"Greening the Ghetto": Majora Carter to speak at Rozsa March 20

HOUGHTON - - "I believe that you shouldn’t have to leave your neighborhood to live in a better one." Green activist and MacArthur Fellowship recipient Majora Carter is on a mission: to lead her community out of poverty and fight environmental injustice by bringing green-collar jobs to the area. In just over a decade, Ms. Carter has vaulted from working as a community volunteer, knowing almost nothing about environmental issues, to becoming a nationally known advocate for environmental justice.

The Rozsa Center will host a presentation by Majora Carter at 7:30 p.m. on Saturday, March 20. Carter will speak on public health, poverty alleviation, climate change and green-collar job training and placement systems. Her lecture is free and open to the public.

Majora Carter was born, raised, and continues to live in the South Bronx. Her career has taken her around the world in pursuit of resources and ideas to improve the quality of life in environmentally challenged communities. She founded Sustainable South Bronx in 2001 after writing a $1.25M Federal Transportation grant to design the South Bronx Greenway with 11 miles of bike and pedestrian paths connecting the rivers and neighborhoods to each other and to the rest of the city. That project secured over $20 million in funds for first phase construction and serves as alternative transportation, economic development anchor, storm water management infrastructure as well as healthy recreation.

She has been instrumental in creating riverfront parks, building green roofs, working to remove poorly planned highways in favor of positive economic development and successfully implementing the Bronx Environmental Stewardship Training (BEST) program -- a pioneering green-collar job training and placement system -- seeding a community with a skilled workforce that has both a personal and an economic stake in their urban environment.

These accomplishments grow from her notion that self-image is influenced by surroundings -- so those surroundings should be beautiful! Her vision, drive and tenacity earned her a MacArthur "Genius" Grant. She started 2007 as one of Newsweek’s "25 To Watch" and ended the year as one of Essence magazine’s "25 Most Influential African Americans." She has been named one of the "50 most influential women in NYC" by the New York Post for the past two years, and "NYC’s most influential environmentalist" by the BBC World Service. Majora is president of the Majora Carter Group, LLC; a board member of the Wilderness Society, SJF, and CERES; and host of a special national public radio series called "The Promised Land."

To learn more about Majora Carter, her projects and her quest, visit www.majoracartergroup.com.

Sponsored by the Environmental Sustainability Committee/Students for Environmental Sustainability, CCE (Committee for Cultural Enrichment) and the Van Evera Distinguished Lecture Series Endowment.

For more information contact the Rozsa Box Office at 487-3200 or visit www.rozsa.mtu.edu.