Sustainable South Bronx executive director Majora Carter.

"In an emotionally charged talk, Majora Carter explains her fight for environmental justice in the South Bronx. This MacArthur-winning activist shows how minority neighborhoods have suffered most from flawed urban policy, and energetically shares her grassroots efforts to "green the ghetto." Her talk from the heart drew a spontaneous standing ovation at TED, and has proved equally moving online."

Watch this. So moving, so smart, so...just watch it! Make sure you stay for the end -- she tells Al Gore how it is. Best thing I've seen all year. HERE for the video.

I'm reading up on asset-based community building, so her call to stop wasting people from the so-called ghettos, their minds, energy, and wisdom, stuck with me especially. "Stop wasting me," she says, and there's no "please" spoken nor implied.

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related, from Building Communities Inside Out:

"There is nothing natural or inevitable about the process that leads to the creation of client neighborhoods. In fact, it is important to note how little power local neighborhood residents have to affect the pervasive nature of the deficiency model, mainly because a number of society’s most influential institutions have themselves developed a stake in maintaining that focus. For example, much of the social science research produced by universities is designed to collect and analyze data about problems. Much of the funding directed to lower income communities by foundations and the United Way is based on the problem-oriented data collected in “needs surveys,” a practice emulated by government human service agencies. Finally, the needs map often appears to be the only neighborhood guide ever used by members of the mass media, whose appetite for the violent and the spectacularly problematic story seems insatiable. All of these major institutions combine to create a wall between lower income communities and the rest of society—a wall of needs which, ironically enough, is built not on hatred but (at least partly) on the desire to 'help.'"

"The fact that the deficiency orientation represented by the needs map constitutes our only guide to lower income neighborhoods has devastating consequences for residents. We have already noted one of the most tragic—that is, residents themselves begin to accept that map as the only guide to the reality of their lives. They think of themselves and their neighbors as fundamentally deficient, victims incapable of taking charge of their lives and of their community’s future."

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