What do you do at ICA?

I help businesses that are interested in converting to cooperative ownership better understand the process as it relates to their goals, financials, and structure.

What is a worker-owned business that inspires you?

I’m a big fan of the CERO Cooperative, a composting and food diversion company in Boston. They used a Direct Public Offering (DPO) to finance their business through community support. I love this model because it allows community members to invest in the success of a business they care about, providing opportunities for both the business and the community to build wealth and power.

What helps you maintain work-life balance?

I love to spend time outdoors hiking, swimming, and biking (when Massachusetts weather allows). I’m also an amateur potter and I spend many afternoons throwing on the wheel after work.

Where is your current home base?

Northampton

Favorite TED talk?

Hannah Gadsby’s “Three ideas. Three contradictions. Or not.” She sort of flips comedy on its head, and has an incredible way of talking about vulnerability that I find really inspirational.

What is your favorite book about leadership?

Many of my personal models for leadership come from novels, rather than books that specifically lay out leadership strategies. I find the characters in Octavia Butler’s novels to be particularly inspiring– Lauren from Parable of the Sower is probably my favorite example.

What do you do at ICA?

On my best days, I am a coach, guide, and thought partner. I am responsible for much of our sales and development work, and I play a role in various coalitions and partnerships across the country. I also help to shape ICA’s long-term goals.

What is a worker-owned business that inspires you?

Lately I’ve been particularly inspired by the home care cooperatives we work with. For instance, Home Care Associates of Philadelphia has taken a major business challenge – recruitment and retention in a sector with a major workforce shortage and low wages that are largely dictated by public payment rates – and doubled down on ownership as a way to build meaningful connections with workers. In a sector with turnover approaching 80%, HCA is seeing more and more workers joining the cooperative as members.

What helps you maintain work-life balance?

A good day for me will involve time in the garden. Digging in the dirt is incredibly relaxing and I love that my mistakes often take a whole season to be truly understood. I also enjoy playing board and card games with my children, especially now that they are old enough to give me a run for my money.

Where is your current home base?

I am based out of Northampton, a place I lived for a number of years when I went to UMass Amherst as an undergrad and grad student.

Favorite TED talk?

“Will automation take away our jobs?” by David Autor. When we let middle skill jobs die, we create a chasm between bad jobs and good jobs that can’t be bridged. Autor’s work is one of the few places where this issue is being addressed, and his analysis has had a significant influence on ICA’s approach to our employee ownership conversion work.

What is your favorite book about leadership?

Building trusting relationships is really what leadership is really about and Thanks for the Feedback: The Science and Art of Receiving Feedback Well by Douglas Stone & Sheila Heen is a great guide for giving feedback and having effective and engaging conversations. I also appreciate one of the central ideas in Building Long-Term Value: Developing a High-Performance Ownership Culture by Virginia J. Vanderslice and Alexander P. Moss – effective leaders treat information as a common resource for everyone to share, not a commodity that is only shared on a need-to-know basis.

What do you do at ICA?

I lead ICA’s New Ownership Opportunities work to cement employee ownership into the standard economic and business development toolkit, including with our partners in local and state government. I also help build new collaborative models to support and resource broad-based employee ownership at scale.

What is a worker-owned business that inspires you?

I had the opportunity to visit the Mondragon cooperatives with leaders from the Bronx and NYC as an inspiration for our own regional economic development initiative in the Bronx. Mondragon’s scale (over 70,000 employees and $16 billion in revenues), diversity of companies (industrial, distribution, retail, finance, and knowledge), and resilience (survived previous economic downtowns with fewer layoffs by re-absorbing workers in other firms) shows what is possible for cooperatives when they are organized as a network with their own support institutions.

What helps you maintain work-life balance?

I discovered what I’ve come to think of as “dirt therapy” when I spontaneously decided to rip up a small patch of grass last summer and planted a garden in its place. This started what I suspect will be a life-long gardening practice, and a great source of personal calm, connection to the land, and joy!

Where is your current home base?

I work primarily in Massachusetts and NYC.

What is your favorite book about leadership?

I recently re-read Leading from the Emergent Future: From Ego-System to Eco-System Economies by Otto Sharmer and Katrin Kaufer. It is based on a social technology called Theory U which is all about shifting individual and collective awareness in order to source and co-create new (in this case, economic) systems that respond to the needs of the whole and serve our wellbeing.

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MassCEO is administered by the ICA Group, a leading expert on worker ownership and the oldest national organization dedicated to the development of employee-owned companies.