Growing up poor and black in Richmond, Va., Emmanuel Pratt and his mother moved from neighborhood to neighborhood in search of a safe place to live. “We looked for the interstices,” he says.
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Now, as executive director of the Sweet Water Foundation, the community-development organization he co-founded a decade ago, Pratt works to create an “interstice” amid a troubled and long-neglected section of Chicago’s South Side.
Pratt’s organic approach to rebuilding neighborhoods involves teaching the arts, carpentry, construction, stage design, and urban farming to African American residents who have struggled — including homeless youths, former prisoners, and people in drug programs.
Through apprenticeships, fellowships, and one-on-one teaching, Sweet Water prepares people for lives both within and outside the eight acres of urban soil and once-crumbling buildings along S. Perry Avenue that the group has reinvigorated.
To tie its work together with the larger community, Sweet Water relies on what Pratt calls a “bio-dynamic” system that links people in the Englewood neighborhood with the public school system, soil producers, museums, and others interested in rebuilding long-forsaken areas and the lives of the people in them.
“It’s an active rerooting of the neighborhood,” Pratt says. “We’re using labor provided by and for the neighborhood to get people working together, to help them heal.”
The organization has converted a two-acre former site of a reform school into an urban farm, morphed vacant buildings into educational centers, and turned old ruins into art spaces.
High-Profile Recognition
The neighborhood’s utter transformation has earned Pratt the respect of some powerful Chicago institutions. Earlier this year, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation gave him a $625,000 MacArthur Fellow award — unofficially known as a “genius grant.” The MacArthur laurels came, in part, because of Sweet Water’s unconventional, unicorn-like presence on the South Side.
“He is doing community development in a way that brings life back to neighborhoods — physically, spiritually, and transformatively — and has provided a model for how to go about doing it,” says Tawa Mitchell, a senior program officer at MacArthur’s Chicago Commitment initiative.
In doing so, Pratt has returned to his own roots. He escaped the ghettoes of Richmond, his strong grades and a desire to learn about the best ways to organize spaces propelling him into the Ivy League. After years spent studying at Cornell and Columbia, earning a master’s degree in architecture and urban design at the latter, Pratt found it difficult to see himself thriving in the jobs those fields offer.
“When I got into architecture, I dove right in, I loved it,” he says. “But I didn’t like being in a field that thought neighborhoods like where I grew up aren’t worthy of it.”
After graduation, Pratt traveled to Harlem, New Orleans, and Johannesburg in search of ways to help people in areas like the ones where he once lived. Chicago became his focus after he saw possibilities to start urban agriculture projects there that mirrored ones in Johannesburg.
Pratt investigated new ways for poor communities to feed themselves. He became a professor in aquaponics — a symbiotic system of aquaculture that raises fish and then takes their waste and uses it to grow vegetables hydroponically, which in turn cleans the water.
Pratt believed that introducing African Americans in the nation’s cities to aquaponics and agriculture would lead them to reconnect — to the land, to one another, and to a system that has too often thrown people away. Much of Englewood has long been a “food desert.” Sweet Water’s growing efforts have helped ease the problem. Program participants raise and sell the food, making it available to neighborhood residents and others. Though Pratt’s energy and vision have reaped many fans, money hasn’t followed. Sweet Water’s value in connecting people with healthy food, skills, and one another hasn’t been reflected in its annual budget, which has run around $500,000.
“Their work defies categorization, and it’s been hard for Emmanuel to raise money because of it,” says Mitchell.
Foundations often don’t understand the Sweet Water model or apply the proper metrics to it, Pratt adds. “We do social work here every day to deal with the trauma people suffer,” he says. “If a member of my team tells me, ‘My family member has been shot,’ the work must stop for the day. Not everyone understands that.”
What’s more, the group’s work might not line up neatly with many grant makers’ program areas. “We were told early on that we were doing too much and that we needed to pick one thing, like education,” Pratt says. “But poverty doesn’t exist in silos.”
Despite the funding obstacles, Sweet Water is moving forward with plans to raise new housing from the ground up, using the people it has trained to build it. The organization has asked the city government to rezone the area for “21st-century cottage industries,” Pratt says — ventures that allow neighborhood people to take charge of where they live and how they can make the area vibrant.
“The work we’re trying to do here is going to take a generation or more to do. It’s taken us a decade to get people to realize what we’re talking about,” Pratt says. “We’re still in midtransformation.”
Michael Anft has written for the Chronicle since 2001, focusing on advocacy groups and the grant makers who support them. He recently wrote about a Muslim leader in Chicago with a deft ability to bring together poor people from diverse backgrounds to work for a better life.
