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Jessica Gordon Nembhard is a political economist and Associate Professor of Community Justice and Social Economic Development in the Africana Studies Department at John Jay College, City University of NY; and author of Collective Courage: A History of African American Cooperative Economic Thought and Practice. An affiliate scholar with the Centre for the Study of Co-operatives, University of Saskatchewan, Canada, she is a member of the GEO Collective, as well as the US Federation of Worker Cooperatives, the Eastern Conference for Workplace Democracy, the Southern Grassroots Economies Project, and the US Solidarity Economy Network. Gordon Nembhard is also a member of the Shared Leadership Team of Organizing Neighborhood Equity (ONE) DC (a community organizing organization in Washington, DC). Jessica is the proud mother of Susan and Stephen, and the grandmother of Stephon Nembhard.

Writer  and activist Helen Forsey was a member of the now defunct Dandelion Community in Ontario from 1984 to 1991. While there she visited various other communities, and worked with Laird in the Federation of Egalitarian Communities (FEC). This interview was originally published in her book, Circles of Strength – Community Alternatives to Alienation (New Society, 1993). Helen now divides her time between Lothlorien Farm in Ontario and her family's cabin in Newfoundland.

I’ve lived in intentional community for 41 years: 39 years at Sandhill Farm (a small, income-sharing community I helped found in 1974 in northeast Missouri), followed by 20 months at nearby Dancing Rabbit, an ecovillage started in 1997 with a core mission of modeling how to live a great life on a resource budget that’s only 10% of the US average. Today I live in Chapel Hill NC, where I’m trying to pioneer a new community with close friends. For the last 28 years I’ve also been integrally involved with the Fellowship for Intentional Community—a North American network dedicated to providing the information and inspiration of cooperative living to the widest possible audience. Recognizing the value of what is being learned in intentional communities about how to solve problems collaboratively and work constructively with conflict, I started a part-time career as a process consultant in 1987. Today, I’m on the road half the time conducting trainings, working with groups, and attending events all over the country. Recreationally, my passions include celebration cooking, duplicate bridge, wilderness canoeing, and the New York Times Sunday crossword.

Chris Roth edited Talking Leaves: A Journal of Our Evolving Ecological Culture for eight years, and has edited Communities since 2008. A resident member of Lost Valley Educational Center/Meadowsong Ecovillage in Dexter, Oregon, he has lived in intentional community and on organic or permaculture farms most of his adult life. Contact him at editor [AT] ic.org.

Bonnie Shulman, now in her 60s, is an elder hippie who came of age in the 60s.  She is a recovering mathematics professor, recently retired from Bates College in Lewiston, ME, and looking forward to life in the slow lane.  Her friends and family are skeptical about her slowing down, and she grudgingly admits they may be right.  She is eager to return to her passions of poetry, gardening, and yoga.

Elizabeth Barrette writes and edits nonfiction, fiction, and poetry in diverse fields including speculative fiction, alternative spirituality, and community. She ran the Pagan magazine PanGaia for 8 years and writes regularly for the Llewellyn annuals. Visit her blog The Wordsmith’s Forge and coven website Greenhaven: A Pagan Tradition.

Joss Winn is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Education, University of Lincoln and a founding member of the Social Science Centre, Lincoln.

JJ Noire is the producer of the 2-DVD workshop "This Way Out: A Guide To Starting A Worker Cooperative" (http://www.MightySmallFilms.com/This_Way_Out.html) She is a volunteer with NoBAWC and lives in a Limited Equity Housing Coop in Berkeley, CA.  For the past several years she has been videotaping conferences and presentations about worker and housing cooperatives and posting them online (http://www.YouTube.com/JJNoire)

Mira Luna is a long time social and environmental justice activist, community organizer and journalist, working to develop an alternative economy. She co-founded Bay Area Community Exchange, a regional open source timebank, the San Francisco Really Really Free Market and JASecon, and has served on the board of the San Francisco Community Land Trust and currently serves on the boards of the US Solidarity Economy Network and Data Commons Cooperative. She coordinated the Bay Area Participatory Budgeting Tour, the first Homestead Skillshare Festival in San Francisco, the Festival of Grassroots Economics in Oakland and two workshops for the Network of Bay Area Worker Cooperatives.

Michael Kenny has been an environmentalist and social justice activist since his youth, volunteering with numerous organizations. He is a co-founder and Executive Director of the Canadian-based grassroots environmental and social justice organization Regenesis http://www.theregenesisproject.com/. He was the New Democratic Party candidate for Don Valley West in the 2007 provincial election against future Premier Kathleen Wynne and PC leader John Tory.  He attends York University’s Faculty of Environmental Studies in Toronto, where he is conducting research on autonomous spaces, activist centres and intentional communities.

Adam Trott is Staff Developer at the Valley Alliance of Worker Co-ops.

Erbin Crowell is Executive Director of the Neighboring Food Co-op Association.

Thomas M. Hanna is Senior Research Associate with The Democracy Collaborative. Hanna’s areas of expertise include public ownership, nationalization, privatization, and banking, among others. He has published articles in popular and academic journals including The Nation, Truthout, The Neoprogressive, and The Good Society as well as providing research support for numerous articles that have appeared in such publications as The New York Times,Alternet, Dissent, The Review of Social Economy, Solutions, and The Ecologist. Hanna assisted on the Collaborative’s contribution to a report for the United Nations 2012 Rio+20 Conference and worked closely with Gar Alperovitz on his recent book What Then Must We Do? Straight Talk About the Next American Revolution.  He received his M.A. and B.A. degrees in History from Virginia Commonwealth University.

Andrew McLeod is a cooperative development consultant who holds the Master in Management – Co-operatives and Credit Unions graduate degree from the Sobey Business School at St. Mary’s University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. He is a founding member of Collective Seeds Consulting Cooperative.

He has been involved in the cooperative movement since 1992, including two years as editor of the Cooperative Business Journal. His interests include democratic processes, the intersection of cooperative economics and religion, community-based food production and distribution, international models for power-sharing, and cooperative disaster recovery techniques.

Andrew is the author of Holy Cooperation!: Building Graceful Economies, a book that explores cooperative elements of Christianity. He has also presented a paper on common cooperative tendencies found in Judaism, Christianity and Islam; his more recent research includes a focus on 19th Century Mormon economic organizing.

He also maintains another blog on faith-based cooperation.