MCB concentrator and graduating senior Yoseph Boku’s exceptional work with the Y2Y homeless youth shelter in Harvard Square has been featured in The Harvard Gazette.
When he arrived at Harvard, Boku immediately recognized the inequality between Harvard’s status as a wealthy university and the needs faced by people in the neighboring communities and began volunteering at the homeless shelter in his first year, eventually becoming volunteer director and then a case manager at Y2Y. Boku received a Spirit Award last year in recognition of these efforts and recently helped to organize the Black Health Matters Conference.
“Whenever Yoseph and I would meet, he would fill me in on his various activities with such excitement and passion, whether it was researching progeria, his summer in Francis Collins’ lab at the NIH, or his work with Y2Y,” says Assistant Director of Undergraduate Studies in MCB and CPB and concentration advisor Dominic Mao. “It has been a pleasure to have him as an MCB concentrator!”
The Gazette story quotes Boku saying, “I really believe that public service can be therapeutic, that you can learn just as much from a volunteer opportunity as you can learn from a classroom or a section discussion…Even doing a single shift can leave an impact.”
by Diana Crow
