In an effort to forestall gang formation and acts of vandalism, Phillips Brooks House instituted yesterday a pilot social service program at the Columbia Point public housing project in Dorchester.

The committee, named the Columbia Point Program, will send ten carefully chosen Harvard students to work on a one-to-one basis with twelve and thirteen year-old boys, half of them Negro.

These children would be those who have not yet been in trouble with the police, but who may soon join a gang. PBH workers will try to divert these youngsters' energies from gangs and vandalism to athletics and schoolwork.

William Saum '65 and Deaver Brown '66, co-chairmen of the program, said that the volunteers will take the children out of the project for an afternoon or a day to a sports event, to a restaurant, or simply on a walk.

Columbia Point, the largest public housing project in Massachusetts, is 30 per cent Negro. Its 7900 people include 300 children twelve years old and younger.

A group of psychiatrists and social workers will evaluate this pilot program over the summer. Next year, the PBH committee and officials at the housing project hope to expand the program to include 50 volunteers.

Saum said that his committee would choose 20 volunteers. Mr. Neil Sullivan, a youth worker at Columbia Point, would then pick ten from among these. "This is not for do-gooders," Sullivan said. "We don't want world-savers and sob-sisters. If you show a kid you care for him, he will care for himself."