Earth Equity News

Majora Carter: The Green Power Broker. By Marguerite Holloway, NYTimes, December 12, 2008. "In just over a decade, Ms. Carter, 42, has vaulted from working as a volunteer for what was a nascent organization called the Point Community Development Corporation and knowing almost nothing about environmental issues to becoming a nationally known advocate for environmental justice. Her reputation was burnished in 2005 when she won a MacArthur Foundation award for her work at the Point and at Sustainable South Bronx, a nonprofit organization she founded after leaving the Point in 2001. Now, after seven years at Sustainable South Bronx, Ms. Carter is starting something new. Over the summer, she formed a for-profit consulting company, the Majora Carter Group. Along with her husband, James Chase, who serves as the group's vice president for marketing and communications, Ms. Carter hopes that community groups, institutions and corporations will hire her to help them solve environmental problems and create green jobs -- employment that betters the environment, such as producing clean energy -- so she can put to national and perhaps international use the experience she gained in Hunts Point. By singling out individuals, the $500,000 MacArthur awards can sometimes engender resentment. Perhaps partly for this reason, Ms. Carter is a controversial figure in certain activist circles. A few of some three dozen people contacted for this article refused to talk about her or to describe their criticisms on the record. But many who have worked with her said her celebrity is deserved. Ms. Carter's fame is also proving somewhat double-edged for her start-up. She is in high demand for speeches all over the country, yet in the eyes of many she remains synonymous with Sustainable South Bronx, and it is taking time to establish a separate identity."