Philanthrocapitalism_ How Giving Can Save the World - Matthew Bishop [63]
The South Bronx includes the poorest congressional district in the United States. More than 40 percent of its population lives at or below the poverty line. Its unemployment rate is around 25 percent, more than three times the New York City average. It is two-thirds Hispanic, one-third African American. The obesity rate is 27 percent, the asthma hospitalization rate seven times the national average. The area has a core residential section surrounded by manufacturing facilities, utilities, and warehouses. It has the least amount of green open space in the city, less than one-half acre per thousand people.
Carter won a federal grant to design the South Bronx Greenway, an eleven-mile bicycle and pedestrian path connecting neighborhoods to the waterfront, and for a new park to be constructed there. The city government committed the money necessary to build the greenway and the park, but did not commit to fund a maintenance plan. So Majora came up with the idea of creating South Bronx Greenway Stewards to protect the community investment in green space and to provide young residents with jobs, leadership training, and educational programs. Then at the 2006 Clinton Global Initiative, she met Barry Segal, who became her first big partner, with a $100,000 donation. If you’re interested, Sustainable South Bronx needs more support, as do other places all over America and throughout the world that would benefit from more urban parkland and forests.
Majora Carter is a charismatic, energetic, highly intelligent woman with a graduate degree in English literature. When I asked her how she decided to set up Sustainable South Bronx and devote her life to it, she told me she grew up in the South Bronx, and a few years ago, when she started graduate school, she moved back in with her parents. She said, “I discovered the old neighborhood wasn’t as bad as I thought, but people had given up. There were too many toxic facilities—four power plants and dumps with 40 percent of New York’s garbage.” Carter organized a drive to beat back another waste facility, started a job-training program for waste clean-up, and set up Sustainable South Bronx to create more jobs by improving the environment. She’s hoping to get in on the ground floor of Mayor Bloomberg’s ambitious plan to reduce New York City’s greenhouse gas emissions. Why does she keep at it? “Because I see changes. People feel different when there’s beauty. They know someone cares. It’s intoxicating to me.” Majora recently married, and her husband, a filmmaker, left his work and joined her at Sustainable South Bronx. They live across the street from where she grew up. If your area needs more green space, Majora could give you some ideas about how to get started.
Great ideas that merit support can arise from unpredictable circumstances. Tragedies have produced some remarkable initiatives funded by people who lost someone they cared about, and others sympathetic to their cause. The Rory Peck Trust, a British NGO, funds training for journalists going into dangerous areas with a special program named for Richard Wild, a reporter killed on the job in Iraq. After Daniel Pearl was murdered by terrorists in Pakistan, his family, friends, and colleagues set up a foundation and scholarship in his name to allow aspiring journalists to pursue their careers. When brilliant young British lawyer Nick Weber was killed in a car crash in Malawi where he was providing legal services to poor people, a trust set up in his name established a law library and provided scholarships to law students who agreed to follow Nick’s example in providing legal aid after graduating.
A few years ago, I had the opportunity to see a great idea born out of tragedy come to life. On May 28, 2001, I was in the north