Whose Mission

The 30-minute drive to Mission Hill takes us across the river and down Storrow Drive, before we bear right onto the Fenway exit. Traffic at 3:20 p.m. is often stop-and-go, and we crawl along Hemenway Street before arriving at the Parker Street lot around 3:50. The time in the van distances us from campus, and when I turn around in the driver’s seat I often see a couple pairs of eyes blearily blinking awake.

For the last three years, this is how many of my weekday afternoons have started as part of the Mission Hill Afterschool Program. The program, run by PBHA, aims to ease the burden of after-school education on families by connecting Harvard students with children residing in Mission Hill, a three-quarter square mile neighborhood surrounded by Roxbury, Jamaica Plain, Brookline, and Fenway-Kenmore. I work with 11- and 12-year-olds, providing homework help and leading activities that range from designing a new country, to making slime, to leading field trips to different parts of Boston.

Despite my eagerness to begin serving a new community, I blankly stared at the rows of apartments in the Mission Main development, where our program is located, upon exiting the van on my first day. Lost,

I would bury my head in Google Maps when I picked up and dropped off students. Three years later, however, the street names come easily — Parker Street, Annunciation Road, McGreevey Way.

Still, I can’t shake the feeling that I’m intruding. Noticing the significant gentrification of the neighborhood and my relationship to its causes weighs heavily on my hopes to “do good.”

In 2020, the Globe deemed Boston the country’s “third most ‘intensely gentrified’ city in the US,” specifying that Mission Hill is one neighborhood experiencing gentrification. A 2013 National Community Reinvestment Coalition analysis identified the area just bordering Mission Hill as an area “eligible” for gentrification. Between 2013 and 2017, the median home value rose from $172,377 to $324,100, while the median household income dropped from $23,764 to $16,094 in the same time period.

Not everyone can afford the skyrocketing home prices. Most of our students come from Mission Main and Alice Taylor, affordable housing developments built in the mid-20th century. The Boston Housing Authority described Mission Main as one of its “most troubled and distressed” properties before it underwent renovations in the ’90s. For residents of Alice