Literary Science is the methodology. NewComm is its most complete expression.
The New Community Project is Literary Science’s flagship expression—and the proof of what happens when the methodology transforms what an institution’s campus is for.
NewComm operates on the campuses of independent schools—Horace Mann, Poly Prep—institutions with extraordinary assets: physical infrastructure built for deep learning, faculty who became educators because they believe in young people, networks that span industries, and the kind of institutional credibility that opens doors. NewComm’s premise is that all of that can serve a larger purpose than it currently does.
These campuses become shared sites of knowledge-making—spaces where students from historically marginalized communities and the host institution’s own community work alongside each other on challenges that matter to both. Literary Science is the methodology that makes this more than a partnership on paper. It provides the intellectual architecture—novels as operational technology, community data as evidence, hypothesis as the bridge to action—so that what happens on campus produces real outcomes for the communities beyond the gate.
Every year, a client organization presents a real community challenge. Fellows—high school students from historically marginalized communities—spend a five-week Summer Intensive developing hypotheses through Literary Science: reading novels as operational technology, overlaying them onto community data, and synthesizing both into specific, testable claims about what could change. When the school year begins, student-led Project Teams enter the monthly Loop—a twelve-month cycle of experimentation and execution that culminates in $10,000 community interventions designed, prototyped, and delivered by the students themselves.
No one hands them a lesson plan. The project is the teacher. The community is the classroom. And the campus—with all of its resources, its people, and its potential—becomes the infrastructure that makes the work possible. The result is that everyone in the building benefits: the host institution discovers what its space can do when the gate opens, and the community discovers what becomes possible when institutional assets are shared.
Social isolation and identity formation. A young person’s sense of possibility shrinks when their world is small by design.
The novel: Students read Sandra Cisneros’s House on Mango Street through Literary Science, analyzing the consequences of social isolation on identity formation. The novel renders a system: what happens when possibility is shaped not by ability but by proximity.
The overlay: Literary analysis became the basis for research on their peers’ career aspirations versus representation. They discovered that a high percentage of their peers wanted to become healthcare professionals—but did not personally know a single healthcare professional. The asset existed (desire). The flow was blocked (no connection to the profession).
The hypothesis: The system Cisneros rendered—isolation shaping aspiration—was operating in their own community. Strategic Response identified the gap: create the connection that the system had never provided.
Using their literacy skills—proposal writing, data storytelling, strategic communication—students designed The Net Gala: a networking event modeled after the Met Gala that brought together 100 young people with 50 healthcare professionals. The Net Gala is now NewComm’s official annual fundraiser.
A novel became an event. An event became an institution. It is Sandra Cisneros’s ideas given legs.
Every NewComm project is, at its heart, an homage to an author. The project is how students honor the intellectual tradition they’ve inherited—by doing something with it.
Projects as Homage