Marjora Carter
*Majora Carter was born on this date in 1966. She is a Black urban revitalization strategist and public radio host.
Majora Carter was born in South Bronx, New York, where she attended the Head Start Program and primary schools. After graduating from the Bronx High School of Science, she entered Wesleyan University in 1984 to study film and obtained a Bachelor of Arts. 1997 she received a Master of Fine Arts from New York University (NYU).
While at NYU, she worked for The Point Community Development Corporation. While at The POINT Community Development Corporation, Carter initiated the development of Hunts Point Riverside Park and led the non-profit environmental justice solutions corporation Sustainable South Bronx from 2001 onward before entering the private sector. From there, Carter secured a $10,000 grant from a USDA Forest Service program. He worked with other community members and the Parks Department to help leverage that seed money into more than $3 million from the mayor's budget. The money was used to build the park into the Rudy Bruner award-winning iteration, which re-opened in 2006.
Carter's TED talk was one of the first six publicly released talks to launch the TED.com website. She has made appearances in, and/or written, and produced television and radio programs, including HBO's The Black List Volume 2, American Public Media's Market Place, and PRX's This I Believe series, and has hosted several pieces on urban sustainability with Discovery Communications' Science Channel.
In 2007, Carter co-founded Green For All with Van Jones. That same year, she introduced MIT's first-ever Mobile fab lab (digital fabrication laboratory) to the South Bronx, which served as an early iteration of the "maker spaces" found elsewhere today. The project drew residents and visitors together for guided and creative collaborations.
In 2013, Carter joined the Advisory Board member of the Bronx Academy of Software Engineering High School. After Co-Founding StartUp Box #SouthBronx 2012 as a social enterprise to seed diverse participation in the knowledge economy, she launched StartUp Box #QA (Quality Assurance testing services), which assisted in the launch of Mayor Bill DeBlasio's Digital.NYC in 2014. An activist for environmental justice, Carter then took StartUp Box to victory at the national Blogher Conference in 2015, winning the pitch contest with $250,000 worth of in-kind services from SheKnows Media.
