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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.

Mary Hoyer is a community and cooperative development consultant working out of Amherst, Massachusetts.  She co-chairs the UnionCo-ops Council of the U.S. Federation of Worker Co-ops and has worked with the Cooperative Fund of New England, the Cooperative Development Institute, the Eastern Conference for Workplace Democracy, Citizens Research Education Network, Asylum Hill Economic Development Committee, the Hartford Public Schools, and the Hartford Federation of Teachers AFL-CIO Local 1018 as a teacher, facilitator and consultant on organizational development, finance and fundraising, governance, anti-racism, public and community education, and union organizing.

John W. Lawrence is a psychology professor at the College of Staten Island, City University of New York. He is a member of the editorial collective of Grassroots Economic Organizing (GEO) Newsletter. There are many articles on worker cooperatives at the GEO website.

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.

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).

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.

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

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.

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.

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.
 

Teryani writes at the Living Awareness Institute Blog

Sarah Taub, Ph.D is a cultural activist whose passion is creating events where people transform. She teaches the skills of peaceful, sustainable community, self-awareness, honesty, clear boundaries, and facilitates group processes of many sorts, including consensus decision-making, business meetings and retreats, ZEGG Forum, and conflict resolution sessions. Sarah co-founded the first cohousing community in Washington, DC, and for the past 12 years has lived at Chrysalis, a small urban intentional community in Arlington, VA whose mission is to support activists and healers (www.chrysalis-va.org). Since 2004, she has been a major organizer of Network for a New Culture's East Coast Summer Camp (www.cfnc.us) and other events aimed at creating a culture based on awareness, compassion, and freedom rather than on fear and judgment. In 2006, she left her tenured professorship in Cognitive Linguistics at Gallaudet University to focus full-time on events, community-building, and cultural change. Since 2011, she has been the financial and programs manager for Abrams Creek Center (www.abramscreekcenter.com), a retreat center and community in the mountains of West Virginia.

Sarah has been facilitating ZEGG Forum at New Culture events since 2004. She participated in and assisted at three Forum trainings with Teryani Riggs and has completed several Forum trainings with Ina Meyer-Stoll and Achim Ecker of ZEGG, including a 16-day facilitation training at Ganas Community in New York. She coordinated or co-coordinated the Forum team at New Culture Summer Camp West from 2008 to 2011, coordinated the Forum team at New Culture Summer Camp Central Oregon in 2011 and 2012, and has been on the Forum team at New Culture Summer Camp East since 2008. She has been teaching Forum facilitation with Debby Sugarman since 2011, and is deeply committed to Forum as a tool of large-group transparency and transformation.

Matthew Slater builds and implements open source software for social & complementary currencies. As a full nomad, he knows first hand many people and projects in his field. In 2009 he co-founded with Tim Anderson the Swiss association Community Forge which freely hosts web sites for LETS and timebanks. He is also active in thinking and educating about money. In 2013 He co-created the 'trading floor game' with Sybille Saint Girons. In 2015 he co-authored the Money and Society MOOC with Professor Jem Bendell. In 2016 he co-authored the Credit Commons white paper with Tim Jenkin.