In this episode of Eavesdrop with Meena®, Meena sits down with Majora Carter, an environmental justice pioneer, MacArthur Fellow, and author of Reclaiming Your Community: You Don't Have to Move Out of Your Neighborhood to Live in a Better One — a luminous conversation on Brain Drain, the psychology of poverty, and what it takes to rebuild a neighborhood from the inside our. Majora grew up in the South Bronx where the unspoken rule was: if you were smart, you got out. Today, she leads a sustainable urban development movement to retain talent from leaving low-status communities. 

As founder of Sustainable South Bronx and co-founder of Green for All, Majora created parks where there were once dumps, launched green job training programs that transformed lives, and opened the Boogie Down Grind Café and Bronxlandia — live gathering spaces where Harvard-trained doctors and community neighbors can mingle, and get to know each other in the country's poorest congressional district.

Her tagline, You Don't Have to Move Out of Your Neighborhood to Live in a Better One, now lives on the walls of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington DC. Meena and Majora explore the threads of connection that hold communities together — from the roots of gentrification and the psychology of low status individuals, to the quiet, radical act of loving your neighbor as civic practice.

This special episode was produced in collaboration with The January Series at Calvin University.