Rockefeller Foundation Honors Urban Activism with 2008 Jane Jacobs Medal
September 8th, 2008, 3:54 pm
Tonight the Rockefeller Foundation will award the 2008 Jane Jacobs Medal to Peggy Shepard, executive director and co-founder of West Harlem Environmental Action, Inc. (WE ACT), and Alexie Torres-Fleming, founder of Youth Ministries for Peace and Justice (YMPJ) in the South Bronx, at a ceremony at the Morgan Library and Museum in Manhattan. The featured speaker will be Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer Robert A. Caro, who won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Best Nonfiction Book of the Year for The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York. The awards are administered annually by the Municipal Art Society.
Click on the “play” icon above to watch a video featuring the two award winners discussing their work, and click here to read the official press release in full.
Later this month, a series of MAS Jane Jacobs-themed walking tours begins, including Toxic Hazards and Cultural Treasures, a tour highlighting issues of environmental justice in Harlem led by Peggy Shepard. For more information, visit www.mas.org/tours.