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Pratt Center Receives Rockefeller Foundation NYC Cultural Innovation Award

News last updated October 6, 2010

This week, the Rockefeller Foundation announced that the Pratt Center is among the recipients of its NYC Cultural Innovation Fund awards, which this year are supporting projects that use arts and culture as a vehicle for promoting environmental sustainability. Along with Pratt Institute’s Initiative for Art, Community and Social Change, the Pratt Center will advance sustainable practices in New York City neighborhoods through visual and performing arts.

Building on the Pratt Center's Retrofit NYC and neighborhood sustainability planning work, the Pratt Center will team up with community development groups in New York City to develop innovative cultural, arts, media and organizing strategies to engage neighborhoods in making healthy consumer choices and taking environmental action. Our work will also support artists and arts organizations to develop activities -- such as performances, installations and workshops -- that promote a civic dialogue about community sustainability.

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The Art, Culture and Sustainability Project

News last updated January 26, 2012

In the spring of 2011, Pratt Center for Community Development launched a two-year program designed to connect the arts and artists with our multi-layered work, helping New York City communities to become more environmentally sustainable. Supported by a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation’s Cultural Innovation Fund, the Center has partnered with academic and community organizations to produce innovative culture, arts, media and organizing strategies that seek to engage neighborhood residents and artists to promote sustainable, environmental action. This project is a part of Pratt Center’s broader goal to develop replicable models that will aid urban communities’ efforts to become environmentally sustainable -- intensive work we are doing in partnership with nine different community organizations in all five boroughs of NYC.

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Northside Town Hall Community Center

Past Project last updated June 23, 2009

Engine 212 – “The People’s Firehouse” – served North Brooklyn for more than a century; the Pratt Center is now helping transform it into a community and cultural center.

Built in 1869, Engine 212 was threatened with forced closure in the 1970s by a cash-strapped city government. New York City’s poorest neighborhoods were then suffering waves of arson and destructive fires. At the same time, City services, including fire-fighting, were being slashed.

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