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 currently working on becoming a Licensed Professional Counselor and exploring the creation of the Meaningful Numbers Cooperative to help worker owners understand and use financial information.

Erica Buswell is recently “retired” from her position as Co-General Manager at the Belfast Food Co-op in Belfast, Maine, where she was responsible for overseeing all aspects of a $5 million member-owned grocery store for the past three and a half years. The joys of her daily tasks included mentoring new start-up consumer co-ops in the State, collaborating with other organizations to create a more localized food economy, and building community around food. 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.

Tom Cosgrove

Noémi Giszpenc, CDI's Executive Director, Grants and Projects Manager and Director of Training, has experience as a management consultant providing training, research, and communications support to employee-owned firms and cooperative and community development-related enterprises. After graduating with bachelor’s degrees in economics and science journalism from M.I.T., she began her career, first as an economics researcher at the World Bank, then as an editor at the Nonprofit Quarterly, a magazine for nonprofit managers. She later became a principal at Ownership Associates, Inc., a consulting firm in Cambridge, MA specializing in developing an ownership culture at employee-owned firms. As part of earning a Master’s in Community Economic Development from Southern New Hampshire University, she did a thesis on the creation of a cooperative economy in the Northeast, including the practical development of an interactive cooperative directory, the Regional Index of Cooperation (www.find.coop). Her most recent work includes research and writing on Italian cooperatives, financial innovations for community development, and asset development for people with disabilities. She has also taught at Montclair State University, NJ.

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, Board Clerk, is currently in his final year at Hampshire College in Amherst, MA. However, his adventures in the cooperative world began in 2005 when he founded a politically oriented DIY record label that became collectivized shortly thereafter. In the label’s four-year existence, Brian has been a part of all fourteen albums it has released and has consistently worked in every job within the label. In 2007, he began teaching at North Star (a community-learning center for teens) in Hadley, MA. There, he facilitated a class called “Running a DIY Record Label” that was based on cooperative principles. Since that time, Brian has continued to teach classes and workshops at North Star and in other formal and non-formal settings centered on various subjects including: United States history, worker cooperatives, and social change movements. In addition, Brian develops teaching tools and educational resources – ranging from board games to curricula - on the aforementioned issues. Since the summer of 2009, he has been an education intern with CDI. This year at Hampshire, Brian is attempting to lay the groundwork for an educational worker cooperative.

Roger Willcox, Acting Chair, 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.