CHS Student Selected for Civic Innovation Fellowship.

Molly Lawrence (SPH ’15), an MPH candidate concentrating in community health sciences, has been selected as the 2015 BU Institute of Cities City of Boston Summer Fellow.

Lawrence will work with Mayor Martin Walsh’s Office of New Urban Mechanics to improve city services through civic innovation. The Mayor’s Office of New Urban Mechanics (MONUM) serves as the mayor’s civic innovation arm, charged with the design, implementation, and evaluation of pilot projects that offer the potential to significantly improve the quality of city services.

Lawrence said she was “thrilled” to be offered the unique opportunity to collaborate with MONUM to enhance participatory urbanism: “I am looking forward to obtaining a crash course in local government and civic engagement, as well as learning how to apply my interdisciplinary public health education to improve the health and quality of life for Boston residents.”

The agency was formed in 2010 under the leadership of late Boston Mayor Tom Menino, who later co-founded the BU Initiative on Cities (IoC) after leaving office in 2014. The IoC is currently run by Graham Wilson, professor of political science and chair of the Department of Political Science at the College of Arts & Sciences, and Katharine Lusk, a former policy advisor to Mayor Menino.

Lawrence’s eight-week fellowship will run from mid-June to mid-August, and she will join her fellow summer fellows in the fall of 2015 for a panel discussion on their experiences within local government.