Author

John Zippert is the Director of Program Operations for the Federation of Southern Cooperatives/Land Assistance Fund at their Rural Training and Research Center in Epes, Alabama. He has over 45 years experience in community organizing, cooperative and credit union development, community based economic development and rural development in distressed communities. Prior to working for the Federation, he was a fieldworker for the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) in Louisiana. He has a BA degree in history from the City College of New York; and has participated in numerous training sessions and courses to enhance his skills in rural development.

Zippert has worked with the Federation on the development of affordable housing for low income people in Alabama, including development, loan packaging and construction of over 250 units of single family housing, self-help housing and four rural multi-family projects with 126 units.

Zippert and his wife Carol are co-publishers of the Greene County Democrat, the weekly newspaper in their home rural community. They have published the newspaper since it was acquired in December 1984 by a community group in the county. The Zippert’s have three children and 11 grandchildren.    

John Zippert serves on the boards of many national, regional, state, and local organizations to support rural development activities. Among these boards are: The Rural Coalition, Association for Community Based Education, Rural Development Leadership Network, Alabama Black Belt Commission, Alabama Council on Human Relations, Alabama Organizing Project, Alabama New South Coalition, Greene County Industrial Board, Greene County Hospital and Nursing Home, and Greene-Sumter Enterprise Community.
 

The Southern Grassroots Economies Project builds, links, and strengthens sustainable, local, collective, democratic and green economic activities across the South. SGEP sees its work centered in working with the communities most affected by the economic crisis—women, African Americans, immigrants, youth and poor whites. We are working on not just getting a piece of the pie but developing cooperative business and making our own pies. 
 We are inspired by our own rich history of struggle as well as by movements around the world that have developed vigorous and inclusive economic activity while still promoting social, environmental and community values.

Ed Whitfield is a musician, writer, and raconteur in Greensboro, North Carolina. He is co-directer of the Fund for Democratic Communities where he is working to build more democratically-based collaborative economic structures.

Monica M. White earned a Ph.D. from Western Michigan University in Sociology. She is an assistant professor of Environmental Justice at the University of Wisconsin-Madison with a joint appointment in the Gaylord Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies and the Department of Community and Environmental Sociology and is a former Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of African American Studies at the University of Illinois-Urbana Champaign.

Her research engages communities of color and grassroots organizations that are involved in the development of sustainable community food systems as a strategy to respond to issues of hunger and food inaccessibility. Her publications include, “Sisters of the Soil: Urban Gardening as Resistance Among Black Women in Detroit” and “D-Town Farm: African American Resistance to Food Insecurity and the Transformation of Detroit.” She is currently working on her first book, “Freedom Farmers: Agricultural Resistance and the Black Freedom Movement, 1880-2010,” which contextualizes new forms of contemporary urban agriculture within the historical legacies of African American farmers who fought to acquire and stay on the land. Using historical and contemporary examples, Freedom Farmers examines the development of farmers’ cooperatives as strategies of resistance, and documents the ways that these organizations, in general, and Black farmers specifically, have contributed to the Black Freedom Movement.

As a result of her scholarship and community work, Dr. White has received several grants including a multi-year, multi-million dollar USDA research grant to study food insecurity in Michigan. She has also received several awards including the 2013 Olsen Award for distinguished service to the practice of Sociology from the Michigan Sociological Association and the Michigan Campus Compact Faculty/Staff Community Service-Learning Award. She was appointed to the Food Justice Task Force sponsored by the Institute for Agricultural Trade Policy (IATP), maintains a highly ranked and reviewed blog (soil2soul) and is highly sought after and has presented her work at many national and international community organizations, colleges and universities.
 

Dara Cooper is an activist, organizer, indigenous priestess and whole food lover based in Brooklyn, NY. She is the director of the NYC Food and Fitness Partnership at Bedford Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation, the first and one of the largest community development corporations in the country. The Partnership works to address food and health access issues, creating model places where communities of color have equitable access to healthy, safe, clean environments with an empowered community that determines and participates in an accessible, equitable, affordable food system for all residents. In November 2013, she travelled with a delegation to Cuba as a part of the first Black Permaculturalist Network and participated in the 2013 International Permaculture Conference. She believes in the power of people organizing, investing in self-determining, sustainable communities worldwide and is guided by the quote: “Imperialism is an international system of exploitation, and we, as revolutionaries, must be internationalists to defeat it.” – Assata Shakur

Katie Sobering is a doctoral student in sociology at the University of Texas at Austin. She can be reached at ksobering (at) gmail (dot) com.

Christopher Michael is completing a JD/PhD (Politics) at the City University of New York with a focus on cooperative financial structures, community economic development, and labor law. He is currently co-editing a companion volume to “Ours to Master and to Own: Workers’ Control from the Commune to the Present,” for which he wrote a chapter comparing unionized worker cooperatives in the U.S., Italy, Argentina, and Canada. Chris is also a founding director of NYC Network of Worker Cooperatives.

William Cerf received his Master of Arts in Business Communication (MABC) from Jones International University in November 2011 and began doctoral studies in January 2012 at Union Institute & University with a Concentration in Ethical and Creative Leadership and a Specialization in Martin Luther King, Jr. Studies. Additionally he is an active participant in the Poverty Scholars Program of the Poverty Initiative at Union Theological Seminary in New York City and an advocate for empowerment of low-income people through involvement in Community Voices Heard (CVH). He is passionate about the development of worker-owned cooperatives and is a member of the NYC Network of Worker Cooperatives (NYC NoWC).

Christopher Michael is a founder of the New York City Network of Worker Cooperatives and New York State Worker Cooperative Business Association, general counsel of the ICA Group, and a doctoral candidate in political science at City University of New York.