“It Was My Home at Harvard”: Applying a Resource-Based View to Student Leadership, Learning, and Meaning-Making within a Social Change Community of Practice in the College Context

Abstract

Phillips Brooks House Association (PBHA) is a student-led nonprofit providing advocacy and direct services to disadvantaged populations within the Greater Boston area. The Harvard-affiliated organization sought to identify its organizational strengths to understand its positioning within the Harvard ecosystem, clarify its relationship to traditional academics, and address the deleterious impacts of COVID-19 on volunteerism and programming. To support PBHA, we performed a mixed-methods organizational study informed by grounded theory as well as resource-based view, communities of practice, and self-authorship theories. We discovered that much of PBHA’s successes—both historic and current—can be attributed to the integration of six core capabilities: offering pathways for learning and meaning making, centering student leadership, creating space for a supportive peer community, transmitting culture and values, lending structure and stability, and negotiating its context. We concluded by exploring how these capabilities could be leveraged to help strengthen the organization’s positioning against external factors (e.g., generational and demographic changes) and to make internal improvements to its service-learning model, which would enable PBHA to achieve sustained strategic positioning within the Harvard ecosystem.