What We're Working On

Project last updated March 9, 2010

Jackson Heights is a thriving community that faces a distinct set of environmental challenges. The City Council district that includes Jackson Heights has just 1 acre of park space for every thousand children. Traffic to and from nearby LaGuardia airport pollutes the air and clogs the streets. And Jackson Heights has a larger share of tenants living in severely overcrowded housing than any other neighborhood in New York City.

The Green Agenda for Jackson Heights is a collaboration between Queens Community House, Friends of Travers Park and the Pratt Center for Community Development, bringing together residents of Jackson Heights to plan an environmental blueprint for the neighborhood. Air quality, traffic, open space and housing conditions are among the issues participants are grappling with in through a process that is engaging hundreds of neighborhood residents and ultimately influence city spending, services and priorities.

On March 20, Green Agenda for Jackson Heights will convene Jackson Heights residents to assess proposals for making a sustainable neighborhood, generated through workshops held this winter with hundreds of community residents. Participants at this town hall meeting will review ideas for expanding open space, reducing waste, and many other steps toward environmental and economic sustainability, and emerge from the session with a consensus agenda of priority actions to promote a greener Jackson Heights.

Learn more about the March 20 session here.

Project last updated December 8, 2009

Churches, mosques, synagogues and other houses of worship serve as anchors for their congregations and communities. But rising energy costs and expensive building maintenance are a burden greater than many can bear. Their aging buildings waste costly amounts of heating fuel because of inefficient design, poor insulation, and deferred maintenance.

The Pratt Center is collaborating with religious institutions to help them reduce their buildings’ energy consumption, set maintenance priorities, develop space utilization strategies and in the process turn them into centers of education and advocacy for sustainability in their communities. The Religious Institution Sustainability Project is currently focusing on Bedford-Stuyvesant, home to more than 100 houses of worship as well as the Retrofit Bedford Stuyvesant collaboration targeting two blocks of Herkimer Street for home weatherization.