Commencement

2003 Graduate Commencement Speaker - Harry Spence

Harry Spence was appointed Commissioner of the Massachusetts Department of Social Services, the state agency charged with the care and protection of children and which provides a wide variety of family programs, in November of 2001. Currently, Commissioner Spence is leading the department on a course to define the core practice values that underlie its practice of child welfare, and to align its philosophy and structures in accord with those values. In charting this course, the department is attempting to bring the logic of "family-centered" practice to each aspect of its work. This requires a fundamental rethinking of basic work processes and organization. The process Mr. Spence envisions will build on the department's long-standing and developing tradition of family-centered practice, but in its comprehensiveness and coherence, it will result in innovations in practice that will fundamentally revise the way child welfare work is done, not only in Massachusetts, but potentially across the nation.

Mr. Spence formerly served as deputy chancellor for operations for the New York City pubic schools, the nation's largest school system; receiver for the bankrupt city of Chelsea, Massachusetts; lecturer in public policy at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard; court-appointed receiver of the Boston Housing Authority, which became a model for public housing intervention across the nation; and executive director of the Cambridge Housing Authority.

He received a J.D. in 1974 from Harvard Law School and a B.A. from Harvard College in 1969. The father of three children, Mr. Spence resides in Boston.