Majora Carter

Community as Corporation: Talent-Retention in Low-Status America

Lecture by Majora Carter
Response by Mario Gooden, Associate Professor of Architecture at GSAPP

Majora Carter is a real estate developer, urban revitalization strategy consultant, MacArthur Fellow and Peabody Award winning broadcaster. She is responsible for the creation and successful implementation of numerous economic development, technology, green-infrastructure projects, policies and job training & placement systems.

Carter combines her corporate consulting practice focused on talent-retention, and applies it to reducing Brain Drain in American low-status communities. She has firsthand experience pioneering sustainable economic development in one of America’s most storied low-status communities: the South Bronx. Carter creates vision, strategies, and developments that transform properties in low-status communities into thriving mixed-use economic developments. Her approach harnesses capital flows resulting from American re-urbanization among all ages, races, and income levels, to help increase wealth-building opportunities across demographics left out of this historic financial tide change. Her work produces produce long term fiscal benefits for government and leading private real estate developments.

Majora has served on the boards of the US Green Building Council, Ceres, and the Andrew Goodman Foundation, and she is quoted in the permanent collection of the Smithsonian Museum of African-American History and Culture in DC: “Nobody should have to move out of their neighborhood to live in a better one”.

Majora was born, raised, and continues to live in the South Bronx. She is a graduate of the Bronx High School of Science (1984), Wesleyan University (1988 BA, (Distinguished Alum), and New York University (MFA). After establishing Sustainable South Bronx (2001) and Green For All (2007), among other organizations, she opened a private consulting firm (2008) - which was named Best for the World by B-Corp in 2014.