About Us

CDI's Board of Directors

Dan Bell

Dan Bell, Board Treasurer, graduated in Philosophy from the University of Notre Dame. He served as a Holy Cross Associate Lay Missionary in Chile for two years. Dan worked with Kent State's Ohio Employee Ownership Center from its founding in 1987 until 2007. He was a key player in building Ohio's Employee Owned Network, developing ownership culture and open book management training, coordinating international projects in Russia, Hungary, Egypt and Latin America, managing the Capital Ownership Group's Virtual Think Tank, and assisting with the establishment of the Prairie Labor-Worker Coop Council by the Canadian Worker Cooperative Federation and Canadian Labour Congress, the Eastern Conference on Workplace Democracy and the US Federation of Worker Cooperatives. He has Masters' degrees in Political Science, Community Counseling and Business Administration. Dan also founded TECHO, a community land trust serving Akron's Latin American community. He served on the Board of Common Wealth in Youngstown, the Economic Justice Committee of the Akron Catholic Commission, the Bishop's Advisory Council on Hispanic Affairs, and the Women's Entrepreneurial Growth Organization's steering committee. Dan is now a Licensed Professional Counselor and works as a Crisis Intervention Counselor for a community based correctional facility operated by Oriana House, helping clients involved in the criminal justice system make a successful transition back into their communities.

Greg Brodsky

Greg Brodsky has always been passionate about working for causes and people that he cares about. He is the founder and the President of The Bike Cooperative and VP at CCA Global Partners. The Bike Cooperative is a store owned buying group that represents over 250 bicycle stores around the country. He has worked for the past 8 years to build this organization, which is growing daily. Working in a division of CCA Global Partners, he has also gained insight into several other retail co-ops in different industries. Before The Bike Cooperative, the majority of his career concentrated on marketing and public relations for small to midsize non-profit organizations. He was born and raised in Manchester, NH and attended college at Wesleyan University in Connecticut.

Erica Buswell

Erica Buswell, Board Chair, works as a Lands Projects coordinator for Maine Farmland Trust, a non-profit organization working to preserve Maine's diminishing productive agricultural lands. Prior to working for MFT, she was Co-General Manager of the Belfast Food Co-op in Belfast, Maine, where she was responsible for overseeing all aspects of a $5 million member-owned grocery store from 2006-2009. She continues to take joy out of mentoring new start-up consumer co-ops around the State of Maine and is passionately working with multiple organizations, including food, worker, and farmer co-operatives to create a more localized and democratically-owned food economy for Maine. She is a 2002 graduate of the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, MA with a B.A. in Religious Studies, and resides in Searsport, Maine on an off -grid farmstead with her husband, heirloom apple orchard, and flock of ducks.

Rosemary Fifield

Rosemary Fifield, Director of Education and Member Services for the Hanover Consumer Cooperative Society, Inc., has been a member of the Management Team at Hanover since 1998 and on the staff of the Education Department since 1993. She was previously employed by Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center clinical laboratories. Rosemary is a Board member of the Upper Valley Business and Education Partnership and an active member of New England Farmers Union. Hanover Co-op, established in 1936, is the second-oldest food co-op in the U.S. and the second largest, with an estimated $70 million in annual sales (2010), 410 employees, and 28,000 member households; it operates 3 full-sized supermarkets in NH and VT, one community market, an automobile service center, and an off-site commercial kitchen.

Len Krimerman, Professor Emeritus, Cornell University, Emeritus Faculty University of Connecticut Philosophy Dept., has research interests in recent political philosophy, theory and prospects of democracy, philosophy and social science, and philosophy of education . His recent publications include From the Ground Up (with F. Lindenfeld) South End Press 1992, and "Should Social Inquiry Be Conducted Democratically?"(2001). He is co-editor of GEO, the Grassroots Economic Organizing Newsletter , in which he utilizes philosophical theory to clarify and foster democratic transformation. He is working on a book tentatively entitled, "Democracy's Dangerous Dream: Reclaiming Citizen Sovereignty", the heart of which builds on a deep analogy between fully democratic priorities and those characteristic of education.

Brian Van Slyke

Brian Van Slyke, Board Clerk, is a graduate of Hampshire College in Massachusetts. His adventures in the cooperative world began in 2005 when he founded a political DIY record label that soon became a worker collective. During his four years with the operation, Brian was a part of all fourteen albums it released and worked in every job within the label. In 2007, he began teaching at North Star (a community-learning center for teens) in Hadley, MA. While there, he facilitated a class about running a DIY cooperative record label. Since that time, Brian has designed and facilitated classes and workshops in a variety of settings on topics including United States history, worker cooperatives, and social change movements. In addition, Brian develops various teaching tools and educational resources – ranging from board games to curricula - on the aforementioned issues. Brian was an intern with CDI for 15 months where he developed educational resources for co-ops. Currently, he is working to found a new educational worker cooperative – The Toolbox for Education and Social Action (TESA). Brian is Project Director for Cultivate.Coop, which is a resource developed by TESA. This is an online hub for sharing knowledge and resources on co-ops, as well as a space to practice cooperation and build educational tools for the co-op community.

Roger Willcox

Roger Willcox has been involved with housing cooperatives and communities for more than 58 years. He continues as a lower income primarily co-op housing consultant and as president emeritus of the Community Cooperative Development Foundation (CCDF) and the National Association of Housing Cooperatives (NAHC) which he helped found in 1960. He also founded and continues as Secretary and consultant for the Connecticut Valley Cooperative Housing Association (CVCHA). From 1952 to 1971 he was CEO and President of FCH Services, the operating subsidiary of the Foundation for Cooperative Housing, later known as the Cooperative Housing Foundation. From 1969 through 1977, he was also CEO for TechniCoop, Inc. During those years he helped create moderate and lower income housing cooperatives of all kinds, serving more than 55,000 family members. He graduated from Harvard University in 1941 with a major in economics and from MIT with a M.S. in City Planning in 1947. A second-generation housing cooperator, he continues to live with his family in the Village Creek Homeowners Association (VCHOA) cooperative in Norwalk, CT, which he helped organize in 1949. He received the Jerry Voorhis Memorial Award in l985 and was inducted into the Cooperative Hall of Fame in 1986.