Bruce Smith Honored by Local Anti-Poverty Group for Community Efforts

Bruce Smith, director of community and government relations at HSPH, has built bridges of trust and credibility between HSPH and the Mission Hill community in which the School resides since he began working at the School in the early 1970s. And now, Smith’s record of successful collaborative projects between the School and the public has won him recognition as an honoree by the Action for Boston Community Development, Inc. (ABCD). Smith was given the award at a recent dinner at the Marriot Boston Copley Place as a volunteer who has made his “community a better place to live.” ABCD is an antipoverty agency in Greater Boston.

“Bruce is a true leader – his decades of commitment to this neighborhood have created a number of new programs and initiatives that have enhanced the services provided to residents of Mission Hill,” says Milagros Arbaje-Thomas, director of the ABCD Parker Hill/Fenway Neighborhood Service Center in Roxbury.

Added Paul Riccardi, dean for administration and operations at HSPH: “I am very impressed with Bruce’s ability to listen. He doesn’t impose himself or the School’s needs and views onto the community. HSPH enjoys great relationships with our neighbors, largely because Bruce has laid the foundation for us to be accepted as part of the neighborhood.”

Smith helped to create the Longwood Medical Area (LMA) Mission Hill/Fenway Food Project in 1988, which sustains the Parker Hill/Fenway Neighborhood Service Center (NSC) Food Pantry through food drives, fundraisers, and public education.

“This was one of the first community-institutional initiatives between the NSC and the LMA to address a community problem,” Smith noted. “The relationships that developed during that process directly led to collaborations that fostered the creation of several other community-based initiatives.”

These undertakings have included Project LIFE, which aimed to lower infant mortality rates through public education, mentoring, and advocacy. “The collaborations also led to the relocation of the Children’s Hospital Early Intervention program to a community setting and established the Mission Hill Healthy Boston Coalition,” said Smith.

Smith started working at HSPH as supervisor of the School’s mail and receiving service in the 1970s. Eventually, he studied rehabilitative and community counseling at Boston State College (now UMass Boston) while still working at HSPH, earning his BS in 1976 and MEd in 1980.

In 1984, his community liaison work on behalf of the School began after Mission Hill residents expressed concern about a new Harvard energy plant on Brookline Avenue. The residents wrote to HMS and HSPH, announcing plans to protest at the next HMS graduation.

Then-HSPH Dean Howard Hiatt “thanked them for contacting Harvard, and asked to meet with them in the Mission Hill community,” said Smith. “He was the first dean of HSPH or HMS to do this. The meeting went very well, and this was the beginning of our community-institution efforts.”

Hiatt appointed Smith as community liaison in 1984, and Smith has worked since to expand the notion of what this means. Last year, for example, Smith organized a student expedition to Mission Hill as part of a course on society and health taught by HSPH Professor Ichiro Kawachi.

In October of this year, Smith and the students set off across Huntington Avenue, visiting Sociedad Latina, ABCD, and other agencies to learn about the organizations’ health initiatives and to identify volunteer opportunities.

In addition to his other work, Smith serves as a member of the Parker Hill/Fenway NSC Advisory Committee, the Fenway Alliance Board of Directors, the Mission Hill Main Street Board of Directors, and the John D. Gloucester Memorial Presbyterian Church Scholarship Committee. He is also actively engaged with the Maurice J. Tobin School’s Pen Pal mentoring program, the Mission Hill Elder Friendly Program committee, and the MASCO / John D. O’Bryant Gateway Program.

To be sure, problems such as poverty, infant mortality, and lack of educational opportunities persist in Mission Hill and Greater Boston. “But it’s important to remember that nothing is hopeless,” said Smith. “We just have to focus and keep working together."

-Eileen McCluskey. Photo (c) Don West and courtesy of ABCD.