from “le détroit” · the strait
Detroit's onetime Tire Lady traded three decades as a corporate analyst for a cleanup mission, and her company Izzie Global now keeps lots, parks, and corridors clear across the city.
Audra Carson spent most of her working life reading spreadsheets, not hauling tires. She started out as a business analyst at MetLife and then spent about 15 years in the same role for a health care provider, according to the University of Olivet, which counts her among its distinguished alumni. The Detroit native graduated from the college, then known as Olivet College, in 1987.
What pulled her out of that career was a problem she kept seeing on trips back to her old northwest Detroit neighborhood: piles of illegally dumped tires near the streets where she grew up and where her parents still lived. The Awesome Foundation, which funded one of her early cleanups, recorded that the tire dumping was what first set her work in motion.
In 2009 she founded De-Tread, a social enterprise built around post-consumer tire waste. The University of Olivet describes its mission as finding solutions to the Detroit and global problem of tire blight. The name nodded to Detroit's standing as the car capital of the world. Tire piles are a real hazard: they catch fire easily and hold water that breeds mosquitoes and rodents, the Awesome Foundation noted in its grant write-up. Carson's outfit acted as a project manager, handling state environmental approvals, mapping dump sites, training volunteers, and arranging where the waste went.
The numbers grew over time. The Awesome Foundation logged nearly 9,000 tires pulled from Detroit streets as of its 2015 grant; the University of Olivet later put the figure at more than 12,000 across Detroit and Highland Park. The work drew grants from the Awesome Foundation and the Skillman Foundation, and Detroiters gave Carson a nickname that stuck: the Tire Lady.
"The mission of De-Tread called me to action as I witnessed my beloved community becoming overwhelmed by post-consumer tire waste," Carson said in remarks published by the University of Olivet.
In 2016 she launched Izzie, named after her mother, and the company has since become Izzie Global. Carson, who uses the title chief beautification strategist, runs it as a waste management and beautification service rather than a tire operation. Per the Black Legacy Advancement Coalition, where she is listed as a team member, Izzie Global offers a subscription beautification service for commercial corridors and campuses along with environmental landscaping and sustainability consulting, and partners with local businesses, government, and community groups to keep walkways, lots, and parks clear of debris. The company's stated motto is to leave people, places, and things better than they were found.
Carson's recognitions have piled up alongside the tires she cleared. The Black Legacy Advancement Coalition lists her as a Keep Michigan Beautiful award honoree and a three-time Spirit of Detroit award recipient, and notes she sits on the Joe Louis Greenway community leadership team. She is also a University of Olivet trustee and was named to the college's Distinguished Alumni Award, its highest alumni honor.
She frames the company as personal more than commercial. "Izzie Global is Black woman led, Detroit based," Carson told Shoutout Michigan, adding that she wants "to be a solution and positively impact the physical conditions and environments where Black and marginalized people live."
The shift from De-Tread to Izzie Global is a change in scope, not in premise. The premise was always stewardship, neighborhood-scale work that does not wait for conditions to get bad enough to make news. The Tire Lady built a company that keeps doing it without the nickname.
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