As the owner of Elevators on 4th and Grow with Google Digital Coach, Carmen Mays has devoted herself to strengthening businesses.
Carmen has a powerful instinct to discern systemic gaps that too often hinder communities. As a Community & Economic Development Consultant, she seeks out opportunities to "help organizations be good partners in equitable entrepreneurial ecosystem building".
Join us as Carmen arms us with strategies to grow our businesses and walks us through how Grow with Google can help improve your business functions.
Don't tell anyone, but I think she's planning to gives us a little taste of the information she provides in the Google Coaching workshops.
ABOUT CARMEN MAYS
Coupled with a powerful instinct to discern systemic gaps that too often hinder communities, Carmen has vision. She actively seeks out opportunities to expand equity within under-invested legacy neighborhoods and forges ahead with solutions. Carmen has developed blueprints that have been successfully leveraged by community leaders and partners to bridge equitability gaps and promote economic empowerment and transportation access. She brings this intuitive approach and ardency for action to all of her work, including her first foray into entrepreneurship as the founder of Elevators.
She has over a decade of public sector experience engaged with community and economic development with many years in local government. Most recently she served as the Neighborhood Revitalization and Public Safety Administrator for the mayoral transition team for Mayor Randall Woodfin and the City of Birmingham. Carmen also re-launched the Minority Business Development program for the City of Spartanburg in South Carolina, earning Federal Transit Administration approval for the City’s Disadvantaged Business Enterprise Program. She has also worked as the Outreach Specialist for Perimeter Transportation and Sustainability Coalition—now known as Perimeter Connects—leading partnership engagement efforts for the organization and working with over 30 companies to establish commuter benefits programs.
Carmen earned a Bachelor of Arts in Foreign Language, with an emphasis in Spanish, and International Trade from the University of Alabama in Huntsville. She continued her education at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, gaining a Master of Public Administration with concentrations in Public Management and Planning & Non-Profit Management. Carmen was selected to the 2015 Upstate Class of the Diversity Leadership Institute at Furman University’s Riley Institute and ICMA’s Emerging Leaders Development Program. She also attended Habitat III, the United Nations Conference on Housing and Sustainable Urban Development in Quito, Ecuador.
To maintain balance, Carmen enjoys the arts, outdoors, and southern rap music. While she has received many awards and recognitions, Carmen's most prized accolade is "Bestest Auntie in the World."