A wider mission for Ed Portal
The Harvard Allston Educational Portal celebrated its fifth year of programming and an expansion of its facility and its mission with a community event Tuesday that featured music by Harvard students and a lecture by faculty member Michael Sandel. “It’s wonderful to be here and it’s wonderful to see this terrific space,” said Harvard President Drew Faust, who mingled with local residents and Harvard student mentors before stepping to the podium to address the large crowd. The one-story building on North Harvard Street now includes the adjacent Harvard Allston Education Portal Annex, which opened in May. The annex triples the Ed Portal’s existing space, offering its more than 1,500 members expanded access to academic, arts, cultural, and recreational programming. Faust praised the “transformation and discovery” fostered by the Ed Portal’s mentoring programs, the exchange of knowledge and ideas and the “intellectual excitement” offered by its faculty speaker series, and its expansion into the...