This piece was written by Tejas Kaur (MPP’27), a second-year master’s of public policy student who is interning in the City of Boston’s Community Engagement Cabinet.
Tejas Kaur (MPP’27) blogs her experiences as the Summer 2026 McCourt School Summer Storyteller.
This summer, I’m interning at the City of Boston’s Community Engagement Cabinet, which leads initiatives to connect Boston’s constituents to City Hall. My role centers on supporting the Office of Neighborhood Services, making sure residents and community partners get the right information in the most efficient way possible. Day-to-day, I’m involved in the mayor’s community-facing work. This includes hosting neighborhood coffee hours, city-wide events like the Pride Parade and most recently, the Nubian Square Economic Activation Task Force. The task force is a part of Mayor Wu’s effort to jump-start the neighborhood’s economy. I’m helping support a 2026 market analysis that updates a 2020 study, pulling together demographic, commercial real estate and small-business data to guide recommendations for Nubian Square, a neighborhood in Boston, and to inform decisions for community and investor partners. The internship is also built around professional development. Every other Friday, the intern cohort comes together to prepare for our end-of-summer presentations, where we use creative design methods to pitch a new city initiative or policy, and to learn from other city departments, from the Mayor’s Office of New Urban Mechanics (MONUM) to hands-on sessions on tools like process mapping.
My favorite part of the internship so far has been engaging with the community at the grassroots level. I’ve had the chance to meet so many Boston residents and community partners whose energy and investment in their neighborhoods make the work feel worthwhile. Attending Mayor Wu’s coffee hours across different neighborhoods has let me hear directly from residents about what they care about and what they need from the city, and walking in the Pride Parade was a reminder of how much of this work is about showing up and being present rather than sitting behind a desk. It helps that I get to do it all in a city I love. Boston was my college town, and getting to come back to it in this way, meeting the people who make its neighborhoods what they are, has made those in-person moments the most memorable part of the summer by far.
The most unexpected connection between my internship and what I’ve learned at McCourt so far is how closely it echoes the work I’ve been doing at McCourt. Through the Policy Innovation Lab, I’ve spent the past year on the Anacostia Parks & Community Collaborative in DC, mapping land use across redevelopment sites, synthesizing what residents say in community meetings and thinking hard about how land use decisions shape transportation access and economic opportunity in specific neighborhoods. I didn’t expect a Boston city internship to land me in almost the same territory, but that’s what happened. The Nubian Square Task Force is asking the same questions I’ve been sitting with in DC, just about a different neighborhood: what’s happening to this commercial district, who does the local economy actually serve and what would it take to build lasting community wealth here? Sitting in coffee hours and working on the market analysis, I keep recognizing the frameworks and instincts I built at McCourt. The classroom and the sidewalk turn out to be studying the same thing.
In addition to my internship, I’ve kept up my research role at the Georgetown Law Center, working with Professor Anthony Cook and my co-Research Assistant, Matt Lutkins, on a project bridging community wealth building and Marxist theory. This summer, we helped put on a convening around community wealth building for Black America, and we’ve been doing the legal research behind it, building out an interdisciplinary dataset from 1977 to 2025 across law and social science journals to trace where Marxist and critical legal scholarship has gone over time. We’ve also been working on pitch decks and business models, including a capital stack and financial projections for Rosie’s, a community-owned grocery fulfillment hub.
By the end of the summer, I hope to deliver a presentation I’m proud of, with a city initiative idea that reflects what I’ve learned from being in the neighborhoods this summer, rather than something I could have dreamed up from a classroom. I want it grounded in the real conversations I’ve had at coffee hours and in Nubian Square, and to be something that could plausibly make residents’ lives a little better.
Beyond the work, I want to keep soaking up the version of Boston I’m getting to know this summer. I want to do more hot yoga and spin classes, more afternoons spent sketching or reading outdoors, and more little day trips around New England before the school year pulls me back to DC and into a year I’m really looking forward to as McCourt’s Student Body President. Most of all, I hope to leave with relationships across Boston’s communities and city departments that last well beyond the internship, and a clearer sense of how I want to spend my career working at the intersection of grassroots engagement and economic policy.