PULSE, Haley House, and Jacobs’s Influence

Since its establishment in 1969, more than 13,000 Boston College students have participated in the PULSE Program for Service Learning. The majority take a year-long course in philosophy and theology titled “Person and Social Responsibility.” Several PULSE elective courses are also offered, such as “Boston: An Urban Analysis,” taught by David Manzo, who incorporates readings from Jacobs into his syllabus.

In 2014, University Trustee Robert Cooney ’74, his wife Loretta, and their family established an endowment for the PULSE Program that has enabled it to open more sections of its popular core course, “Person and Social Responsibility.” According to Cooney Family PULSE Director Meghan Sweeney, “PULSE cultivates a different way of seeing things. The goal is for students to bring the experiences and the lessons to whatever field they choose to pursue.”

In addition to classroom reflection and discussion, carefully selected field placements in after-school programs, youth centers, correctional facilities, shelters, health clinics, housing programs, and other social service agencies become the context in which students forge a critical and compassionate perspective on society and themselves. Among the more than 50 community partners that provide service-learning opportunities for PULSE students, Haley House in Boston’s South End and Roxbury neighborhoods has had one of the longest and richest associations.

Having recently celebrated its 50th anniversary, Haley House traces its origins back to February 22, 1966, when Kathe and John McKenna began providing homeless men with a meal and a cot in their small basement apartment. The next year, inspired by Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin, founders of the Catholic Worker Movement, they bought a house on Dartmouth Street and turned it into a full-service soup kitchen with the help of a growing community of like-minded people who offered their time and presence in exchange for room and board. They named it after Leo Haley, a Boston College graduate and founding member of the Catholic Interracial Council, who died in a car accident following a traumatic night during which he was kidnapped after helping a man he found lying by the road.

PULSE started placing students at Haley House in 1976 and has continued ever since. Meanwhile, Haley House has branched out. For a time, it operated an organic farm. In 2005, it opened Haley House Bakery Café in Roxbury’s Dudley Square. In addition to offering healthful food and a community gathering space, the café provides employment transitioning, especially for those returning from incarceration. In 2015, Haley House opened its second social enterprise, Dudley Dough, an artisanal pizza shop dedicated to economic inclusion.

Although Jacobs never discussed service-learning programs or social entrepreneurship as such in her writings (except for references to successful micro-lending experiments in Systems of Survival), her books and ideas profoundly influenced the thinking of the founders and early directors of PULSE. In turn, PULSE students have brought what they gleaned from Jacobs to their service engagements.

The net effect? To put it simply, borrowing Jacobs’s own words: “Ordinary people are capable of wonderful economic things without even knowing they’re doing wonderful things.”