Ideas for addressing local community issues come from all over: walking down a block and passing a vacant lot, witnessing a flood, speaking with a local street vendor about their job. For Pratt faculty, staff, and students, the Taconic Fellowship has long provided an outlet for exploring these creative sparks, offering fellows funding and guidance to work with community groups on areas such as food access, public housing, and workforce development to advance racial, climate, and economic justice in New York City.
The Taconic Fellowship recently celebrated its 10th anniversary as a grantmaking program of the Pratt Center for Community Development during a special reception for past and current fellows, where it received an official proclamation honoring its achievements from NYC Council Member Crystal Hudson.
Established in 2013, the Taconic Fellowship connects teams from Pratt Institute with local NYC organizations on projects that tackle intersecting issues of racial, social, economic, and climate justice in NYC. The program has funded 70 projects from 106 Pratt faculty and staff, representing 14 different academic departments, from Art and Design Education and Digital Arts and Animation to Graduate Architecture and Urban Design and Fashion Design. These projects have served 29 distinct neighborhoods and areas, supported dozens of community groups, and created hands-on work opportunities for 109 Pratt students in their fields of study.
A report authored by Pratt Center and designed by Pratt’s Communications and Marketing Creative Services team sheds light on the breadth of projects and demonstrates the power of design, planning, and social engagement in creating lasting community impact. By embedding Pratt’s interdisciplinary approach into community work, the fellowship has helped shape innovative solutions to critical challenges, including affordable housing, sustainable urban planning, and food justice.
“The past 10 years of the Taconic Fellowship have demonstrated the power of collaboration, pairing organizations deeply connected to their communities with the passion and expertise of Pratt’s faculty, staff, and students to bring bold, community-led visions to life,” said Alexa Kasdan, executive director of the Pratt Center.
Bold Ideas
The Taconic Fellowship fosters sustained community engagement throughout the duration of a grant, with community partners involved in the planning and execution of projects. From co-design and participatory planning to interviews and workshops, fellows employ a range of methods, approaches, and tools to engage and collaborate with community stakeholders.
Pratt Center staff provide administrative support and create spaces for fellows to discuss challenges and share best practices. This joint approach allows bold ideas to take root and flourish beyond a project’s initial scope.
“It has created opportunities for faculty to percolate an idea that may have come up in class, allowing them to earmark time to examine questions that come up more carefully,” Gita Nandan, adjunct associate professor in the Graduate Center for Planning and the Environment (GCPE) and a four-time Taconic fellow, said in the report.
In 2014-2015, Nandan and Elliot Maltby, adjunct associate professor in GCPE, developed “lowlands,” a collaboration with the social justice organization Red Hook Initiative on a community-based green infrastructure plan for New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) residents in Red Hook. The project grew out of Nandan’s pre-existing relationship with the community and a design-build green infrastructure studio that Nandan and Maltby co-taught that looked at public housing on low-lying land in the aftermath of the flooding caused by Hurricane Sandy.
The team worked closely with local youth leaders, going on NYCHA campus walks and hosting group sessions with local residents to gather information. Their work ultimately influenced the creation of the first urban farm on public housing in Red Hook and helped spur the adoption of enhanced stormwater management techniques across the city.
“The Taconic gave us an opportunity to get into a level of detail and a level of engagement with local communities that wouldn’t be possible for a small firm with the financial pressures of running a practice,” said Maltby, who co-leads the architecture studio thread collective with Nandan, adding that the grant allowed them to hire student fellows. “The Taconic provides a sweet spot of collaboration and support through their expertise and knowledge of working with communities.”
Nandan and Maltby have been able to build on what they learned from “lowlands.” For example, their 2021-2022 Taconic Fellowship “Blue City Blue Blocks Garden” allowed them to create floating gardens to improve air and water quality, improve coastal resilience, and support local species in Red Hook.
Cynthia Tobar, former visiting assistant professor of social science and cultural studies, discussed in a Prattfolio interview the importance of the Taconic Fellowship for her documentary short film Mujeres Atrevidas, which chronicles the professional and personal lives of Brooklyn-based women fighting for better working conditions.
“Thanks to this funding, I set out to engage with the community within The Worker’s Justice Project, a Brooklyn-based worker center that educates, organizes, and fights for better work conditions and social justice in the workplace,” Tobar said in the interview. “I was able to establish a working relationship with them and interview several of their members. The more I sat with them, the more I realized that I also had to focus on the friendships, sense of community, and empowerment these women identify as their sources of strength in their organizing.”
Ligia Guallpa, Executive Director of the The Worker’s Justice Project, emphasized the transformative impact the documentary had on the women who participated. “The documentary provided a rare and poignant opportunity for working class immigrant women to play an active part in shaping and presenting stories about their struggles to build power and a dignified life for themselves and their fellow workers,” Guallpa said.
Ryan Thomas Devlin, former visiting professor of historic preservation, also acknowledged how the Taconic Fellowship enabled his 2021-2022 “Enhancing Access to Healthy Foods” project exploring affordable and lightweight carts for street vendors who sell fruits and vegetables.
“I had been working with street vendors before this, doing what I could to support whatever initiatives they were running at the time, but the money and support that we got from the Taconic Fellowship really enabled us to start thinking about what a new vending community could look like,” Devlin said. “It helped to fund community meetings, research assistants, and building materials.”
Although the team’s final prototype—developed by faculty and students in the School of Architecture—hasn’t been implemented, the insights Devlin gained have proved useful in his later work, including his 2023-2024 Taconic Fellowship “Visioning Corona Plaza.”
“I appreciate the Taconic for being the kind of grant that allows for experimentation,” he said. “I now have a relationship with people in the Department of Health that can be built upon and there can now be a transfer of knowledge with similar groups of vendors.”
Building Futures
The 2024-2025 fellows are working on a variety of community-engaged projects that seek to strengthen climate resilience, improve educational access, and elevate artistic expression.
In the fall 2023 semester, Charles Newman, visiting assistant professor of design, led a studio that invited students in the School of Design to develop a plan for transforming public housing green space. Students worked in collaboration with the Center for Justice Innovation on their Green Space Connections Program to design workshops with residents of Roosevelt Houses for the green space proposals.
With support from the Taconic Fellowship, Newman was able to plan a follow-up studio for this past semester that allowed students to design prototypes for a shaded structure to be included in the proposals.
“The generous grant from the Taconic Fellowship has been crucial towards realizing this project, as all of the funds will go towards purchasing construction materials for the shade structures,” Newman said. “As we move into the summer, we look forward in anticipation as we begin with purchasing and contracting for the project.”
In Cho, visiting assistant professor and sustainability coordinator in the School of Architecture, received funding to design a Passive Housing Training Center for the Boys and Girls High School in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. Passive House refers to a set of energy efficiency design principles for housing. Cho has championed Passive House through her organization Passive House for Everyone and has led a Passive House design/build studio for undergraduate architecture students, as well as an Ice Cream Box Challenge afterschool program for Design Works High School students in collaboration with the Pratt Center for Art, Design, and Community Engagement K-12.
Three projects are supporting immigrant communities in Brooklyn. Sara Rothstein, visiting assistant professor of creative arts therapy, is hosting weaving workshops to help diverse immigrant populations with trauma in Sunset Park, while Emily Ahn Levy, visiting professor of urban placemaking and management, and Ghuncha Shaheed, MS Urban Placemaking and Management ’25, are working with the Bangladeshi Women’s Club in Kensington to build connections between community members and create space for resource sharing. Keena Suh, professor in the School of Design, and Ann Dinh, AICAD post-graduate teaching fellow in the School of Architecture, are working with University Settlement to co-design English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) classes.
Two mapping projects highlight New York City’s climate risks. Yuliya Dzyuban, assistant professor in GCPE, is conducting a series of thermal walks to support the North Brooklyn Parks Alliance in their efforts to create equitable green spaces, while Mark Heller, assistant professor in GCPE, John Lauermann, associate professor in the School of Information, and John Shapiro, professor in GCPE, are creating an interactive database showing how sea level rise could affect the city’s industrial and manufacturing land as part of Pratt’s Spatial Analysis and Visualization Initiative.
“In the coming years, we plan to deepen and strengthen the community partnerships that are at the heart of the Taconic Fellowship and cultivate a community of practice across Pratt Institute,” said Kasdan. “We are committed to building a vibrant network that centers community-engaged research and builds power in our neighborhoods.”
More information on the Taconic Fellowship and the latest fellows is available on the Pratt Center for Community Development’s Taconic Fellowship page.