Author

Tusz-King is Atlantic Director of the Board of Directors and Vice-President of the Canadian Worker Co-operative Federation (http://www.canadianworker.coop/).  He is also a founding member and manager of EnerGreen Builders Co-operative in Sackville, New Brunswick, Canada (www.energreen.coop), and founding member and Chair of Open Sky Co-operative Board (www.openskyco-op.ca).  Co-operative Developer and Diaconal Minister in The United Church of Canada, Eric is a husband and father in a family of four children and two grandchildren with his wife, Margaret Tusz-King.

Tim Huet helps to establish and develop bakery cooperatives through the  Arizmendi Association of Cooperatives, which he co-founded in Northern California. He was previously a member of Rainbow Grocery Cooperative, where he served in various management capacities.  He also served as a Board Director for the U.S. Conference of Democratic Workplaces. Tim serves other worker cooperatives as an organizational consultant and attorney. His writing on cooperatives and self-management has been published in Dollars & Sense, Grassroots Economic Organizing, Peace Review, and The Stanford Law & Policy Review.

For over 40 years my main occupation has been managing a community through a collective face-to-face process. This has involved ongoing experiential learning about personal development and culture building.

My secondary occupation for the past 20 years has been reflecting on how to apply that rich learning to developing democracy on larger scales. The Growing Democracy Project is the outcome. It is not an answer. Rather, it is a solid starting point.

This work began in 1980 with co-founding a small experiential research project on the North shore of Staten Island New York. Our purpose was to learn how people can make creative use of face-to-face conflict in the process of managing joint projects. We worked on this intensely 24/7 for 20 years.

In the process we built an intentional community—Ganas—of more than 80 people, 8 houses, five commercial properties, and three retail stores.

We shifted gears into a less intense life around 2000, and became somewhat smaller in the process. Throughout these four decades we have been practicing face-to-face communication and collective management of the community.

Around 2008 I began exploring how what we had learned could be applied to everyday democracy. This led to 4 years of field research in the cooperative/solidarity economic movement. In turn, this led to 10 years of active involvement in the movement as an active member of the Grassroots Economic Organizing Collective (GEO). 

At GEO I was a blogger, writer, reviewer, interviewer, and editor. I am also a co-author of Building Co-Operative Power! Stories and Strategies from Worker Co-Operatives in the Connecticut River Valley (2014).

All the while I was doing extensive study in many fields of social science, adult transformative learning, evolutionary thinking, history, and political theory. In 2017 I began to pull all of my experience and study together into what became the 140,000 word Growing Democracy Workbook as well as the Growing Democracy Project vision. Now, at the end of summer 2023, we are bringing this to the world.

Lazri DiSalvo is a doctoral student and instructor in the political science department at the University of Connecticut. His research focuses on co-operative development in post-conflict regions in the world, including Nicaragua, East Timor, and Rwanda.

Jessie Myszka is a DAWN-certified Peer Advisor and has been a worker owner at Equal Exchange since 1996. Participating with DAWN’s pilot with Kiva Zip has been a great way to combine her background in Sales (seven years) and Operations (nine years), serving on the board at a consumer grocery cooperative, and volunteering locally with community development for small businesses.
 

Adam Trott is Director of Member Relations at Shared Capital Cooperative, and Executive Director of the Valley Alliance of Worker Co-operatives. He has a Masters in Management of Co-operatives and Credit Unions from Saint Mary’s University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Contact him at adam@valleyworker.coop.

Micha Josephy is CFNE's Program Manager, with varied responsibilities, including grant writing, communications and networking. He first joined the co-op movement as a member of the Oberlin Student Cooperative Association, in Oberlin, OH, and later coordinated the development of Boston Community Cooperative’s first housing development, Seed Pod Co-op, in Dorchester, MA.

Esteban Kelly is the Development Director at the New Economics Institute. He has been an important leader in food justice and co-op movements, including recently through his work at Mariposa Food Co-op, and as a board member of the US Federation of Worker Cooperatives, NCBA–CLUSA, and NASCO, where he was recently Board President, and was inducted into their Cooperative Hall of Fame in 2011. He is a founding member of AORTA (the Anti-Oppression Resource and Training Alliance), a worker co-op of consultants serving co-ops and social justice organizations. Esteban is a facilitator, parent, nerd, and blogger, who holds a Masters in Anthropology from the CUNY Graduate Center.