Pratt Center

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.

The Pratt Center has already supported such strategies in Bedford-Stuyvesant, where under the Retrofit NYC Block by Block project Bedford Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation teamed up with Justice Corps to create a community garden on a block targeted for energy efficiency audits and retrofits. The garden features a mural created by Justice Corps members -- young people who have been in contact with the criminal justice system -- and has become a focal point for community gatherings and discussions about environmental sustainability and energy efficiency. Meanwhile, the community-based sustainability planning projects Green Agenda for Jackson Heights and Cypress Hills Verde have both brought diverse communities together to collaborate on a shared agenda for sustainable neighborhood development, by working with local cultural, educational and civic organizations to engage residents in the process.

Since its establishment in 1913, the Rockefeller Foundation has funded cultural innovation and the interplay between artistic, scientific and social advances. Creative expression has long been central to the identity of New York City, the Foundation’s headquarters. Today, more than ever, our communities need imaginative, life-enhancing elements that shatter barriers between disciplines and bridge right-brain ingenuity and left-brain problem-solving. To foster this approach, the Foundation’s New York City Cultural Innovation Fund supports diverse organizations that fire our imaginations, enrich our neighborhoods, and inspire us to envision and build a better tomorrow.