Endowed fellowships from Julia Koster (MUP ’01) and Richard Doege (HLS ’79, MPA ’00) support students committed to public service.
To support Harvard graduate students, especially those demonstrating a commitment to public service, Julia Koster (MUP ’01) and her late husband, Richard Doege (HLS ’79, MPA ’00), have provided a generous gift to establish endowed fellowship funds at the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD) and the Harvard Kennedy School (HKS).
Julia has dedicated her career to public service, holding planning positions across local, state, regional, and federal levels. This commitment to the public good also defined her relationship with her late husband, Richard. When Richard enrolled at the Harvard Kennedy School, Julia decided to join him in Cambridge. She had long wanted to pursue her master’s degree in urban planning at the GSD, and moving from their home in Tacoma, Washington, to Cambridge seemed like an ideal way to achieve their goals.
At Harvard, they both found rigorous, immersive academic experiences and engaged communities. But the most important takeaway from their graduate educations was how public policy and design could both serve the common good.
Julia and Richard were equally devoted to supporting their respective schools. During his lifetime, Richard established multiple life income gifts at Harvard to benefit both himself and Julia. Through his estate plan, he established a revocable trust, from which, upon his death at age 83, Julia facilitated a charitable gift annuity and a charitable remainder annuity trust. These generous gifts carry out plans Richard built into his estate to provide Julia with income for the remainder of her life while honoring their shared legacy at Harvard. Ultimately, these gifts will create two endowed fellowship funds: one supporting Master in Urban Planning students at the Graduate School of Design (with preference for those committed to public service) and one establishing a Public Service Fellowship at the Kennedy School.
“In thinking about the world through a planning and design lens, there’s a lot you can offer in the public sector. It’s fundamentally about how we experience our communities and how we live in those communities.”
Julia Koster
“We both found ourselves amazed by the people we worked with in public service. They truly saw it as a calling,” Julia says. “It might be easier to see the path at the Harvard Kennedy School, but many folks in the planning, architecture, and landscape disciplines have found ways to go down that path. In thinking about the world through a planning and design lens, there’s a lot you can offer in the public sector. It’s fundamentally about how we experience our communities and how we live in those communities.”
Julia came to the GSD without formal design training and, she says, learned something new every day from faculty and classmates who opened her eyes to novel practices. In her first land use course, Julia found that the readings didn’t match her work experience. When she brought this conflict to the professor’s attention, he told her to keep raising it in class discussions and continued to encourage her to apply her real-world experience to her studies. Eventually, she worked for him as a research associate and today considers him a mentor.
“I see the world very much through the lessons I learned in those classes,” Julia says. “I was with a cohort of people who were equally committed to learning, problem-solving, and sharing. Richard and I both made some lifelong friends, and those relationships have continued to influence how I’ve worked, where I’ve worked, and what I’ve been engaged with. My time at Harvard had a lasting and great impact on me.”
For the last 20 years, Julia has worked at the National Capital Planning Commission in Washington, DC, which oversees future development in the city; she currently serves as Project Director of Flooding and Resiliency. In this role, she depends upon drawing as a medium for communication. She finds that images can be as powerful as a 100-page document, and she credits the GSD with giving her the tools to convey important ideas and advance projects and initiatives. She hopes those who benefit from the endowed fellowships find the same expansive skills and solutions as they prepare for careers in public service.
“What the GSD offered was very interdisciplinary, and that has continued to provide so many benefits,” Julia says. “As planners and designers, we think about how things are connected. You’re often serving as a convener and translator, weighing perspectives in real estate, transportation, housing, and public space. Somehow, we pull those pieces together and craft the kinds of solutions that will help people feel like they’re invested in their communities.
“That’s why public service is so incredibly important,” she adds. “And it’s more important than ever that we value people who choose this path.”
