Rappaport

More than a decade before she would occupy the city’s top office – as the first woman, first person of color, and first Asian-American Mayor of Boston – Michelle Wu was feeling overwhelmed, intimidated, and frankly a little bit scared.

It was June of 2009, and at 24 years old, the Chicago-raised transplant and daughter of Taiwanese immigrants was soon to finish her first year at Harvard Law School. Wu had recently become the legal guardian for her youngest sister, and she was in the midst of family complications and her mother’s growing mental illness.

So as she stood outside the massive edifice that is 60 State Street in downtown Boston, literally in the shadow of her future while readying to meet Jerry and Phyllis Rappaport as part of the incoming class of Rappaport Fellows, you’d forgive her for feeling a little, well, unsettled.

“It was scary and thrilling,” she said.

“That was my first exposure to City Hall and city government,” Wu said of the summer-long fellowship, during which she worked alongside Mayor Tom Menino’s Chief of Staff, Mitch Weiss, to simplify and update the city’s then-onerous restaurant permitting system – ultimately creating Boston’s first start-to-finish guide to restaurant permitting.

Until her Rappaport Fellowship, she had only ever seen what government did, or didn’t do, from a distance. Now viewing from the inside out, she was seeing this world through a fresh lens – focused on possibility and connectedness rather than obstacles and limitations.

“This fellowship made sure that young people like me had an opportunity to see state and local government up close,” she said. “It encouraged us to see that government could do so much more.”

It was a seminal period for Wu, her worldview evolving in accord with her family life and educational experience, and how she has since put that 2009 epiphany to use is a matter of an impressive public record.

Following her 2012 graduation from Harvard Law School and a year working as statewide Constituency Director on Elizabeth Warren’s Senate campaign, she became the first Asian-American woman to serve on the City Council in 2013, at the age of 28, and has since worked to be, as her website notes, “a voice for accessibility, transparency, and community engagement in city leadership.”

She was the lead sponsor of Boston’s Paid Parental Leave ordinance and Healthcare Equity ordinance prohibiting discrimination based on gender identity. She authored Boston’s Communications Access ordinance, providing translation, interpretation, and assistive technology for access to City services regardless of English language proficiency or communications disability.

She also authored a handful of ordinances now on the books: preventing the city from contracting with health insurers that discriminate in their coverage against transgender individuals, protecting wetlands, supporting adaption to climate change, enacting a plastic bag ban, adopting Community Choice Aggregation, and providing for paid parental leave to municipal employees.

“So much more,” indeed.

In a unanimous vote, Wu became the first woman of color to serve as Council President in 2016, the same year she was honored among the “Ten Outstanding Young Leaders” by the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce, and as one of Marie Claire magazine’s “New Guard: America’s 50 Most Influential Women.”

And on Nov. 16, 2021, the next chapter officially began when she was historically sworn in as Boston’s Mayor, having received over 64 percent of the vote in the general election.

It’s been an extraordinary journey for a woman who just 12 years prior had nervously walked into that building at 60 State Street as a first-year law student without a shred of substantial political savvy. She points to the Rappaports as central figures in her evolution.

“Every experience that Jerry and Phyllis and the Rappaport Foundation created was meant to pull us through that door to spaces that we might never have felt like we belonged in otherwise,” she said. “As someone who lived so much of my life feeling and finding ways to stay invisible, Jerry helped me see myself.”

Mayor Wu was among the many luminaries – including Massachusetts Governor Charlie Baker and Harvard President Larry Bacow – to speak at a memorial service for Jerry Rappaport in May 2022, and her remarks focused wistfully on both the man and the foundation which will live on in his name.

“Jerry believed that great leaders build things designed to outlast them,” she said. “That’s what he did, in the built environment and in the talent that he nurtured.”

The Mayor spoke of her appreciation that the fellowship “didn’t just stop at opening the door and then tossing you through it,” but developed a community and connection that have helped to buoy her ever since.

She remembered developing a bond with the dozen other law fellows, their weekly meetings, colleagues turned friends, and a trust so strong that she eventually revealed to them a secret she had once thought she might never give up: She was still driving the family’s old green minivan. (It was a secret, she shared with a laugh, that would later become an asset when the group needed a ride to a Rappaport function at the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum.)

And she recalled Jerry himself coaching her through pieces of her first City Council campaign.

“I remember thinking,” Wu said, “if a first-generation American, minivan-driving person who grew up with no political connections could get elected to the Boston City Council, imagine the impact if all of us across every one of our communities could see ourselves in government and politics.

“Jerry and Phyllis have made it their life’s work to open doors to build platforms for young leaders who will shape our city and beyond for years to come.”

Among them are leaders in Mayor Wu’s own administration and cabinet, including PJ McCann, deputy director for policy and planning at the Boston Public Health Commission, who has helped to lead the city’s COVID-19 response, Mariangely Solis Cervera, Wu’s cabinet chief of equity and inclusion, “and countless others,” Wu said, “making their marks on communities across the state and around the country.”

The brilliance of Jerry Rappaport and the foundation he and Phyllis developed, she explained, is the inherent sustainability that comes by properly nurturing a generation that will, in turn, nurture the next. Build up young people, provide them with tools. They will continue to plant similar seeds.

And it begins by nurturing an individual, who in this case becomes Boston Mayor Michelle Wu, whose office now looks out over that very street where she once stood overwhelmed, intimidated, and frankly a little bit scared.

“Jerry didn’t just touch people’s lives, he expanded them,” she said. “He gave us a chance to do and be what we’d never dreamed of. And for someone like me, who never would have imagined that any of this was possible, I am only here because Jerry believed it was possible.”