Activist Women's Voices: Oral History Project
Linking Communities and the University
  Mary Burns, a Sister of Charity (S.C.) is co-director of the Maura Clarke-Ita Ford Center, a grassroots community-based center for learning and organizing, created by and for the women of Bushwick, Brooklyn. She founded the Center in 1993 with Mary Babbick and Mary Dowd, an Urseline Sister (O.S.U.). The Center welcomes women from the surrounding community who are among the most economically disadvantaged in the city and in need of education, job training and leadership and advocacy skills. It functions on three levels: self-development and education, economic self-sufficiency, and community change. Using this multi-level approach, the Center attempts to empower the women, break the cycle of poverty and enable them to move from dependence to independence.