Ron Shiffman, editor and contributor to Beyond Zuccotti Park, was awarded the 2012 Jane Jacobs Medal for Lifetime Leadership by the Rockefeller Foundation for his work as a “trailblazer in his development of the model for community development corporations.”

The Medals are awarded each year to recipients whose work creates new ways of seeing and understanding New York City, challenges traditional assumptions, and creatively uses the urban environment to make New York City a place of hope and expectation.

The Rockefeller Foundation highlighted Shiffman’s efforts to promote community-based activism over the last fifty years:

As a student in the early 1960s, Mr. Shiffman, along with Professor George Raymond and others, worked on a study of Bedford-Stuyvesant, anticipating a city urban renewal program planned for the neighborhood. The community consortium developed a comprehensive plan to rebuild Bedford-Stuyvesant through economic development programs that became a model for the creation of community development corporations today.

 

Mr Shiffman’s work in Bedford-Stuyvesant became the inspiration to create the Pratt Institute Center for Community and Environmental Development, founded by Mr. Shiffman and Dr. Raymond in 1964.  The center continues today to empower low and moderate income communities in New York to plan for and realize their futures.

 

Just in the last few years, Mr. Shiffman has advised Develop Don’t Destroy Brooklyn, an organization that brings community voices into the planning process for development projects in Brooklyn such as Atlantic Yards. For his tireless pursuit of, and belief in, the power of community-based groups to change the makeup of New York City for the better, Ronald Shiffman is the 2012 recipient of the Jane Jacobs Medal for Lifetime Leadership.

 

Congratulations, Ron!

 

Read the full press release here.