Majora Carter is the founder and former executive director of Sustainable South Bronx, a non-profit focused on promoting environmental justice and green space in the borough. Now she's respectfully sold out to the private center with the "green" economic consulting firm, The Majora Carter Group, LLC.

A lifelong Hunts Point resident and Bronx Science grad, Carter attended Wesleyan and earned an MFA from NYU before taking a job with an arts awareness program in the Bronx. When then-Mayor Rudy Giuliani proposed building a landfill in Hunts Point in the early '90s, an outraged Carter helped launch The Point CDC, which successfully blocked the city's plan to move ahead with the municipal waste facility. In 2001, she founded Sustainable South Bronx, which works on environmental issues like mitigating pollution and advocating for more parks and playgrounds. One of the more prominent environmental activists in the city, Carter and Sustainable South Bronx were the driving force behind the South Bronx Greenway, a set of bike and pedestrian paths along the Hunts Point and Port Morris waterfront areas. Carter has also been pushing for "green roofs" in the South Bronx—as opposed to the black tar roofs so common throughout in the city—a move that would reduce energy consumption as well as improve air quality. To further her green agenda, she entered the private sector and has popped up on various media platforms from her TED talk in 2006 to her 2010 radio show The Promised Land and her Sundance Channel show The Green. [Image via Getty]