People
Organizers
Michael Leung is starting a credit union to finance worker cooperatives. He graduated from the University of California Berkeley in 2000 with a B.S. in Engineering Physics and completed his Ph.D. in Physics at Princeton University in 2006 working on cosmology, accelerator, and particle physics experiments. He consults part time for the Princeton University Physics Department and currently resides in the Boston area.
Brent Emerson is a founding worker-owner at Electric Embers Cooperative and a worker cooperative activist. He served on NoBAWC’s first Board (2006) and is a member of the advisory board of the Worker Ownership Fund. Brent previously worked as a technology consultant to progressive nonprofit organizations in the San Francisco Bay area and was a founding member of the tech underground. He graduated from Brown University in 1998 with a B.A. in Philosophy (Logic & Philosophy of Science) and Mathematics, and currently resides in Portland, Oregon.
Neil Helfman has been a practicing attorney in the San Francisco Bay Area for the last 21 years working primarily in business related litigation where he has formed, advised, and litigated on behalf of, numerous worker and agricultural cooperatives. He has written for the C.E.B Business Law Practitioner Reporter which advocates workers’ cooperatives as an alternative way of doing business, and the UC Davis Center for Cooperatives, where he examined the application of labor law to workers’ cooperatives. He has drafted legislation amending the California Corporation Code that defines workers cooperatives and their financial structure, and during the last several years he has advocated the need for cooperatives to form their own financial services and self-insurance network.
Lisa Stolarski is a founding member of Jane Street Housekeeping and is on the board of East End Food Coop. She is doing coop administration and development work through Keystone Development Center. Lisa was the coordinator for a study-group manual called A Discussion Course on Cooperatives which covers many coop industries, perspectives and types of coops. She studied Philosophy and Critical Theory and currently resides in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
Tim Huet is a founder of the Association of Arizmendi Cooperatives, an enterprise aimed at replicating successful worker cooperatives. The Association in the last decade has launched in the San Francisco Bay Area three new bakery cooperatives, and has recently initiated work in fostering cooperative charter schools. As part of the Association’s Development & Support Cooperative that helps launch new cooperatives and provides technical assistance to the established outlets, Tim participates in writing business plans; raising start-up capital; negotiating leases; and training workers in democratic business management. He also serves as in-house legal counsel.
During his five years as a worker-owner at Rainbow Grocery Cooperative — as Rainbow grew to be the West’s largest worker cooperative (with 200+ workers and $32 million in annual sales) — Tim served in the following capacities: Conflict Resolution Team Coordinator, Personnel Procedures Specialist, and Facilitation Team Coordinator. He is also one of the founders and current organizers for the Worker Ownership Fund.
Kasper Koczab is a board member on the Network of Bay Area Worker Cooperatives (NoBAWC). He developing a Worker Coop map for the SF Bay Area to serve as a marketing tool for worker coops and works at the Berkeley Free Clinic.
Chris Meyer has degrees in history and business. He is employed by Mennonite Mutual Aid, which practices socially responsible investing through social screens, shareholder advocacy and community development investing. He currently lives in Goshen, IN.
Brendan Martin works with the The Working World a fund that supports worker cooperatives in Argentina.
Ridwan Schleicher is a member of the Cheese Board in Berkeley CA.
Advisory Board
Jessica Azulay is a writer, activist and website developer living in Syracuse, New York. She currently co-owns the collective website development firm WebRoot Solutions. She is also a co-founder of PeoplesNetWorks, publisher of the now defunct NewStandard, an alternative news website that successfully ran on the principles of participatory economics for four years.
David Ellerman works in the fields of economics and political economy, social theory and philosophy, and in mathematics. His undergraduate degree was in philosophy at M.I.T. (’65), and he has Masters degrees in Philosophy of Science (’67) and in Economics (’68), and a doctorate in Mathematics (’71) all from Boston University. He has been in and out of teaching in economics, mathematics, accounting, computer science, and operations research departments in various universities (1970-90), founded and managed a consulting firm in East Europe (1990-2), and worked in the World Bank from 1992 to 2003 where he was an economic advisor to the Chief Economist (Joseph Stiglitz and Nicholas Stern). Now he is a visiting scholar at the University of California in Riverside. Of particular relevance to worker cooperatives is his work on property theory, worker ownership, economic democracy, and democratic theory.
Ajowa Ifateyo works with Grassroots Economics Organizing a bimonthly newsletter that reports on worker cooperatives and community-based economies in the U.S. and world wide, and their development through local cooperative action. She is involved with grassroots organizing to build and finance worker-owned, democratically run, community based, ecologically sustainable enterprises. Add bio. . .
Christopher Mackin is the founder and President of Ownership Associates. He has worked professionally in the field of employee ownership for twenty-eight years. Chris is a frequent speaker in both the United States and Europe to groups interested in issues of corporate governance and organizational change and is also a regular contributor to newspapers and periodicals on the topic of employee ownership. After graduating from Georgetown University in 1974, Chris served as a Sidney Harman Fellow at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University from 1978 to 1980 researching leading models of American industrial relations. He later completed a Doctorate in Human Development from the Harvard Graduate School of Education. His Doctoral thesis was entitled The Social Psychology of Ownership. In addition to his work in the field of employee ownership, Chris is active in the field of ethical commerce and with efforts to promote alternatives to sweatshop working conditions.
