First Week with Pratt

I had a wonderful first week with the Pratt Center for Community Development. My supervisors had me jump right in taking notes on the Hunts Point Forward Vision Plan (HPF + HPVP) meetings and the East Side Coastal Resiliency project’s Community Advisory Group (ESCR CAG). Having been briefed on these projects, coupled with the time spent researching the areas over the spring semester, I thought I would be prepared enough to understand what was going on. I was incorrect.

The Hunts Point Forward Vision Plan is an update to a set of recommendations put forth to the city government of New York in 2004. Pratt Center is working with New York City Economic Development Corporation (EDC) to facilitate the process of community outreach and organizing efforts to provide the most comprehensive set of recommendations which will fill in the gaps that were previously mentioned but not addressed in the original plan, as well as add to the list to bring Hunts Point forward. Introduced myself to everyone on the call and was quickly thrown by all of the acronyms being thrown around, beyond EDC, they work with DDC, DOT, various agencies, I had no idea if CB2 was referring to community boards or something else entirely. Behind the Microsoft Teams meeting I was furiously googling the city agencies and acronyms related to planner talk that were outside my scope. By the end of the first EDC x Pratt meeting I had begun to grasp what was being discussed and who worked for which parts of the working group. They were looking to do public outreach at an upcoming parade, look at survey results to gage community feedback, and plan meetings for the public after hosting meetings with a smaller subgroup from the community.