For Robert L. Heckart, his current career began with free winter coats and a revelation.

The 2015 Advanced Leadership Initiative Fellow (and 2016 Senior Fellow) Bob Heckart, HLS ’73, was building a legal career as a partner in the law firm of Davis Polk & Wardwell LLC, structuring complicated international financial transactions when he first focused on the complex question of why is anyone hungry or homeless in the United States? At a summer board meeting in 1982 of the Yorkville Emergency Alliance, an interfaith, apolitical group formed in response to President Regan’s federal cutbacks in social services, Bob and his fellow board members learned of a potential donation of adult winter coats and began excitedly planning for their immediate pickup and distribution .  But they were immediately stopped by the donor, who explained that they would have to wait until November to do so because people who are homeless do not have closets.

 “That was a seminal moment,” recalls Bob. “We all fell silent immediately and thought about the consequences of that relatively simple fact for thousands of our neighbors.”

After retiring from Davis Polk in 2010, Bob served as a Senior Adviser to Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) and then Senior Counsel to Senator Carl Levin (D-Mich). When Senator Levin was about to retire at the end of 2014, Bob’s daughters sent him a magazine ad for Harvard’s Advanced Leadership Initiative.

Fortunately, he pursued it and his resulting experience as an ALI Fellow was “life-changing,” he says. From the start, the Yale graduate and retired international lawyer took a broad approach to his time on the Harvard campus, auditing courses from children’s rights to an introduction to Islam taught by Harvard’s first Imam to a popular survey of world architecture. “I  sought out courses I hadn't taken when I was an undergraduate and just thoroughly enjoyed taking advantage of all things available to Harvard students on campus,” he said. Noting the quality and diversity of everyone ranging from speakers such as the Prime Minister of Israel to the U.S. Secretary of State to the students he sat with in all the courses he audited and at dinner on many evenings to the members of the 2015 Cohort, he said, “being able to discuss current topics in small groups of current and future world leaders and policy makers shaping the world is a unique opportunity.”

It would also prove personally transformative. While on campus, Bob met two Harvard undergraduates, Sam Greenberg and Sarah Rosenkrantz, who were in the process of founding Y2Y Harvard Square, the first student-operated shelter for young adults experiencing homelessness.  Bob began volunteering with their project and soon joined its advisory board where he put his professional background to use: “When the shelter opened, I helped organize Y2Y Network, a 501(c)(3), to assist Phillips Brooks House and the students operating the shelter and served as a founding member of Y2Y Network’s board of directors.”

The shelter in Harvard Square was only the first step. Soon Bob was working with two other Harvard undergraduates, Connor Shoen and Tony Shu, co-founders of Breaktime Café with a program to teach job skills and offer life coaching to young adults experiencing homelessness.  At the same time, he worked with Y2Y Network, Youth Continuum and Yale students in Dwight Hall to start a student-operated shelter in New Haven modeled on Y2Y Harvard Square. By 2019, he was working with Howard Koh, Harvey V. Fineberg Professor of the Practice of Public Health Leadership at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and Harvard Kennedy School, as Senior Adviser and a member of the Steering Committee on Professor Koh’s Initiative on Health and Homelessness, whose mission is to serve as an academic center of learning, teaching and research on all facets of homelessness and to collaborate with health practitioners, service providers and government agencies in addressing homelessness.  

“Participating in Harvard’s remarkable Advanced Leadership Initiative in 2015 and 2016 gave me the opportunity and support to focus actively on the critical issue of homelessness among young adults and to become involved with knowledgeable and experienced people working on the frontlines of this crisis,” Bob said.  “I am forever deeply grateful to the ALI staff and members of all ALI Cohorts, especially the 2015 Cohort, for their support, guidance and friendship then and now.”