Category: Dorchester Reporter

As the lights began to dim, a symphony of drums intensified, competing with the cheering voices of more than 1,300 spectators in a sold-out Strand Theatre as stragglers, carrying cups of chai and mango lassi, followed ushers to their seats. One of North America’s largest Punjabi dance competitions was about to begin.

The Boston Bhangra Competition celebrated its 22 years of operation a week ago Saturday (Nov. 15), welcoming 11 teams from across the United States and Canada to Dorchester to compete for $4,000 in prizes. The event was hosted by cultural nonprofits South Asian Nation and Boston Bhangra, which train recreational and competition Bhangra and Bollywood dance teams.

Bhangra is an energetic folk dance from the Punjab region of India and Pakistan that is  associated traditionally with the harvest season. Though historically male-dominated, recent years have seen a surge of co-ed and all-female teams. Around 30 to 40 teams apply for the annual competition, with an acceptance rate of 20 percent to 25 percent, said Boston Bhangra President Rohit Bhambi. 

“Bhangra is a very exciting dance … it’s almost a sports-like atmosphere,” Bhambi said. “People are cheering, it gets very loud at times, and the music is going to make you move. It’s a really immersive type of experience.”     

The competition comprised student groups, like Carnegie Mellon University, and formal dance academies, like the Furteelay school in Michigan. Each performance was preceded by an independently produced introduction video.

Throughout their 7-to-12-minute performances, teams meshed Western songs like KRS-One’s “Sound of da Police” with Bollywood hits, like the 2019 “O Saki Saki.” Dhols (double-sided barrel drums) laid the foundation for the beat, while dancers used saaps – metal or wood X-shaped expanding instruments similar to accordions – to create accompanying clapping noises. 

“It’s fun to reconnect with people I’ve known for 10 to 12 years and also get to see the new faces in Bhangra,” said Harjot Singh, coach of The Raniyaan, an all-female team from Brampton, Canada. “The best 16 dancers from our academy are the ones chosen to go.”

Singh said he has competed in the Boston competition two other times with his all-male group, so this year’s performance marks a first.

Another all-female team making its debut was Boston University’s Vakhri Taur Diyan. Co-captain Trisha Natarajan said the club began around three years ago, when its founders wanted to create a safe space for women to learn Bhangra dance and culture. 

“Most of our members don’t come from any sort of dance background at all,” said Natarajan, who has a background in ballet and contemporary dance. “It’s been overwhelming to prep for this … but at the end of the day it’s mind-blowing that we even get to be on that stage.”     

Guests and dancers crowded the Strand’s lobby during a 30-minute intermission, eating samosas and tikki masala and rice dinner boxes from catering company Mirchi Nation, before returning for the competition’s second half.   

Toward the end, Punjabi singer Bhinda Jatt, best known for blending West Coast hip-hop with folk vocals, took to the stage while the judges deliberated. The 11 teams slowly returned, and while Jatt performed his biggest hits and Bhangra classics, a dance circle formed behind him—competition briefly pushed aside in communal celebration.

BU’s VTD took home the people’s choice award, determined by audience votes submitted through a QR code. Putt Sardaraan De, based in Seattle, Washington, was recognized for having the best Jodi — a pair of dancers — while best traditional outfits, Vardi or Vardiyaan, went to San Francisco Bay Area team Saanjhe. 

Performances were evaluated on creativity and difficulty, and first, second and third were separated by two points, Bhambi said. Saanjhe, meaning “together” in Punjabi, placed third, winning $500, and was awarded “Best Mix.” The Raniyaan took second, winning $1,000. First place and the winner of $2,500 went to Apna Bhangra Crew, a 19-year-old team from Seattle, Wash. 

This year, ABC debuted a co-ed lineup, which often makes team cohesion difficult, said coach Harmeet Dhaliwal. ABC’s all-boys team placed second in the 2018 competition, and to come out on top this year, Dhaliwal said the team has been practicing five to seven days a week.

“These 12 dancers on stage today have been learning from our dance academy since they were five or six years old … and they’ve never danced on another team,” Dhaliwal said. “I don’t know when the next time this group gets on stage. Life is busy, and I’m just glad they came together and did it one last time.”  

Northeastern graduate student and ballroom dancer Elena Markovitz was invited to the competition by a friend, Maninder Singh. “I do another type of competitive dance, so it was exciting to see a completely different form,” Markovitz said.

Singh had seen Bhangra performed at weddings in India, but Saturday was his first time attending a competition. He said he had been rooting for the Boston-based teams, but Apna Bhangra Crew’s performance was particularly eye-catching. 

“The last group stood out because they were telling a popular folk story,” the Somerville resident said. “The competition was awesome.” 

This story is part of a partnership between the Dorchester Reporter and the Boston University Department of Journalism.

Three Dorchester residents will be recognized this week as recipients of a Henry L. Shattuck Award, one of Boston’s highest honors for public service.

Each year, the Shattuck Public Service Awards, administered by the Boston Municipal Research Bureau, a non-partisan fiscal watchdog, celebrate a cohort of City of Boston employees whose work has strengthened the city and two Shattuck City Champions, one nonprofit leader and one private-sector notable. 

This year’s honorees include Dorchester residents Jeffrey Alkins of the Mayor’s Office of Housing; Taylor McCoy, an inclusion specialist at Mattahunt Elementary School; and Bill Kennedy, a longtime civic leader and partner at Nutter, McClennen & Fish LLP, who received the Shattuck City Champion Award.

For Steve Poftak, president and CEO of the Research Bureau, this 40th awards ceremony —set for Thursday evening— presents an opportunity to highlight individuals whose contributions are “incredibly inspiring” and often overlooked.

“I’ve had the opportunity to meet them and be incredibly impressed with their deep understanding of the needs of the residents that they serve,” Poftak said. In a polarized time when public servants often go unappreciated, he added, “everyone who gets the Shattuck award represents the very best in commitment to the public.”

Kara Buckley, who co-chairs the selection committee, said the panel looks for city employees and leaders whose work reflects the values embodied by Henry L. Shattuck, a Boston city councillor and state legislator, civic leader, Harvard treasurer and interim president, and chair of the Boston Municipal Research Bureau in the first half of the 20th century.

“He was someone who was highly dedicated to public service — a great, quiet leader and a humble man,” she said. “That’s what we look for when we go through these nominations: tremendous character, tremendous service, tremendous impact on the city and the world around them.”

For Jeff Alkins, the Shattuck Public Service Award recognizes more than two decades of work helping residents purchase their first homes and hold onto the homes they already have. A program manager with the Boston Home Center, Alkins provides foreclosure-prevention advocacy, technical assistance, and guidance on everything from mortgages to emergency repairs.

“It was completely by surprise, and it was definitely a humbling honor,” said Alkins, who grew up in Dorchester and has spent most of his life living in neighborhoods from Blue Hill Avenue to Four Corners to Lower Mills. His work, he said, is rooted in values he learned as one of nine children. “Growing up in a large family was about stability in your neighborhoods,” he said. “I’ve always been a strong community person.”

His work also centers on seniors, through the city’s Age Strong initiative. He helps connect them to fuel assistance, tax abatements, and emergency home-repair programs so they don’t have to choose, as he put it, “Do I pay my bill, or do I buy groceries this month?”

For Alkins, his work comes down to a straightforward philosophy: “You start small. You take your village, which is what Dorchester is — my village — and… we make this city a better place from one end to the other.”

For Taylor McCoy, an inclusion specialist at Mattahunt Elementary School, the award also came as a shock. “I actually wasn’t aware that I was nominated,” she said. “It felt both surreal and humbling.”

McCoy spent eight years teaching in substantially separate kindergarten classrooms at Mattahunt before moving into her current role three years ago. Now, she works to help students with specialized learning and behavioral needs transition from more restrictive settings into inclusive classrooms where they can learn alongside their peers.

“In this role, I work tirelessly — or I try to work tirelessly — to move students from the most restrictive setting to the least restrictive setting,” she said.

Much of McCoy’s commitment comes from her own experiences growing up. She struggled with letter reversals as a child and remembers the teachers who helped her. “I had such great teachers… it just kind of really stuck with me,” she said.

As a Dorchester native, McCoy said the award carries added meaning. “It’s nice to work in the community where I grew up and have lived my whole life.” 

Mattahunt serves a large multilingual student population and hosts the nation’s first Haitian Creole dual-language program. Many students face challenges outside school as well. “Just making sure they know when they come to school, they’re loved, they’re welcomed, that we are here for them — that’s been pretty heartbreaking but also rewarding,” she said.

For Bill Kennedy, a partner at Nutter McClennen & Fish LLP — the Boston law firm where he co-chairs the public policy group — and the lone recipient from the business community honored this year, the Shattuck City Champion Award recognizes decades of service to Boston’s civic and charitable institutions.

“For my peers to think that I am worthy of the City Champion Award is very flattering and humbling for me, and it means a great deal,” Kennedy said.

His public service career stretches across four decades. Born and raised in Dorchester’s Meetinghouse Hill neighborhood, he went from Suffolk University Law School to state government, serving as chief of staff and chief legal counsel to former House Speaker Thomas Finneran and to the House Ways and Means Committee. He later worked as an attorney for the Executive Council and as an assistant clerk at the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court.

He also spent more than 20 years involved with the Boston Municipal Research Bureau, including a decade as chair or co-chair of the Shattuck Awards dinner, the annual event that celebrates its recipients.

Kennedy’s civic commitments run deep. He has long supported organizations such as Pine Street Inn, Boston Health Care for the Homeless, Catholic Charities, and St. John Paul II Catholic Academy.

Across all those roles, Kennedy said, he has tried to carry forward an ethic that has shaped his work: “Life is a team sport. We can’t do it alone. We need each other.”

Other honorees at the Shattuck Awards include Elisabeth Jackson, CEO of Bridge Over Troubled Waters; John Connors, court coordinator for the city’s Inspectional Services Department’s Legal Division; Mari McCullough, special library assistant at the North End branch of the Boston Public Library; Elsie Morantus Petion, nurse manager at the Boston Public Health Commission;  Sgt. Peter Moscaritolo, supervisor at the Boston Police Department’s Street Outreach Unit; Alexa Pinard, assistant Deputy Director of Design Review at the Boston Planning Department; and Eric Prentis, principal administrative assistant at the Public Works Department.

This story is part of a partnership between the Dorchester Reporter and the Boston University Department of Journalism.

The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has finalized its plan to clean hazardous pollutants out of a 3.7-mile stretch of the Neponset River, the landmark waterway that runs 29 miles from Foxborough into Dorchester Bay.

The project will target those parts of the river that are highly polluted with Polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) and other hazardous materials that have been discharged or runoff into its waters from manufacturing sites that have dotted its banks since the 1600s.

After years of lobbying by local officials, the EPA designated the river a Superfund Site in March 2022 and with the final plan now in place, the next phase of the cleanup will begin where the river merges with Mother Brook in Hyde Park and then extends downstream through Mattapan and Milton, ending at the Walter Baker Chocolate Dam in Lower Mills.

A Superfund designation is both a mechanism for the federal government to clean up polluted sites and a tool to hold polluters accountable for the cleanup, said Ian Cooke, executive director of the Neponset River Watershed Association.

Last June, the EPA completed its analysis of cleanup alternatives and recommended the plan to address the widespread river contamination, especially PCBs, chemicals used in many manufacturing processes until the EPA banned them in 1979. According to the EPA, they can cause cancers, learning deficits, elevated blood pressure, and immune and reproductive disorders.

While mills and other businesses going back to early colonial times had used the Neponset to power their gunpowder, lumber, textiles, paper, and chocolate operations, from the 1930s to 1970s, many industries operating along the river and its watershed used PCBs, man-made chemicals introduced in the late 1920s, as production applications. According to Tristan Pluta, a remedial project manager with the EPA, the PCB infestation was the result of both direct discharges and runoff into the river.

Andres Ripley, the greenways program director at the Neponset River Watershed Association, said the Superfund designation allows the EPA to fund the cleanup while it looks for the parties that polluted it and potentially hold them responsible for the cost. 

The cleanup will include work at the Tileston and Hollingsworth Dam, where workers will excavate all the riverbank soils where PCBs exceed one part per million, EPA’s Pluta said.

The EPA will restore both the riverbed channel and the river’s banks after its cleanup and will then conclude with the removal of the dam, which is seen as a significant hazard, she sais, noting that the design will begin next year, and the cleanup will follow in 2027. It’s anticipated, she added, that the project will be completed in 2031.

“EPA believes that not only will this cleanup abate the immediate risk, it will also achieve the greatest efficacy for our long-term cleanup goals for the entire river,” Pluta said, “and it will give us the greatest likelihood that we won’t have to do a large mobilization in the future to address contamination in this area.” 

The EPA accepted public comments about the plan from June 13 through August 1, which included a virtual public hearing on July 9.

Public feedback was instrumental in the process, Cooke said. The EPA received many observations, and a lot were positive, which is unusual at a Superfund site, he noted. 

The Lower Neponset River Superfund Site Community Advisory Group, which meets monthly, is a group of interested citizens, residents, and community organizations that is following the cleanup and want to provide input to it. 

“They sort of provide a connection point for EPA with the community and other state agencies as the process goes along,” Cooke said.

Jay Paget, a member of the group, has been involved since early 2024. Most of the group members are residents of Hyde Park, Mattapan, Dorchester, and Milton, he said, as well as some advisory members from the Neponset River Watershed Association.

Other participants include members from the state Department of Conservation and Recreation and the Department of Environmental Protection, as well as the EPA. 

Paget said that the report that came out in June, in which the members solicited comments from the community, was a “great success in getting the word out, getting folks engaged.

“Our voice in ensuring that the river is clean to the highest standard possible, and our voice on how we would like to access and utilize this beautiful natural resource is important,” he added. 

This story is part of a partnership between the Dorchester Reporter and the Boston University Department of Journalism.

City Council President Ruthzee Louijeuene won re-election handily Tuesday, finishing far out in front in a field of eight candidates. But she said she’s not celebrating — she’s getting back to work.

Topping her to-do list: exploring whether the city should operate grocery stores in underserved neighborhoods and fixing Boston’s housing crisis.

Louijeune was elected Tuesday to a third term, topping the slate with 54,303 votes, around 7,000 more than the second-place finisher, Julia Mejia. Fewer than a quarter of Boston voters cast ballots Tuesday, with Mayor Michelle Wu running unopposed. All four at-large City Council incumbents – including Erin Murphy, Julia Mejia and Henry Santana – won re-election.

The day after the election, Louijeune said she was energized by her big win.  

“To think about 54,500 people know my name – I mean the idea of that is still sort of surreal, because I’m just a little girl from Mattapan,” Louijeune said.

Louijeune is a lifelong Bostonian, born and raised in Mattapan and Hyde Park. The daughter of Haitian immigrants, she worked as a lawyer before entering politics. Her parents and three sisters have always been on her side, she said.

“I couldn’t do this without an incredible family to support me,” Louijeune said. 

Although Louijeune received the most votes Tuesday night, her win was overshadowed by the contest for fourth-place between At-Large Councillor Henry Santana and former District 3 Councillor Frank Baker. Baker ended up 15,000 votes short of Santana, coming in fifth. 

After the election, Louijeune said she’s looking ahead to her next term and is excited about continuing to represent the city. She said the possibility of a future Congressional run isn’t on her mind right now, though she’s being floated as a possibility to replace Rep. Ayanna Pressley’s seat if she decides to run for U.S. Senate. 

“I really love my job. I just got re-elected to the best job possible,” Louijeune said. “I’m gonna continue doing that, and I’m really excited about the prospect of continuing to represent the city.”

Emily Polston, Louijeune’s chief of staff, who’s worked for her since 2021, said she’d follow her anywhere. 

“She’s going to be someone that continues to fight for Bostonians as long as the voters allow her to,” Polston said. 

Louijeune raised a more than $245,000 in 2025 to fund her re-election, according to records kept by the Office of Political and Campaign Finance.

Planned Parenthood and the Environmental League of Massachusetts endorsed Louijeune, and Greater Boston’s large Haitian American community came together to support her, Polston said.

Louijeune said she’s getting straight back to work. First on her list is to explore the possibility of city-owned grocery stores and address the housing crisis. She said she’s also concerned about the federal government’s suspension of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program payments, which 140,000 low-income Bostonians rely on to buy food. Most of these residents are in six zip codes including Dorchester, Mattapan, Hyde Park and Roxbury. 

A recent raid in Allston by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents is also on her mind.

“We remain vigilant on letting people know their rights, on bystander training and investing in nonprofit organizations that are helping with legal resources for individuals who face a number of immigration legal issues,” Louijeune said. 

Protests against the Trump administration must continue, Louijeune said, and the city council can fill in the gaps because it’s “what we’re called to do with the local government when our federal government is failing us.”

Boston political strategist Joyce Ferriabough Bolling of Roxbury said she’s a fan of Louijeune because she is true to her word. 

“We’re going to need people who aren’t afraid to get it done,” Bolling said. “She can go anywhere that she wants to go from here, and I hope to see that she does.”

This story is part of a partnership between the Dorchester Reporter and the Boston University Department of Journalism.