Meet the GEO Collective!
AJOWA NZINGA IFATEYO
Born Vicki Lolita Adams in a small town in South Florida 1954, the year of the Brown v. Board of Education decision. The TV images of assassinations of John and Bobby Kennedy, Martin Luther King, and Malcolm X and of the civil rights movement, rioting, etc. fired the rebel in me. At 17, I'd co-led a boycott of classes to protest Hollywood High's refusal to allow a black history program. Protesting racism at the University of Florida fueled more activism. I joined the African People's Socialist Party, and became the editor of The Burning Spear newspaper, APSP's journal. 
I adopted an African name, Ajowa, and in 1985, legally became Ajowa ("Girl Born on Monday"), and in 1985, legally became Ajowa Nzinga Ifateyo. I deeply admire Queen Nzinga of Angola who fought Portuguese enslavers for more than 50 years. Ifateyo is Swahili for "Love Brings Happiness." After profound political disappointment in the APSP, I became a mainstream journalist to try to "change the world." I also worked on feminist issues in D.C. For more than 10 years I wrote for The Washington Afro American, the Los Angeles Times (where I interned), The Morning Call in Allentown, PA and The Miami Herald. I did important work, but soon learned that mainstream journalism had its limits, and its own race issues.
So I moved on to institution-building. First, I co-founded the Ella Jo Baker Intentional Community Cooperative in DC. (I did this while earning masters degrees in Community Economic Development and Business Administration from Southern New Hampshire University.) I serve on the board of the Eastern Conference on Workplace Democracy, and am a founding board member of the U.S. Federation of Worker Cooperatives. I joined GEO. Now I'm also working with the Democracy at Work Institute to create technical assistance network for worker co-ops, and have served on many boards over the past eight years.
At 55, I understand better now that deep and meaningful change starts with knowing ourselves, confronting our own racial, sexual and political brainwashing - internalized oppression and spiritual ignorance. This learning is an exciting journey. I am writing my memoir, Outside Child, about growing up fatherless and the child of "the other woman." I am organizing Beautiful World Cooperative and Business Services. Health is another passion -- I'm a contributor to the recently published book, Sistah Vegan: Black Female Vegans Speak on Food, Identity, Health and Society -- as is enjoying nature and creating a more joyful life.
CHRISTINA A. CLAMP
I am a professor of Community Economic Development at Southern New Hampshire University, where I also direct the Center for Co-operatives and CED.
I have been active on the board of the ICA Group, a developer and technical assistance provider to employee-owned and worker co-operative businesses since 1994.
Here are some other highlights of my life work:
- served on the board of the National Co-operative Business Association for nine years, from 2000 to 2009;
- former chair of the board of the Co-operative Development Institute in Greenfield, MA;
- current treasurer of the Allston Brighton Community Development Corporation, Boston MA.
- served on the board of Northeast Co-operatives, Brattleboro, VT.
- was a clerk of the Childspace Development and Training Institute Board, a national replication program for sectoral development to
create and re-design jobs held by primarily low-income women in the field of childcare using a worker co-operative model.
Walking along La Concha Bay in Donostia-San Sebastian on the Bay of Biscay in the provincial capital of Guipuzkoa province, where Mondragon is located. Caitlin Gianniny, my older daughter, is looking towards the water. She is currently living in Mondragon and working as a conversational English coach funded on a teaching fellowship by the Spanish government. Megan Gianniny is facing the camera. The picture was taken in February.
ELIZABETH BOWMAN AND BOB STONE, CO-AUTHORS
Elizabeth Bowman earned her PhD degree in French Literature from Columbia University in 1987. Its theme was Sartre's ethical plays. She published in French and English journals on that theme and taught French Literature at Memphis University, University of Hartford, and Middlebury College. She is active in the feminist and worker rights movements. Bob Stone taught philosophy for 35 years - mostly at C. W. Post College of Long Island University. In 1982, with Cliff DuRand and others, he co-founded the Radical Philosophy Association and the Review of Radical Philosophy. Stone has been active in the civil rights, peace, worker cooperative, and solidarity economy movements.
In 1985 Bowman and Stone joined forces as co-authors. Their work has been on parallel themes of economic democracy and Sartre's ethics of the mid-1960s. They have been members of the editorial board of Grassroots Economic Organizing since 1994. Over a dozen of their articles have appeared in journals and collections in philosophy, sociology and political science in Russia, Bulgaria, Belgium, France, Mexico and Argentina. In 2004 they joined with DuRand and others in founding the Center for Global Justice in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico where they currently work. The Center is devoted to "research and learning for a better world". Main research themes so far have been neo-liberal globalization and ways of surviving it, including the solidarity economy. Since 2004 many of Bowman and Stone's writings have appeared on its website, www.globaljusticecenter.org They have long worked on a book manuscript titled Sartre's Morality and History: An Introduction to the Ethical Writings of the mid-1960s. They hope to finish it.
ERIN RICE
I am a lone wolf who has found her pack with the Cooperative Movement!
I was born and raised in south Louisiana. I studied English Literature at Louisiana State University. If you'd told me 20 years ago that I would own a business, get an MBA and become a business teacher I would have probably thrown a bell hooks* book at you. I moved to Western Massachusetts and, after a short career as editor and publisher of a radical lesbian feminist literary journal, I joined the cooperative ranks as a worker-owner at Collective Copies in Amherst, MA. It turns out that I love business! Cooperative business that is. I 
stayed with Collective Copies for 12 years, got an MBA at UMASS and then came back to my home state to hang out with my folks and help spread the word about cooperation. I teach business at Baton Rouge Community College and throw in some cooperative education whenever and wherever I can.
Grassroots economic organizing is my abiding passion. In between busting up patriarchy and dismantling the military-industrial complex, I play saxophone in the Jazz Ensemble at school.
*hooks is a prolific black feminist author.
Jazz Fest, New Orleans, 2010. Me and some folks from the Prince of Wales Social Aid and Pleasure Club. The guys are wearing home-made hats which did not really help with the rain. The hats were very stylish, however, and were made of useful oil-absorbent material. I am second from right.
JESSICA GORDON NEMBHARD, PH.D.
I am an Associate Professor of Community Justice and Social Economic Development in the Department of African American Studies at John Jay College, of the City University of New York (CUNY). I recently completed a year as a visiting scholar in the Economics Department's Center on Race and Wealth at Howard University, and was Master Teacher (July 2007 and 2009) at the Center's Summer Institute for Research on Race and Wealth. I also was a visiting scholar at the Centre for the Study of Cooperatives at the University of Saskatchewan in Canada (academic year 2008-09), and a research affiliate for that Centre's "Linking, Leverage, Learning: Social Enterprises, Knowledgeable Economies and Sustainable Communities" project.
I also am a political economist specializing in economic development policy, Black political economy, popular economic literacy, and community justice. My research has focused on community- and asset- based economic development and democratic community economics; cooperative economics and worker ownership; alternative urban economic and youth educational development strategies; and racial and economic wealth inequality and wealth accumulation in communities of color. Future research and policy analyses will connect community-based economic development, asset building, and economic justice strategies with community-based approaches to justice.
I was previously Assistant Professor of African American Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park; Research Director of the Preamble Center (Washington, DC); Senior Economist at the Institute for Urban Research, Morgan State University; and Acting Deputy Director and Economic Development Analyst for the Black Community Crusade for Children at the Children's Defense Fund. I am the recipient of a Henry C. Welcome Fellowship Grant from the Maryland Higher Education Commission (2001-2004), and a 2008 USDA grant on the economic impact of cooperatives distributed through the University of Wisconsin's Center for Cooperatives, to study wealth accumulation through cooperative ownership. I was a Visiting Scholar and Senior Urban Fellow at Brown University's Annenberg Institute for School Reform from June 1998-June 2000. I was Treasurer of the National Economic Association (NEA) from 2001-2008, and continue as a member of the board of directors of the NEA. In addition, I am a board member of the Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. In addition I began my appointment to the Black Enterprise Board of Economists in October 1999.
My community work is as follows: a co-founder of The Democracy Collaborative at the University of Maryland, College Park; the U.S. Solidarity Economy Network; and the Eastern Conference for Workplace Democracy. In addition, I was a founding member of the US Federation of Worker Cooperatives. Currently, I am a member of Grassroots Economic Organizing (GEO) Newsletter Collective (of the Ecological Democracy Institute of North America), The Association of Cooperative Educators, the Canadian Association for the Study of Cooperatives, The Federation of Southern Cooperatives/Land Assistance Fund, CEJJES Institute, and Organizing Neighborhood Equity (ONE) DC.
I earned both a Ph.D. and an M.A. in economics from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst (1992 and 1989, respectively). I earned my B.A. degree, magna cum laude, in Literature and African American Studies from Yale University (1978); and an M.A.T. in Elementary Curriculum and Teaching from Howard University (1982).
My recent publications include Wealth Accumulation and Communities of Color in the US: Current Issues (University of Michigan Press 2006, co-edited with Ngina Chiteji); "Theorizing and Practicing Democratic Community Economics: Engaged Scholarship, Economic Justice, and the Academy" (In Engaging Contradictions: Theory, Politics and Methods of Activist Scholarship, University of California Press, 2008); "Growing Transformative Businesses: Community-Based Economic Development" (in the Solidarity Economy proceedings published by ChangeMaker Publications 2008). In addition, I am the author of "Cooperatives and Wealth Accumulation" in the American Economic Review; "Non Traditional Analyses of Cooperative Economic Impacts," in the Review of International Co-operation; "Cooperative Ownership in the Struggle for African American Economic Empowerment" in Humanity & Society; "Alternative Economics, a Missing Component in the African American Studies Curriculum" (in a special issue co-edited by Gordon Nembhard and Mathew Forstater of the Journal of Black Studies, May 2008);and "Educating Black Youth for Economic Empowerment: Democratic Economic Participation and School Reform Practices and Policies" (in Handbook of African American Education, Sage 2008). My current work is completing a manuscript on the history of African American cooperative businesses.
My greatest accomplishment is being the proud mother of two children (Stephen and Susan), and a grandmother to Stephon.
JIM JOHNSON
Two major influences have guided my life from the very beginning. One is that my parents ran a small technical business out of our house, and the kids were expected to work in the business. So from an early age, I learned how bills got paid, how customers were treated, and what made the difference between sweating the rent or having money in the bank. My second major influence is progressive activism - my parents were early supporters of the Civil Rights Movement and early opponents of the Vietnam War. Their outspoken positions lost them some friends, but gained them many others, and our house hosted lots of interesting people engaged in ponderous, altruistic discussions. Thus, trying to run a business ethically, while also living and working in a dissident, quasi-tribal culture, has always felt like home to me.
When I struck out on my own in the late 70s, I found my first affinity group through my local food co-op. Before long I had joined a DC collective publishing a dissident 'zine, and was organizing punk and reggae benefits and training people for non-violent civil disobedience actions. I got into computers in the mid-80s, and remained involved in many different democratic grassroots activities until the mid-90s, when I decided to focus my efforts more exclusively on economic democracy and website development. This again led me to my local food co-op, and to a local software company that was just beginning to convert to a worker-owned, worker-managed co-op. Through those experiences, my studies in co-op development, and my networking with other worker co-ops, I started working with the GEO collective in 2005, and began to do an increasing amount of consulting to co-ops as well. After 10 years with my worker co-op, I'm planning on more travel, more study, more co-op development, and more work with GEO.
JOEL SCHOENING
I was born in Delaware and raised in suburban San Jose, CA, but I truly discovered myself in San Francisco, where I completed my Bachelors degree in Sociology at San Francisco State University. During my years in SF, I became active in Critical Mass, a bicycle advocacy social movement, and realized the potential power of direct action and direct democracy for making urban change.
I then moved to Eugene, OR were I continued to pursue this interest as an environmental and labor activist and scholar during my graduate studies at the University of Oregon. One of the highlights of these years was my participation in the World Trade Organization protests in Seattle, where once again, direct action and direct democracy demonstrated its incredible power. In the culmination of my graduate work, my doctoral dissertation, I conducted an organizational analysis of Burley Design Cooperative, an Oregon producer cooperative famous for the little blue and yellow trailers that people use to haul their kids and groceries behind their bicycles.
For the last three years I have been working as an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Shippensburg University of Pennsylvania where I have been teaching and researching in the areas of community development, organizations, and social change. This summer (2010), my spouse and I will be returning to Oregon, and our family there, and I'll continue to pursue my commitment to democracy and social and environmental justice.
I became a peace activist during the US-sponsored wars against the people of Central America during the 1980's. Later, while searching for a path to a peaceful democratic egalitarian society, I came across this quote by Noam Chomsky: "The task for a modern industrial society is to achieve what is now technically realizable, namely, a society which is really based on free voluntary participation of people who produce and create, live their lives freely within institutions they control, and with limited hierarchical structures, possibly none at all" (Language and Politics). I thought, "That is a very interesting idea. I wonder who is trying to create those institutions now." My search led me to GEO.
Founded by Len Krimerman and Frank Lindenfeld, GEO has been reporting on democratic worker cooperatives and other grassroots economic institutions for over 25 years. Believing this work is very important, I moved from being a GEO subscriber, over the years, to being a GEO writer and editor. In my day job, I am a professor and clinical psychologist. I worked for eight years in a regional burn center and my research focuses on helping people cope with severe burns. My "likes" include democracy, equality, basketball, flowers, and eating and drinking with friends. My "dislikes" include corporate capitalism, war, authoritarianism, propaganda, cold fingers during the winter and fabric that chafes.
LEN KRIMERMAN
Len Krimerman helped found both Changing Work (1984), and the GEO Newsletter (1991), for which he still writes and edits. He has taught anarchism and radical democracy at the University of Connecticut for over four decades, and now directs the Public and Community Engagement program there (see our website at www.creativecommunitybuilding.org). Members of this program recently won four $10,000 grants to create sustainable cooperative enterprises to help break the cycle of poverty in Willimantic, CT. These include a Youth Digital Media Cooperative, a commercial licensed Cooperative Kitchen, a Cooperative Hub (incubator focused on developing co-ops and animating inter-cooperation among them), and Rays of Hope, which assists people in recovery, or people with criminal records find gainful employment. If anyone reading this has experience or knows of people with experience in these forms of cooperative enterprise, Len would love to hear from you! Contact him at: lenmvgeo@mindspring.com; 860-487-0008(h); 860-918-8709(c).
MICHAEL JOHNSON
1. Born in the panhandle of Texas in 1942 of an Irish lass and a Mississippi gentleman...Grew up deeply Catholic in a bible belt with a nurse, a doctor and three brothers, on land as flat and rolling as the ocean, under an enormous vault of sky either full of sun or moon, and in the face of constant wind...Got the message at 16 that "the world doesn't work."
2. Entered a Kansas monastery in '63, left in '66; entered law school in NYC in fall of '67 and left in winter of '67; became an 'outside agitator at Columbia in April of '68 and discovered that the far left can be as top/down as the middle and right...deeply involved in group dynamics and community organizing in NYC '68-'73...bottomed out in Phoenix '73-'76. A member of the desegregation unit of Austin school system '76-'80.
3. Co-founded an intentional community in Staten Island, NY in '80, in part an experiential research center in democratic culture...still there 30 years later...immersed in the worker co-op and solidarity economy movements since 2007 with the Valley Alliance of Worker Co-operatives (New England), GEO, and the Community Economies Collective.
