Activist Women's Voices: Oral History Project
Linking Communities and the University
  Alberta Williams, a long-term Bushwick resident working at the Maura Clark-Ita Ford Center, a grassroots community-based center for learning and organizing, created by and for the women of Bushwick Brooklyn. Before this, she worked at the Human Resources Administration for twenty years. The Center was founded in 1993 and 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. Alberta Williams began her work at the Center by teaching English classes. The Center 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.

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