For too many born in struggling, low-status communities, the preferred plan is escape. Success, if you're talented, is measured by how far from home you get.

That mindset needs to change, Majora Carter says.

In a discussion of her book Reclaiming Your Community: You Don’t Have to Move Out of Your Neighborhood to Live in a Better One, the urban revitalization strategist, real estate developer, and broadcaster emphasizes that retaining homegrown know-how is a critical aspect of reversing poverty in disadvantaged areas. Like the corporate world, she says, such areas need a plan for talent retention.

Carter has practiced what she preaches, returning home to New York’s South Bronx neighborhood and devising a development strategy rooted in the conviction that her community – and others like it – have the internal resources needed to prosper.

Her presentation is part of the Library’s Making a Great City series, aimed at fostering the healthy growth of Kansas City. It is co-presented by Multistudio (formerly Gould Evans), the Hall Family Foundation, the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, and First Missouri Bank.

Carter, named a MacArthur “genius grant” Fellow in 2005, heads the Majora Carter Group, a real estate development and urban revitalization consulting company she established in the South Bronx. She also launched a nearby, hip-hop-themed specialty coffee and craft beer spot, Boogie Down Grind.

She also is the founder of the environmental justice nonprofit Sustainable South Bronx, serves as a distinguished fellow with the solar energy-promoting nonprofit Groundswell, and has served on the boards of the U.S. Green Building Council, the Wilderness Society, the Andrew Goodman Foundation, and New York City’s Solar 1.

Carter also will speak at TEDxKC on Friday evening, August 12. For more information, go to the Kauffman Center For The Performing Arts website.

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