Who’s Who in Green: Majora Carter

The South Bronx, where Majora Carter grew up, wasn’t exactly an inspiring place for a creative girl who would go on to study cinema. Back then, as Majora told CNN, the area was considered “the poster child for urban blight”. Waste facilities and other kinds of polluting infrastructure crowd this neighborhood outside Manhattan. While the South Bronx is better now than it was when she was a child, Majora was still stunned by the prevalence of such facilities in a poor community. She decided to get more involved, and founded Sustainable South Bronx, an organization that works to promote green collar jobs and sustainable development to create healthier communities and help lift people out of poverty.

Over the years, the South Bronx has literally served as a dumping ground for waste. The air quality was abysmal and athsma rates were raising ever-higher. When Majora went back to live with her parents while seeking a graduate degree from New York University, she noticed a disused stretch of waterfront one day and thought, why can’t that be a usable, clean, green space for the community to enjoy? She wrote a .2 million Federal Transportation planning grant for the South Bronx Greenway, which resulted in a big victory: an 11-mile waterfront park.

The South Bronx still faces plenty of problems. It handles more than 40 percent of New York City’s commercial waste. There’s also a sewage treatment plant, a sewage sludge palletizing plant and four power plants. Residents breathe in diesel emissions from about 60,000 diesel truck trips every week. Majora hopes that Sustainable South Bronx’s efforts will inspire the community to come together and fight against the kind of discrimination that results in poor communities being kept on the receiving end of all of this pollution.

Five years ago, Sustainable South Bronx started an urban green-collar job training program, Bronx Environmental Stewardship Training (BEST). It focused on individuals who needed help the most; many of the trainees were formerly incarcerated. The program has a fantastic 85 percent employment rate in areas like forestry, green roof installation, brown field cleanup and maintenance.

Other projects by the Sustainable South Bronx include building a park on the site of a former concrete plant, developing an ecological restoration workforce to protect the environment, replacing the abandoned Sherridan Expressway along 1.25 miles of the Bronx River with riverfront housing and retail stores and advocating for swimmable waterways.

Check out this video of Majora talking about ‘greening the ghetto’:

Of Sustainable South Bronx’s future, Majora told CNN,

In ten years I hope that Sustainable South Bronx has worked itself out of a job because our work to help create the South Bronx as a hope for green businesses, for clean businesses, has taken off so much; that our 25 percent unemployment rate is in the past; that our asthma rates have plummeted because there is so much green space along the new Greenway that has been built here; that there are so many people bike riding and the diabetes rate is gone; and that Nobel Prize Laureates are being born.

In 10 years, if we play our cards right and make the right partnerships, whether that’s with the city or with businesses, absolutely. I don’t think it would take much for that to happen. When my parents moved here 60 years ago, this place was a working class community and it was thriving. We can be thriving again.
There was a different kind of manufacturing then, but it was manufacturing and the jobs were right here in this country. People were able to make livings out of it and the gap between rich and poor was smaller.

I think we need to decide as a society, as a country, that it’s not ok that people are as poor as they are right now. We’ve got to decide that we want to live in a world that is sane and happy and healthy, and that everyone deserves that.

Majora has been named among Newsweek’s ‘Who’s Next in 2007’, The NY Post’s 50 most influential women in New York City, Essence Magazine’s 25 Most Influential African-Americans of 2007 and Vibe Magazine’s New Power Generation. She has also been awarded the National Audubon Society’s Rachel Carson Award for outstanding efforts in environmental protection. In fact, she’s received so many awards that the list is too lengthy to include here! Check it out on her Wikipedia page.

Majora is also co-founder of Green for All with fellow Who’s Who in Green Van Jones, which aims to help raise people out of poverty through green jobs. Majora looks forward to a future where the world works together to create communities that are safe and healthy, and she’s inspiring plenty of people along the way.

Majora Carter’s Green Score: 74,887

ShareThis