Our Community
If we want to build a new economy, it’s going to take the whole community.
We think about our community like an ecosystem– an interconnected system where every actor has a diverse role to play in relationship with others.
Co-op Rhody is a hub for diverse community members to meet, build relationships, and organize their work into real impact. Community is a practice sport!
Building unionized worker-owned businesses is no small task. It takes entrepreneurs, organizers, creatives, advisors, funders, policy advocates, good neighbors, conscious consumers, and many more sorts of folks–all working together from a place of trust.
Co-op Rhody is a hub for these community members to meet, build relationships, and organize their work into real impact. Community is a practice sport!
The Co-op Rhody community is ever-growing, as is the broader groundswell towards worker ownership in Rhode Island. We’re proud to walk in the footsteps of our friends at Fuerza Laboral and White Electric Coffee, and participate in the budding RI Worker Cooperative Association with nearly a dozen more local cooperatives.
Want to get involved?
We’d love to collaborate!
Our Team
Co-op Rhody is led by a grassroots network of worker-entrepreneurs, organizers from local organizations including UFCW Local 328, Reclaim RI, and Break the Cycle Cooperative Hub; and national cooperative and industry experts who believe in the vision for a worker-owned economy in Rhode Island.
Our Board
David-Allen “Bear” Sumner Sr.
Board Chair, Cooperative Founder
David-Allen “Bear” Sumner Sr. has been an advocate in the city of Providence for the past 30 years. At present time, he is an organizer with Break the Cycle Cooperative Hub and serves on the Board of the Rhode Island Black Business Association.
Bear can be reached at dsumnersr@gmail.com
Deborah Groban Olson
Secretary
Deb Olson has specialized in creating & advising employee- owned companies & co-ops since 1981. She is a former chair of the National Center for Employee Ownership, Board Chair of the employee-owned Once Again Nut Butter Collective, a board member of Circle Pines Center, & served from 2007-2019 as Executive Director of the Center for Community Based Enterprise, Inc.
Emma Karnes
Board Member, Organizer
Emma Karnes is a union organizer with the United Food and Commercial Workers Union Local 328. Previously, she worked with growers in Northern California working to cooperatize their supply chains through the Cooperative Agricultural Network, and has supported democratic governance design with the large dairy cooperative Organic Valley.
Emma can be reached at ekarnes@ufcw328.org
Elliot Hardy III
Board Member, Cooperative Founder
Elliot Hardy III is a law student and entrepreneur. Balancing his legal studies with business, he brings a unique blend of academic and entrepreneurial skills. An avid photographer, Elliot captures the world with a keen eye for detail. His journey reflects a commitment to professional and personal growth, marked by creativity, dedication, and a drive to make a meaningful impact.
Eve O’Connor
Board Member
Eve O’Connor is a PhD Candidate in American Studies at Harvard University. She is an interdisciplinary scholar currently studying the history of cooperative economies in the early 20th century in the U.S. She has been a fellow with Rutgers University’s Institute for Employee Ownership and Profit Sharing and the Institute for the Cooperative Digital Economy at the New School.
Sanjay Pinto
Board Member
Sanjay Pinto is a researcher whose work addresses the intersections of racial capitalism, care labor, worker surveillance, & strategies for building grassroots worker power. A fellow at the Worker Institute at Cornell & the University of Illinois Chicago, he co-directs the program on Unions & Worker Ownership at Rutgers SMLR & serves on the advisory boards of Citizen Share Brooklyn, the Model Alliance, & the Real Utopias Collective.
Rebecca Lurie
Board Member
Rebecca Lurie serves on faculty at the City University of NY, School for Labor and Urban Studies where she founded the Community and Worker Ownership Project. As a union carpenter she then transitioned into worker education through the union’s apprenticeship school, later devising economic development strategies for equity, inclusion and cooperative business solutions.
Contributors & Advisors
Sarah Owen
Treasurer
Sarah Owen is an MBA graduate from the University of Chicago and prior to that, served in the U.S. Marine Corps. Leveraging her experience in investment banking, Sarah brings a unique blend of finance and leadership skills.
Eduardo Cabral
Advisor
Eduardo Cabral is a cooperative finance, private equity, & community organizing consultant with Triple Beam Advisors. Previously, he led corporate development for Obran Health (CA’s largest home healthcare co-op), worked as an associate at Bengal Capital, & managed progressive political campaigns.
Dennis Olson
Advisor
R. Dennis Olson is a Senior Research Associate & Policy Analyst for UFCW International, where he advises the national director of the meatpacking division and provides strategic analysis for organizing programs, collective bargaining activities, union co-op development, legislative initiatives and strategic alliances. Dennis is specifically focused on helping UFCW develop farmer- and worker- owned union cooperatives in the food sector.
Andre Dev
Organizer, Cooperative Founder
Andre Dev is a non-practicing MD and entrepreneur who has lived in Providence for 19 years. An alum of Brown’s entrepreneurship and medical schools, Andre most recently served as a director at a game development company and an organizer with ReclaimRI.
Hunter Silvestri
Organizer, Cooperative Founder
Hunter Silvestri is an organizer, technologist, designer, and proud Rhode Islander. As the founder of Commonplace Cooperative, he is helping to build human-centric digital tools and infrastructure to meet the needs of community organizers, especially within the ‘solidarity economy’ movement. He is also a founding organizer of the Rhode Island Alliance of Worker Cooperatives.