Syracuse University

University Lectures 2010-11 season begins Sept. 21 with award-winning green economic strategist Majora Carter

Kelly Homan Rodoski
(315) 443-3784

Majora Carter, MacArthur “Genius” Award-winning green economic strategist, television and radio host and president of the Majora Carter Group, LLC, will kick off a spectacular 10^th season of the University Lectures series at Syracuse University on Tuesday, Sept. 21.

Her presentation, “Green the Ghetto and How Much It Won’t Cost Us,” will begin at 7:30 p.m. in Hendricks Chapel and is sponsored in cooperation with the Syracuse Center of Excellence in Environmental and Energy Systems. It is free and open to the public; reduced-rate parking will be available in the Irving Garage. CART will be available for all University Lectures this season.

Carter is the first of 14 distinguished guests and panelists who will share their global experiences and perspectives with the SU and Central New York communities as part of the University Lectures series. For more information on the series, visit Facebook at http://www.Facebook.com/universitylectures.

While the term “green-collar jobs” gains more press and pundits daily, very few people have actually marshaled the resources to get unemployed Americans trained and placed on pathways out of poverty in this growing economic sector. Carter has. Born, raised and continuing to live in the South Bronx, her work takes her around the world in pursuit of resources and ideas to improve the quality of life in environmentally challenged communities.

Carter founded Sustainable South Bronx in 2001 and by 2003 had implemented the highly successful Bronx Environmental Stewardship Training (BEST) program, a pioneering green-collar job training and placement system seeding communities with a skilled workforce that has both a personal and economic stake in their urban environment.

She is currently president of the green-collar economic consulting firm, Majora Carter Group, LLC. Newsweek named her one of “25 To Watch” in 2007, and one of the “century’s most important environmentalists” in 2008. Carter is a board member of the Wilderness Society, SJF and CERES. She hosts a special national public radio series, “The Promised Land,” on the Sundance Channel.

The Office of University Lectures welcomes suggestions for future speakers. To recommend a speaker, or to obtain additional information about the University Lectures, contact Esther Gray in the Office of Academic Affairs at 443-2941 or eegray@syr.edu

Other scheduled presentations for the 2010 fall semester are Kathleen Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania and a leading expert on political advertising and campaigns (Oct. 12); Randy Cohen, Emmy Award-winning writer and humorist and author of The Ethicist column in The New York Times Magazine (Oct. 19); a conversational panel discussion on the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico (Oct. 26); Nicholas D. Kristof, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, New York Times columnist and co-author of “Half the Sky” (Nov. 3); and Bernard Amadei, founding president of Engineers Without Borders, professor of civil engineering at the University of Colorado at Boulder and faculty director of the Mortenson Center in Engineering for Developing Communities (Nov. 16).

During the spring 2011 semester, guests will include Eric Schlosser, investigative journalist and author of “Fast Food Nation” (March 1); James Balog, photographer and director of the Extreme Ice Survey (March 8); Karen Tse, human rights attorney, founder and director of International Bridges for Justice (March 22); and Maude Barlow, co-founder of the Blue Planet Project and chair of the Food and Water Watch (April 5).