Harris Community Action (HCA)

Harris Community Action (HCA) is a student-run organization at the University of Chicago’s Harris School of Public Policy. We connect Harris graduate students to the larger South Side Community through a unique fellowship program that utilizes student expertise in data and policy analysis for the benefit of local non-profit organizations. HCA maintains two guiding principles: 1) Meaningfully support the work of non-profit organizations on Chicago’s South Side with the goal of improving long-term community outcomes. 2) Provide Harris students with real-world experiences addressing substantive policy issues that intersect the public, private, and non-profit sectors. Each year HCA facilitates a 10-week fellowship program in which teams of students partner with South Side-based non-profits to complete concrete and accomplishable deliverables that advance the missions of each organization. HCA projects are policy-adjacent and draw heavily upon the Harris skillset, yet afford Fellows the chance to complement their classroom learnings with real-world application. Past projects have included data identification, data analysis, survey design and distribution, logic modeling and environmental scanning, fundraising strategy development, and process improvement planning.