The Rappaport Institute for Greater Boston offers students a variety of opportunities to learn about Greater Boston and to become more involved in the region’s governance.

By both sponsoring new research and collecting information on existing research, the Institute aims to become a leading source of information on Boston-related, policy-relevant research being done by scholars at the region’s leading colleges and universities. This information is disseminated through public events, publications, articles in the local media, and on our website.

Institute staff can help students working on Boston-related research projects identify useful resources and materials. The Institute also helps faculty members whose classes require direct involvement with local governments and officials.

Past Projects

Municipal Finance Task Force

The Municipal Finance Task Force, a group of private sector, public sector, and academia experts and leaders led by John P. Hamill, Chairman of Sovereign Bank New England, today released a comprehensive report on the state of municipal finances. The report, Local Communities At Risk: Revisiting the Fiscal Partnership Between the Commonwealth and Cities and Towns, provides a comprehensive analysis of municipal revenues, municipal expenditures, and state local aid over a 25-year period and makes a series of recommendations to stabilize municipal finances.

The Task Force report underscores that Massachusetts cities and towns are facing a long-term financial crunch caused by increasingly restricted and unpredictable local aid levels, constraints on ways to raise local revenue, and specific costs that are growing at rates far higher than the growth in municipal revenues. The situation has created a serious strain on municipal budgets universally – in dense urban cities, suburban towns in eastern Massachusetts, Cape Cod resort communities, and rural towns in western Massachusetts – that has already caused a decline in municipal services and that will evolve to crisis proportions without changes to state and local policies.

During the summer of 2005, Conor McEachern, a 2005 Rappaport Institute Public Policy Summer Fellow, worked in the City of Boston's Budget Office on the Municipal Finance Task Force report.

Press Release | Local Communities at Risk Report | PowerPoint Presentation

Budgeting and Financial Management in Somerville

During the 2004 - 2005 academic year students who were enrolled in The Kennedy School of Government's Budgeting and Financial Management class taught by Linda Bilmes had the opportunity to gain hands-on experience by helping the City of Somerville, Massachusetts, to develop a performance-based budget. Students had a unique opportunity to work in a real field situation in the city of Somerville.

Somerville is the next town over from Cambridge. In 2003, with the election of Mayor Joe Curtatone, the city embarked on a project of converting its line-item budget into an activity budget and developing performance measures. What this means is that the city decided to collect the data to understand what it cost to do things like fix street lights and potholes, so it could better alllocate its resources. The city has completed this exercise for the Department of Public Works in the Summer of 2004 and other departmnts including fire, police and traffic. Students worked in Somerville City Hall, four hours per week, for a minimum of 6 weeks and wrote a short memo (2-3 pages) at the end of the project describing their experience.