The College of Architecture is presenting leading urban revitalization strategy consultant, real estate developer and Peabody Award winning broadcaster Majora Carter as the next Hyde lecture speaker at 4 p.m., August 24, at the Nebraska Union Auditorium giving a lecture entitled “Community as Corporation”.

For this lecture, Carter challenges the notion that the best and brightest talent in small and low status communities need to leave in order to succeed. Talent retention is valued across communities and companies of all sectors, but what is a community to do when brain and talent drain is the expected norm, keeping local economies stagnant, concentrating poverty and making it more difficult for anyone in these communities to succeed. Carter proposes some community self-examination and encourages stakeholders to pay attention to why people would want to leave, learn how to harness their successful outcomes of education, healthcare and other programs, instead of just expecting them and their dollars to leave. Join Majora Carter for an unorthodox look at the built environment and its connection to environment, economy and social equality.

Carter is responsible for the creation and implementation of numerous green-infrastructure projects, policies and job training and placement systems.

At Sustainable South Bronx, Carter deployed MIT’s first ever Mobile Fab-Lab, a digital fabrication laboratory, to the South Bronx, where it served as an early iteration of the “Maker-Spaces” found elsewhere today. The project drew residents and visitors together for guided and creative collaborations.

After establishing Sustainable South Bronx and Green For All, among other organization, to carry on that work, she opened a private consulting firm to help spread the message and success of social enterprise and economic development in low-status communities - which was named Best for the World by B-Corp in 2014.

Her work is characterized by an emphasis on talent-retention on the corporate and community levels.

Clients include industry leaders in many fields, municipal and federal government agencies and leading educational institutions across the United States.

Carter co-founded the Bronx Tech Meetup, as well as the StartUp Box software services company which is rebuilding the entry level tech job pipeline by using market forces and established business practices to help diversify the US tech sector. Clients include Digital.nyc, PlayDots and GIPHY, among others.

Carter has helped connect tech industry pioneers such as Etsy, Gust, FreshDirect, Google and Cisco to diverse communities at all levels, and she continues to drive resources that value diversity into the communities left out of previous economic growth trends.

Carter is a graduate of the Bronx High School of Science and an advisory board member of the Bronx Academy of Software Engineering High School as well as a board member of the Andrew Goodman Foundation.

Her long list of awards and honorary degrees include accolades from groups as diverse as Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, John Podesta’s Center for American Progress, Goldman Sachs and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. She has been named one of BusinessInsider.com’s Silicon Alley 100, Goldman-Sachs’ 100 Most Intriguing Entrepreneurs” and The Weather Channel’s “Individuals Making An Impact On Long-Term Global Climate Change”.

The College’s Hyde Lecture Series is a long-standing, endowed, public program. Each year the college hosts compelling speakers in the fields of architecture, interior design, landscape architecture and planning that enrich the ongoing dialog around agendas which are paramount to the design disciplines and our graduates.

For questions, email Kerry McCullough-Vondrak at kerry.vondrak@unl.edu.