“And folks kind of looked at me as the coordinator (of the Central Brooklyn Neighborhood College) and I was still doing that as a volunteer. And sometime in September, Ron offered me a paid position to do what I was doing. I kind of resisted that for, I guess, a little over a month or so, because I was worried that being paid for what I was doing, what I enjoyed so much, would change the dynamic for me.” –Rudy

“Rudy helped build the center. He helped create some of its focal points. He helped educate a lot of the students and staff, and he was an indispensable partner in building the Pratt center. And one of the things that we’re talking about and what you’re uncovering is that unlike today, Pratt didn’t know what we were doing, or like today, they still don’t know what the Pratt Center did, but there wasn’t a commitment by the institution to what we were doing or what others at Pratt were doing that were, activist and working with the communities.”

Rudy Bryant & Ron Shiffman

Rudy Bryant worked at the Pratt Center for 40 years, from 1967–2007. He served as the Assistant Director from the early 1970s until he retired in 2007. One of his passions was education, from birth to adulthood.  Born in New York City, he was raised on a farm in North Carolina until he moved to New York City as a teenager. He served in the military for four years where he acquired his GED diploma  and when he returned to Brooklyn, he “stumbled upon” the Central Brooklyn Neighborhood College where he started taking courses. Rudy first worked at the college as a volunteer where he met Ron Shiffman and was subsequently hired by the Pratt Center to continue his work at the Central Brooklyn Neighborhood College until the college transitioned into a new organization in 1972. Rudy also served on the board of the college under the auspices of the Central Brooklyn Coordinating Council.

Folks from Bedford-Stuyvesant taught stuff like stenography, typing, and I took a class in chemistry and mathematics, and so classes were taught somewhere on the campus of Pratt, but many were actually in the community. So that photography class was actually taught in the community, and Kingsborough Community College had a facility, and Clinton Hill (classes were held) in the Masonic Temple, and there were classes held in the church across the street from the library. And there were dance studios, there were academic courses, there were professional courses to prepare people for a job. If they needed that help, they helped folks to get their GED, if they wanted to help folks to get into college. All of those things were what the faculty of the neighborhood college did to help people in the community to move on. So for that summer, that’s when I was both a student and a volunteer. Come September, Jim Shirley and the other students that were employed through college work study at the Pratt Center to assist the neighborhood college, they went back to class. And so that led to a dearth, if you will, of administrative assistants to keep the neighborhood college operating. By that time I had actually been elected by the other students to the board of the steering committee of the college.

That first summer, the college had about 60-75 students spread around and courses all throughout the community. September of that year the student body expanded to probably about 150 or so. And when I left the college, I believe in 1972, we had about 500 students and we were operating  out of the industrial building on Vanderbilt between Fulton and Atlantic.

Rudy recalls that the Central Brooklyn Neighborhood College also sponsored VISTA (Volunteers in Service to America), a federal program established in 1965, to work in the college. According to Rudy, this was one of the first sites to sponsor “indigenous” VISTA volunteers (meaning volunteers from the local community rather than from outside). “We  recruited seven people from the Bed Stuy, Bushwick, Brownsville community to be VISTA volunteers and serve through the neighborhood college.

Rudy then worked for about five years as a liaison to community groups who wanted to establish child care centers in New York City. At the time, activists across the city who were part of the welfare rights and daycare movements pressured the city to provide affordable public care and education for young children. 

We (the Pratt Center) probably worked with over a hundred daycare centers or daycare organizations throughout the city. Not all of them became daycare centers and they certainly didn’t all last long. Not all of them became city funded daycare centers, but the number of community groups that approached us was well in the neighborhood of 170 some odd groups.

Ron Shiffman

I often say that I have served a life sentence at Pratt. I started as a student in 1956, probably before some of the students’ grandparents were born. I started as an architectural student and had the opportunity over the years to begin to work with some of the neighborhood organizations surrounding Pratt, primarily in the sixties, early sixties, and, helped form and found what became the Pratt Center for Community and Environmental Development now known as the Pratt Center for Community Development. And it was by working with some of the leaders in the Bedford-Stuyvesant community, that my education was really, I believe, rounded out and informed and helped condition the kinds of work I did.

Some of those people were people like Elsie Richardson, Donald Benjamin, a woman by the name of Shirley Chisholm, and a couple of others, who’ve gone on to be recognized for a variety of other reasons over the years. Some of the early work that we did led to the formation of what now is the Bedford Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation, which was a model for community based development groups around the country.

And out of that grew that Central Brooklyn Neighborhood College, and a couple of other efforts like that. One of the ideas behind the Central Brooklyn Neighborhood College was to set up a permanent institution that would do the kinds of things the college did. It was part of the movement that led to the founding of Medgar Evers College in Central Brooklyn. I had the opportunity then to meet some of the graduate students that were running the Central Brooklyn Neighborhood College. And that’s when I met Rudy Bryant and he became a member of the Pratt Center staff. I think just introducing him with that title is wrong.