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More than 50 Harvard students shared fun facts over free Playa Bowls in Cambridge Queen’s Head Monday to celebrate the kickoff of the Dean of Students Office’s “mattering” initiative — an effort intended to instill a sense of belonging among students in the College’s high-pressure atmosphere.
The event began with a Zoom presentation from leaders of the Mattering Movement — a non-profit organization that works to “combat the pandemic of loneliness and despair that are harming our youth.” Students then participated in icebreakers and brainstormed ideas for fostering “mattering” at Harvard.
The kickoff event was hosted by Dean of Students Thomas G. Dunne, Cabot House Administrator Palmer A. Berry, a group of student volunteers, and other DSO administrators.
Last fall, Jennifer Wallace ’94 — one of the co-founders of the Mattering Movement — visited campus to gauge interest in the initiative. During wintersession, the DSO also hosted a retreat to Vermont to discuss integrating “the Mattering framework into our community at Harvard College.”
Though Monday’s event publicly launched the initiative, Dunne said in an interview after the event that the project is still in its “idea generation phase.” The kickoff event’s hosts did not mention specific, upcoming Mattering events planned for the semester.
During the Zoom presentation, Wallace said she first heard of “Mattering” in 2019, when she reported for the Washington Post that students at “high-achieving” schools like Harvard were most susceptible to clinical anxiety and depression.
Wallace then began a book project on students at these schools, looking for patterns among students who achieved success even under heightened pressure.
“I found that these ‘healthy strivers’ — as I call them in the book — actually had a lot in common. In short, it boiled down to mattering,” she said. “The kids who were doing well, despite the pressure, felt like they mattered for who they were — deep at their core, away from their achievements and successes.”
Student attendees said an absence of “mattering” at Harvard may be a result of the College’s pre-professional culture.
“We tend to be very future thinking, or future minded, rather than the present,” Amy X. Zhou ’28 said.
But according to Wallace, the Mattering Movement’s mission is to affirm a sense of intrinsic value in students, independent of “how they performed.”
Still, organizers were hopeful that effective steps toward decentering academic performance could be implemented as soon as this semester.
In an interview with The Crimson, Yutian Li ’28 — a student organizer for the kickoff — said she hopes to install “chatty tables” in dining halls, designed for students to meet new friends and to create “third spaces.”
“They say the first place is your home. The second place is a place where you work or you study,” she said. “The third space is a separate space where you can just be yourself and just have fun.”
These “third spaces” and “chatty tables” would allow students to have “a deeper conversation with someone that you may have not met in some pre-existing way,” Dunne said.
“In some ways, it’s a platonic version of Datamatch,” he added, referring to an annual student-organized online matchmaking service.
Dunne also said the DSO hopes to introduce new uses for Cambridge Queen’s Head — a DSO-run events space located below Annenberg Hall, Harvard’s freshman dining hall. The venue formerly housed the Queen’s Head Pub before its controversial closing last spring. Dunne said he hopes to see students potentially celebrating their birthdays at Queen’s Head.
Some attendees were skeptical of how effective the Mattering initiative could be in changing school culture.
“I genuinely don’t know how you can change something that’s so embedded in our school environment,” Zhou said before the event. “I’m curious to see what they have to say and what their ideas are.”
Still, students like Anna Shao ’28 expressed hope for the new project.
“I hope it will draw more people together, but I don’t know how effective it will be, so we’ll have to see,” Shao said.
—Staff writer Darcy G Lin can be reached at darcy.lin@thecrimson.com.
