces, etc.) make a big difference.

I also completed an informational interview project that connected rental registry and lived experience. While doing preliminary research on rental registries, I was surprised to learn that not every city has a rental registry, despite the benefits of having one. During the interviews, I asked city officials about the process, challenges, and successes of creating and maintaining their city’s rental registry. It was interesting to hear from both cities that already have established rental registries and cities that recently created their rental registry. We also included questions that touched upon the use of lived experience as an evaluative tool, which I think is important because many times, numbers by themselves don’t tell the whole story.

Read Tammy’s Blog on the NLC website: “Creating and Managing Rental Registries: Cities’ Experiences and Exploring Use of Lived Experience to Evaluate Impact“

Learn about Tammy here. You can learn more about the NLC Menino Fellowship here.