Emmanuel Pratt is an urban designer creating a model of resident-driven community development in neighborhoods that have suffered the effects of long-term disinvestment. Pratt is co-founder and executive director of the Sweet Water Foundation, a nonprofit organization based on Chicago’s South Side that engages local residents in the cultivation and regeneration of social, environmental, and economic resources in their neighborhoods.

A recipient of the 2019 MacArthur Foundation Fellows, Emmanuel Pratt was invited to give the keynote to close the daylong SCE Climate Colloquium because the work demonstrated and exemplified by the Sweet Water Foundation provides a radically transformative model of engaged practice. Informed by deeply held belief in social, racial and climate justice, Sweet Water Foundation challenges traditional institutions, like Parsons, to question what it really means to live and educate meaningfully today. Emmanuel Pratt sets an example for how to use a design education as the foundation for constructing fundamental change.

The video recording is available here.