Join Rob Jolles and Majora Carter on this 30 minute podcast. The subtitle says it all: “You Don’t Have To Move Out Of Your Neighborhood To Live In A Better One.” Peabody Award winning broadcaster and author, Majora Carter, sits down with Rob and talks about her new book, “Reclaiming Your Community – You Don’t Have To Move Out Of Your Neighborhood To Live In A Better One,” and discusses low-status communities and strategies to retain talent to help them emerge from economic challenges.
In this Pocket Sized Pep Talk, you’ll learn:
• How Majora’s book found her.
• What makes this particular book different from all the others on this subject.
• The connection between talent-retention, and reclaiming your community.
• The, “unintended consequences” of the civil rights successes of the 1960’s.
• Gentrification, and the challenges it has had on poor urban areas.
• How to truly improve housing in poor urban areas and attract new businesses.
• The vital importance of black owned businesses.
• Majora creating a business of her own, within her community called, “The Boogie Down Grind.”
• Key mentors in her life.
To learn more about this guest, visit: www.majoracartergroup.com
Listen on Apple Podcast
Originally Published January 2, 2023
Rob Jolles (00:00):
Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing’s going to get better. It is not. Who said that? Dr. Seuss. Let’s have ourselves a pocket size pep talk because my guest today cares a whole awful lot about low status communities and strategies to retain talent, to help them emerge from economic challenges. And we need to care a whole awful lot too.
Introduction (00:27):
A pocket size pep talk, the podcast that can help energize your business and your life with a quick inspiring message. Now here’s your host, Rob Jolles.
Rob Jolles (00:40):
My guest today, Majora Carter is a MacArthur’s genius fellow, a Peabody award-winning broadcaster and has over a half dozen honorary PhDs. Her 2006 Ted Talk launched their website as one of the first six talks released to the public. She was invited back to their stage this year on the strength of her new book, reclaiming Your Community. You don’t have to move out of your neighborhood to live in a better one. Always happy to have a fellow BK author with us. Welcome to the show, Majora.
Majora Carter (01:13):
Oh, thank you. Thank you so much, Rob. So happy.
Rob Jolles(01:16):
And you sound good too. I want you to know. All right, well it’s a pleasure to have you here and I want to dive right in. And I don’t know about you, but I’d love to create a podcast, I think I want to call it someday, “A book finds you” because that’s typically what happens to authors and we’re focusing on reclaiming your community. You don’t have to move out of your neighborhood to live in a better one. How did this topic in this book find you?
Majora Carter (01:40):
Wow. Yes, I love that question. It found me because it was always in me. It’s really interesting because Steve Persante, the editor of my book and founder of BK, was one of the, he was just like, the problem with you Majora is that you’ve got at least five books in you and it’s going to be hard to get one out. And so what this book is is literally just sort of all of my feel or many of my feelings about how one reclaims your community, how you fall in love with it in order to see the value in it, and then you do something beautiful with it. And I realize that I run away from my neighborhood for so long because I believe this narrative that there was always something wrong with it, and then I discovered that wasn’t the case and that I could actually be a part of actually making it even better.
Rob Jolles (02:39):
Yeah, well that’s what I mean in terms of “It finds you.” How long did it take you to write it?
Majora Carter (02:43):
Oh goodness. It was my pandemic project to tell you the truth. Honestly, if it didn’t happen, I don’t know if I would’ve had, because I was working so hard working on building this approach to community development through talent retention, but I actually had the time to sit down to do it. But basically from first really understanding what the proposal was going to look like to sitting down and writing the book it was book writing to actually handing in my first draft was about five months.
Rob Jolles(03:15):
Okay. All right. I’m curious about your writing process. Do you give yourself a page count a week or do you wait till the moment moves you? people want to hear this.
Majora Carter (03:26):
No, I actually, it’s actually, it’s a good question. Mine was, I gave myself a chapter a week once I broke down what I wanted the book to be and worked with Steve to help to make it happen. And we had a month, we had a weekly phone call. It was actually Monday nights 8:30 my time. And so I knew I had to be done with my chapter because I was really pretty good about exactly knowing what I wanted to be in them. And yeah, that was it.
Rob Jolles (03:55):
You know, bring out a couple things. First of all, for people who are listening, what you just heard of, it’s unusual to have your editor be your accountability partner. But we all need an accountability partner definitely to keep us going. I know a couple of book coaches that will give you a pin that says, ask me about my book. And the brilliance of that pin is if you wear it now, people are going to ask you about it. And if they ask you about it, you can’t go, well, I’ve been working on it for seven years and I’ve gone to chapter and to it keeps you moving. So I like to give it even to people who I work with who are in a career transition. They struggle with ’em, but I’ve got buttons that say, ask me about my job search because it’s something we don’t like to talk about. And yet how do we network if we don’t talk about it? Right. So yeah, neat on the accountability partner, I’m different. I was a former marathon runner, so I was always this many miles a week and some weeks were easier than others. And so I approached the writing that way a little bit too, where I just give myself a number every week I go after that number. Sometimes I’ll add a couple of pages to it just in case next week looks a little bit rough, but it’s a marathon. Writing is a marathon. When you think about it.
Majora Carter (05:13):
It sure enough is. Yeah I couldn’t, there’s no way I think I would’ve been able to do it if I knew somebody was literally waiting for me to hand something in because it’s just, life just gets in the way and I’m a practitioner and so I’m always doing something. And that in and of itself was, it felt actually quite luxurious to write and just be like, no, this, I’m going to focus on this. I didn’t give myself a set number of hours a day, but it was just more like this is the thought. Sometimes I’d outline it, sometime,s most of the times I didn’t and it was just like, but I know what I wanted to get to and I got there.
Rob Jolles (05:56):
Yeah, that’s interesting. I outline but I’m always hopeful that my mind and my hands will take me past the outline, but it’s just signposts that I’m kind of looking for almost like a speaker or a trainer. We work with word outlines and then how we get from word to word. That’s the fun part. I was doing my research on you and I noticed that you’ve got a bunch of books you seem to have collaborated on Amazon, so this isn’t your, it’s your first solo book it looks like, but there are other books out there, right?
Majora Carter (06:33):
Yeah I did some forwards, actually. I did one it was, which was basically just a speech for the Schumacher Institute Environmental Organization, but this was my first real project. Absolutely. This was it.
Rob Jolles (06:50):
Well, welcome aboard in the author club. Now, I don’t want to intimidate you on this, but somebody told me once when you write your first book, you’re an author and when you write your second book, you’re a writer.
Majora Carter (07:04):
Yeah. Did you know that you were going to write your second?
Rob Jolles (07:07):
Absolutely not. And I didn’t get the great advice you got. I threw the kitchen sink at it in the first book. Everything I knew about selling and I actually was with Simon and Schuster and I tried to get some of it back when I went, wow, I’ve, I’m talking about implementation, I’m talking about some really good things. And they went, oh no, no, no, that’s ours now. But no, I had no idea I was going to write another one because as we started the conversation, you don’t just wake up and go, I don’t know, I think I’ll write a book today. There’s something moving you, there’s something inspiring you and tugging at you and that’s what we go for. Or else it’s just a merciless grind. It is and it’s no, not fun for anyone. Well, let’s climb. Let’s climb inside. Alright, so you’re known for your work in urban sustainability and job creation. Let’s talk about that. You center on talent retention and I, I assumed I knew what that meant, but I was looking that up. Are they related in terms of urban sustainability and talent retention?
Majora Carter (08:14):
Well, I use the term as I feel that successful companies, if you think about it, they use talent retention as a way to grow and build their companies and they make sure their people are happy. So they’re motivated to grow with them. And I do believe that you can use the same concepts behind talent retention to also build successful communities. And when you stop and think about it, there’s a bunch of neighborhoods and communities around the country and around the world where inequality is assumed. And those are the places where there’s lower health outcomes, educational attainment, more incarceration more poverty, more unemployment more environmental burdens. And inequality is assumed by people both inside and outside of those neighborhoods and people born and raised in them, regardless of how talented they happen to be artistically or academically or anything else, they’re led to believe they need to measure success by how far they get away. So I was like, what if we applied a talent retention strategy to all communities? What would we literally be bringing back, or rather keeping close so that it could reinvest and support those communities and it would be a really beautiful cycle. And that’s the approach that we take to community development.
Rob Jolles (09:40):
Yeah, I can tell this, it’s a passion of yours. I saw a documentary on Magic Johnson and his theaters and did you see that? Just it was beautiful. I’m assuming you’re familiar with his work. What impressed me was how he really got into the community and made that a safe zone of sorts and didn’t leave it up to, it was just very impressive. He didn’t just rubber stamp some movie theaters. He was knee deep in that community.
Majora Carter (10:13):
No, and when you believe that, that all communities have value, and I don’t believe that that is the dominant way that most development happens in some neighborhoods. I mean what we call communities in those neighborhoods, low status, not poor or underprivileged, although poverty is often a big part of what they experience. And they could be inner cities or Native American reservations or even white towns that once had industry but doesn’t anymore. And it’s long gone. But again, inequality is always assumed. And if even poverty is considered the cultural attribute of those communities, then that’s what is planned for. And it’s just this very status quo way of doing it. And you see it in terms of housing development, you’ll see it in terms of there’s an expectation that people will suffer from some certain chronic health issues. There’s always this moment where it’s just like, look, these people are never going to be anything but poor,
so that’s what we plan for. And that’s absolutely not the way that we look at it. We really do believe that if people are given the opportunities, then those communities could grow into exactly what other communities grow into when they’ve been given the certain advantages and whether it’s opportunities for home ownership or business development or just even the kind of places that make people feel like their community is worth staying in. And I’m from one of those, actually one of the most storied low status communities. And it’s the stuff that literally, I mean up until recently movies were made about the burning of the Bronx, which happened during the seventies and the eighties, and we were literally the poster child for urban blight. We were the place that presidential candidates would come and see and say, look what’s wrong with American cities? I’m going to fix it. And of course they never really did for me. It’s like, this is real. We know there’s opportunities here within our communities. We know there’s talent, but are we giving them the best opportunity to grow and then take their talent and reinvest it right back into our communities?
Rob Jolles (12:37):
And I’ll get off the Magic Johnson ambien, I promise. But what surprised me at the end of the documentary wasn’t the success of the movie theater, it was the businesses that were coming up around the movie theater. And that’s where I really sat back and went, wow, he proved it and then if you build it, they’ll come. You just saw a lot more development, a lot more trust in that community and away it went. So it was.
Majora Carter (13:04):
Local development. And I think what we are trying to do, and I use my own neighborhood as we own a research and development lab because I too believe if you can create the kind of right lifestyle infrastructure for people to literally see their community become something they want that actually speaks to them. We did all sorts of surveys and focus groups and just gathered lots of market research from this community to help to just figure out what were people’s hopes and dreams and aspirations for the kind of communities they wanted to be in, and also what were they leaving our community to experience some for good when they found new housing or whatever, but others just where were they spending their money? Because it wasn’t in our communities. And we realized it was that things that are often considered like little amenities, but whether there’s cafes and coffee shops and bars and restaurants.
But when you really stop and think about it, those places which are, you can honestly consider them community centers because that is where people go and build community. They build relationships, whether it’s sometimes love relationships, sometimes business relationships, sometimes they’re building their own what do you call it? Businesses at a coffee shop. I mean when you have those places, those we call them in urban planning parlawns, it’s third spaces, places that are neither working nor home that literally make people feel like, oh, it’s worth my coming outside and staying in my neighborhood. And so it’s not at all surprising that the kind of stuff that Magic Johnson first built, it did inspire other development. And it’s the same kind of thing that we are really excited about seeing here too because it’s the local development people from our own community who are just like, oh wait, I can do stuff here. Even if it means something, I don’t, don’t feel like I need to sell my family’s home to go live someplace better. I can stay and reinvest in my own community. And that’s super exciting about all of this that the idea of reclaiming your community for yourself and for your family and for your future is not something that was even thought of in low status communities. And that is literally what we’ve been pushing against for years at this point.
Rob Jolles (15:32):
Well, it’s a terrific book and people should, it’s out there on Amazon and every place else you can find a book, you need to get a copy. But let’s talk about gentrification because it’s another, it’s not a podcast, but another Jolles book idea. I’ve always wanted to write a book called, “It Looks Looked Good on Paper”, the name of my book. There’s so many things like that. Well, okay, so on paper we’re going to go into poor urban areas and we’re going to improve housing and attract new businesses. But what we don’t talk about is that frequently the current inhabitants are displaced in the process. So tell me about your views on gentrification.
Majora Carter(16:15):
Well, it’s a complicated matter, but that’s also not very complicated. And if you really stop and think about it, I mean, first of all gentrification is actually one of the byproducts of re-urbanization. We had white flight and redlining and folks moving out of the urban core into the suburbs and suddenly we’ve got people who want to come back. This is the first time in American history where literally two very different age groups are actually vying for the same type of real estate where it’s you’ve got baby boomers and you have millennials who both want the same kind of walkable communities that are near transit and da da. And guess what? That would be cities and in particular urban cores. And those are the places that were actually left behind through the rapid suburbanization, which did leave behind in particular many people of color out from not being able to move out of there because of all sorts of crazy and discriminatory housing policy and banking policy, etcetera.
But we’re also not building enough housing rental or otherwise. And that I think has a lot to do with the way your current real estate system is actually kind of rigged to not create even more of it. And it really makes it so that people within the urban core in particular are not the people who are most able to be a part of the trends that are where they are building anything to begin with. And we’re led to believe that there is no real value in our community. And predatory speculation is so real that we become really early not even advocates, because we’re not advocates for our own self because we’ll often sell early and cheap because we don’t see the value in our communities until it’s often too late for us as the people who own property. And I could say that unfortunately because my own family, my dad bought our house here in the early 1940s and I’m the youngest of 10 and by the time I grew up and my parents had both passed away, none of my siblings wanted to keep the house because they were like, it’s cute, you do your community stuff Majora, but nobody wants to live there.
That house isn’t worth anything. That house is now worth three times what it was sold for after my parents passed. And that could have been my family’s generational wealth, but it’s not. It was bought by a predatory regulator and that’s happening all over the country. But if we don’t see the value in our own communities and we are selling early and cheap and there’s not really any policies to support people in our own communities to hold on to what we have and create more opportunities for people to stay in it and the system sort of privileges housing developers that are not from our communities and that are continuing to concentrate poverty through subsidized rentals, are things actually going to change? No. And so the gentrification that we see is actually a part of a really nasty dynamic, a part of a very well-oiled machine that continues to go. And then again, jeopardizes future wealth creating opportunities for people that were already here, while it creates massive opportunities for other folks. And that is the truth of gentrification that unfortunately almost never gets addressed because it’s such a hot button issue and it’s just people are being displaced and it’s like, can we check and see why people are being displaced? Can we deal with that and then support them so that they’re, they’re holding onto what they have and then giving others opportunities to build more wealth within their own communities that would change things.
Rob Jolles (20:23):
And I see it, I’m right out about a mile outside of Washington DC and grown up around the DC area. We certainly see it here. Mm-hmm. Real estate in DC in the sixties and seventies was, they’re practically giving away now it’s very chic to get into the city and push others out to the suburbs now. So it’s pretty amazing. I guess what it is, we need leaders. We need leaders to help create change and you know are doing that, your book is doing that, but how do we make that happen? How do you create more leaders
Majora Carter (21:06):
I mean, What’s been wonderful with this book in particular just the way that we’ve been putting ourselves out there, is that folks sort of see the example and they know that they’re not crazy, which is really kind of cool because when you think about our communities, and I think especially since America loves the Cinderella story of a hard scrabble, somebody in a hard scrabble community and then growing up and being somebody, but of course they’re always moving out. And what excites me about Ry having written this book is that we can be the heroes in our own story in our own communities. We don’t always have to leave them in order to be powerful and wonderful. And it’s just like, why is the foundation just this horrible life to start? And just sort of humble, doesn’t have to be horrible, but why can’t we take the beautiful things that in some many cases our community has given us? As tough as my neighborhood was, there was still all sorts of love and amazing people in it that made me who I am. And why would I want to dishonor all that and take it someplace else so that someone else could benefit from it as opposed to people in my own community.
Rob Jolles (22:32):
Right. My dad had a saying, I remember, I was a boy scout, but he loved this saying and he would say, I actually was writing it down. “Don’t go on and do it. Come on, let’s do it.” And that was his message to the leaders. We had over 120 boys in this troupe, so were actually, my dad was a Marine, so we were in companies and companies had patrols, don’t get me started, but that many kids, you actually needed some sort of structure. But that was a leadership piece of ours and it meant something to me. And Majora, you are somebody not just talking about it but doing it because I’m ready for you. I was looking at this boogie down grind and I thought, what in the heck is that till I looked it up so I know what it is. Tell this audience what the boogie down grind is.
Majora Carter (23:31):
Yeah. So it is, literally, like I said, my own neighborhood is my own research and development lab because you got to be able to try stuff out before you can tell people, no, this stuff actually really works and so lifestyle infrastructure, again, the building those community places where community can connect and build and see its value in each other, we call it lifestyle infrastructure, and it’s literally the same kind of thing that makes people feel like, oh, I can do more in my neighborhood. But we, there’s things like cafes and coffee shops and bars and things like that where people can connect and create. And build those relationships. And so we’ve not had, honestly, the biggest social space in my neighborhood was literally the inside of either the waiting rooms and health clinics or pharmacies. It was like, maybe there’s another
community center, but it’s meant for kids and so cool people don’t hang out there.
They’ll leave the neighborhood in order to do some fun stuff. So we had to build some of these places just to test this model. And it was a really smart thing to do because when we did it, first of all, we were the first coffee shop, first kid, now first cafe because we serve, craft beer, and really nice craft wines in San Marias as well. It was the first one we’ve had in this neighborhood since I was in high school in the eighties. It was the only place you can actually be an adult and get a drink in a nice place. And it was at first kind of like, can you do that here? Because we just didn’t have it because it’s just like, it was almost as if nice things shouldn’t happen here. Or at least that was the expectation. And it was like, why shouldn’t they? But again, if the narrative is just nice things don’t happen here. You leave your neighborhood in order to experience them. After a while you start to believe them and really having to push this idea that no, we can build it for ourselves and we can experience it and experience each other because that is the best part of our neighborhood. It is each other. But again, if we’re always leaving because we don’t have these places to gather,
Rob Jolles (25:56):
Yeah
Majora Carter (25:57):
Then yeah, the community’s going to not really flourish because there’s not going to be a whole lot of people left who can do that.
Rob Jolles (26:05):
Right? Well there’s that Lee Jolles coming out of me though. Don’t go on and do it. Come on, let’s do it. And that’s what you’re proving, reclaiming your community. You don’t have to move out of your neighborhood to live in a better one. Love the tagline, by the way. I certainly know what the book is about, but that’s, Steve did a good job on that one.
Majora Carter (26:27):
Just, in case nobody reads it. They need to know what it’s about. They’re like, okay. So that’s that.
Rob Jolles (26:35):
Coming down the home stretch. How about a couple of mentors for you, who really deserves a shout out about now in terms of how you see things or the path that you’re on?
Majora Carter (26:47):
Unfortunately, both of them, and I’ve been, was thinking a lot about them today cause it’s around the time that they both kind of exited my life, unfortunately. But it was two women both on opposite ends of the spectrum. One was a professional legal advocate, her name was Leslie Lowe, and the other one was actually a woman who was born and they were both born and raised in the Bronx, which is kind of cool. But the other one was a first generation me, second generation Puerto Rican woman who was actually going to be displaced by the city because they were doing urban renewal. And she was just like, Nope, we’re going. We’re going to stay and we’re going to do this ourselves. And we are to, you’re not going to show us how to do this. We’re going to become the developers. And so Yolanda Garcia, who was just the developer and Leslie Lowe was the legal advocate who actually helped us do some incredible work.
Majora Carter (27:45):
And both of them at different times in my life were able to help me understand that it was not only but preferred and urgently important for me to speak up on behalf of myself and my own community and that I had every right to do so and not leave it in the hands of other folks. And it was hard because I certainly didn’t feel qualified and was at that point a fairly young black woman who had just walked back into my community after leaving it for many years because I followed that narrative that you had to grow up and get out and found myself back home and realized that there was so much more to being a part of a community and giving my best gifts to it in order for it to grow and I could grow with it.
Rob Jolles (28:47):
Beautiful. And that’s why I asked the question. I love stories like that because again, it’s just like the book it takes a village. There’s usually people out there that are, they’re kind of forming around us. Sometimes we don’t see ’em unfortunately. And sometimes we’re blessed and we do but they’re there. And I wish people would invest in mentors just a little bit more. It doesn’t have to be your parents there’s other really amazing people out there. Is there on, and lemme say this again, is there an audio book on this
Majora Carter (29:22):
There? And I’m very excited about it. There is an audio book. It was actually recorded at a studio right around the corner from here. So it’s like I kept everything as local as I possibly could. Good. Yeah, it’s called Umbrella Studios, which makes me really happy. And you have to wait till the end because there’s this really cool actually original hip hop song that they rejiggered to put my name in it. It was very cool. So I was like, just go to the end and listen to it because it was really hot. I was like, oh my God. Well
Rob Jolles (29:59):
That’s great. That’s got to be playing at the Boogie Down Grind. Exactly. Once a day, a day in Somewhere you got, that’s part of the cost of getting a cup of coffee. You’re going to have to hear that song. I love that.
Majora Carter (30:14):
Exactly.
Rob Jolles (30:16):
Listen, what a treat doing my homework on you. I saw one particular quote that stood out. You’re a role model for so many that seek to make a difference. Sometimes it takes a committed doer to help the rest of us realize what’s possible. Seth Goden wrote that and after meeting you a few, I’m reminding you and after meeting you a few months ago and today, I couldn’t agree more with him. It’s been an absolute pleasure catching up with you talking to you fellow BK author, and I wish you nothing but success with this book. And if my audience is listening right now, we all know on this side of things, we don’t just buy books, we write reviews on books. It matters. So let’s write, let’s get this book, let’s write a review on it and get the audio book. She’s teasing us with a song there. Either that or you’re going to have to go to the Boogie Down Grind to hear it, so you pick it. Either go there or get the audio book. I think the audio book might be a little less expensive unless you’re in New York, but what a treat. Thank you so much for being on this show.
Majora Carter (31:26):
Thank you for everything. Really. Just you’re, you’re so much a hero to so many of us, and I appreciate you.
Rob Jolles (31:33):
Thank you so much. Well, we’ll do it again as well as we can next time, everybody. Until then, stay safe.
Outro (31:45):
Thanks so much for listening. If you enjoy today’s show, please rate and recommend it on iTunes, outcasts, wherever you get your podcast. You can also get more information on this show and rob@jolles.com.