Tran, Klein Elected to Lead Harvard Phillips Brooks House Association

Tiffany V. Tran ’28 was elected the next president of the Harvard Phillips Brooks House Association, alongside vice president Frederick L. “Fred” Klein ’28 in the first slate of the organization’s annual elections on Wednesday evening.

The pair will take office Feb. 1, 2027, with 12 other students serving as PBHA’s student officers. The organization is set to elect the rest of its 22-member student leadership body on Nov. 18.

Tran has been a member of PBHA since her freshman fall and currently serves as PBHA’s Assessment and Evaluation Chair, a role focused on collecting and processing program data. She has volunteered for five programs at PBHA — and said the highlight has been working with the Boston Refugee Youth Enrichment Program, which connects Harvard students with children of immigrants and refugees in Dorchester.

Tran said she plans to focus on “humanity first and foremost” in her newly elected position.

“Whether I’m working with the 90 kids that I worked with over the summer with BRYE, or working with my Elderly 1-2-1 buddy Maria, who’s 80 and so funny, and just has a heart of gold — anyone that I’m working with — I try to understand their story, try to put myself in their shoes, try to live through a lens of their lived experiences, and that’s shaped me,” Tran said.

PBHA is a student-led 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization and the largest public service organization on Harvard’s campus. The organization runs 55 programs and serves more than 7,000 youth and adults in the greater Boston area through initiatives like the Harvard Square Homeless Shelter and the Cambridge After School Program.

Tran will step into the presidency after the Center for Public Service, which supports PBHA, faced sweeping staffing cuts in July. She said she plans to capitalize on PBHA’s upcoming 125th anniversary in 2029 to aggressively fundraise during her tenure.

“Whatever monetary challenge or whatever challenges that we encounter, I think the 125th campaign is really going to help us navigate through this year,” Tran said. “Using that as a platform is really going to help us succeed this year.”

More than 1,200 students volunteer through PBHA, but Klein said PBHA and nonprofits in general are facing a “really hard time,” making fundraising “more important than ever.”

“One of our major goals for that is to expand our capacity, raise money to hire new staff members, so that our fundraising is stronger than ever,” Klein said.

Klein said volunteering at Harvard is popular, but students’ busy schedules may prevent them from taking action, which he hopes to address in the upcoming year.

“Harvard is an eternal fight for the attention span of all of us, between classes and things that feel more pre-professional,” Klein said. “Volunteering is something that can actually heal your burnout and can actually make you more effective and a better leader.”

Outgoing president Arya S. Prasad ’27 said the organization has seen a record number of volunteer enrollments this semester — the highest since the Covid-19 pandemic.

“It is an enormous privilege that people choose to spend their time doing this work, and we need to make sure we are working towards building the capacity to support them in doing that work,” Prasad said.

Prasad said she is eager to see Tran and Klein take the helm of the organization.

“I have not a single doubt in my mind that they’re going to do an incredible job, and I’m really excited to see where they take the organization,” Prasad said.