Newsletters

"When Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans in 2005, then-Belfer Center Senior Fellow Doug Ahlers, a former resident of New Orleans, immediately realized that he and the Kennedy School could help. The result was the Belfer Center’s Broadmoor Project, a collaboration with the Broadmoor neighborhood....Broadmoor is now a model of recovery, almost 90 percent rebuilt, with a new charter school, library, and community center....With Ahlers vision and leadership, the Broadmoor Project has also helped other disaster-struck communities. Below, Ahlers describes how the Broadmoor model is currently assisting in the recovery of three Chilean communities nearly destroyed by the earthquake and tsunami of 2010."

Juliette Kayyem is a Lecturer in Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy School who served as Assistant Secretary for Intergovernmental Affairs at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security in the first Obama administration and headed homeland security efforts for Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick. Currently a columnist for the Boston Globe and analyst for CNN, Kayyem provided extensive analysis of the situation following the Boston Marathon bombings. We asked for her views on Boston’s response to the attack.

"The Boston Marathon is at the heart of a day rich in meaning for the Boston community...The marathon terror attack of April 15 cut into our community at its most vulnerable. That made the suffering of the victims even more intolerable for all Americans...As the dramatic events unfolded in Boston, I was proud not only of the resilient response of our city, but also of the support the Belfer Center community was able to offer."

The Winter 2010/11 issue of the Belfer Center newsletter features recent and upcoming activities, research, and analysis by members of the Center community on critical global issues. This issue highlights a major Belfer Center conference on technology and governance, the Center's involvement in the nuclear threat documentary Countdown to Zero, and a celebration of Belfer Center founder Paul Doty.

Five years after the devastation of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, one stand-out recovery success story is the neighborhood of Broadmoor and its unique collaboration with Harvard Kennedy School through the Belfer Center's Broadmoor Project.