On Tuesday afternoons during the past two spring semesters, a group of Connell School of Nursing (CSON) students traveled roughly eight miles to the Mattapan Teen Center (MTC), a brick building with a trimmed lawn off Blue Hill Avenue in the Mattapan neighborhood of Boston. Several dozen boys, girls, and young adults, ranging in age from 11 to 18, met them inside the facility where, for the next five hours or so, the CSON students interacted with the teens. They spent some of that time teaching health topics, but the student-nurses took on other roles too鈥攎entors, role models.

CSON students and teens from the Mattapan Teen Center

CSON students and teens from the Mattapan Teen Center. Photo courtesy Instagram @mattapanteencenter

The future nurses who make the weekly trip to MTC are students in Clinical Assistant Professor Donna Cullinan鈥檚 Population Health Practice in the Community course. In January, Cullinan will oversee a new group of undergraduates who will spend Tuesday afternoons and early evenings at this haven for young people in Mattapan, a neighborhood that has long struggled with crime, poverty, and unemployment.

Cullinan鈥檚 students have already worked in a variety of community settings, including homeless shelters, schools, and prisons. She calls the partnership with MTC 鈥渁 win-win situation鈥� that has benefited all of the young people from Mattapan and Boston College who come together under the center鈥檚 roof.

鈥淢y students come to better understand the lives of people living in poverty and the challenges they face, and how they can help them,鈥� says Cullinan. Meanwhile, the young adults at the Mattapan Teen Center not only learn important lessons about health and self-care鈥攖hey also have a chance to engage with college students just a few years older than they are, which helps some to see new possibilities for the future.

“My students come to better understand the lives of people living in poverty and the challenges they face, and how they can help them.”
donna cullinan, clinical assistant professor

MTC is part of the Boys & Girls Clubs of Boston, which was founded in 1893 with a stated mission to 鈥渆nsure all young people in our community have the opportunity to realize their full potential.鈥� Reaching for that goal can be a particularly daunting challenge for the young people of Mattapan. The community, where more than 90 percent of the residents are people of color and a significant portion are non-English-speaking immigrants from Haiti and other Caribbean countries, is located about six miles south of downtown Boston. While the overall crime rate in Boston has dropped six percent since last year, Mattapan has witnessed an eight percent increase. Many kids at MTC report that they know gang members.

Moreover, the proportion of households with children under 18 that are led by single mothers is twice as high in Mattapan as it is throughout Suffolk County (which comprises the cities of Boston, Chelsea, Revere, and Winthrop). Compared to the rest of the county, the median household income is 26 percent lower in Mattapan while the unemployment rate is 37 percent higher, according to U.S. Census Bureau data.

Cullinan has a long history of working with the residents of Mattapan: She鈥檚 been doing diabetes screening and offering other primary care services at Mattapan Health Center鈥檚 annual Health Care Revival for the past decade. However, 亚色影库 as an institution has historically had little听presence there. This is something Neil McCullagh discovered when he arrived at Chestnut Hill in 2015 as executive director of the recently endowed Joseph E. Corcoran Center for Real Estate and Urban Action, part of the Carroll School of Management. The reason soon became apparent. 鈥淢attapan is one of Boston鈥檚 neighborhoods with the greatest amount of need,鈥� says McCullagh. 鈥淵et it鈥檚 the least accessible neighborhood to the many anchor institutions in the city and in the region.鈥�

The primary reason for this poor accessibility, McCullagh and his colleagues learned, is that Mattapan is not well served by public transportation. A 亚色影库 student using the MBTA to travel to MTC in Mattapan has to take a Green Line train, switch to the Orange Line (following a six-minute walk through Back Bay), then grab a 31 bus at Forest Hills Station that makes a stop at Wellington Hill Street, a two-minute walk from the teen center. The entire journey takes about an hour and a half, on a good day.

To address this problem, in 2016 the Corcoran Center established the Mattapan Shuttle, which makes several trips and stops daily between campus and MTC, shortening the travel time to about 25 minutes. Improving access to Mattapan has contributed to a dynamic engagement with Boston College: Today, students across campus volunteer approximately 2,500 hours in the neighborhood per semester, in a variety of roles. (See sidebar.)

Donna Cullinan
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Donna Cullinan
Clinical Assistant Professor, Connell School of Nursing