Featured Researchers

May 2012

Dr. Gayle Broad

Dr. Gayle Broad
Community Economic and Social Development
Algoma University
Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario

B.A. (Laurentian-Algoma), Ph.D. (Bristol)

Dr. Gayle Broad is an Associate Professor in the Community Economic and Social Development (CESD) program at Algoma University in Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario. She is also the Director of Research for NORDIK Institute, a community-based research institute affiliated with Algoma University. Gayle combines a background in legal advocacy with years of experience in facilitation, conflict resolution, strategic planning and program evaluation.

Dr. Broad’s research interests derive from her more than 20 years’ experience as a community organizer prior to returning to graduate studies to complete her doctorate. Her current research interests include the social economy, public legal education, indigenous issues, participatory action research, violence against women, and poverty. For the past six years, Gayle has been the academic lead for research on the SSHRC-funded social economy research project in Northern Ontario. Currently she is working with community groups and other researchers on creating resilient, sustainable Northern, rural and Indigenous communities and strengthening relationships.  Gayle is also working with universities and community groups in Colombia to develop a Community Economic and Social Development program there.

An author of numerous research articles and reports, Gayle has presented her work nationally and internationally.

September 2011

Isobel M. Findlay

Associate Professor, Management and Marketing
Edwards School of Business
Co-Director, Community University Institute for Social Research (CUISR)
University of Saskatchewan
Saskatoon, Saskatchewan

Isobel (M.A. Aberdeen, M.A. Sask, Ph.D. McGill), a Scholar with the Centre for the Study of Co-operatives at the University of Saskatchewan, teaches business communication, business and community, co-operative studies, and law and culture. An active member of CUISR since 2003 and associate member of the Council for the Advancement of Native Development Officers (CANDO). She has special research and teaching interests in communications, cultures, and communities; diversity in the workplace; Aboriginal and associative organizations; partnerships, participation, and democratic governance; corporate social responsibility, performance indicators, and reporting standards; and transsystematics and transcultural law and justice. She has published widely on Aboriginal co-operatives and community development broadly understood in terms of quality of life, education, justice, socio-economic development, cultural revitalization, and ecological sustainability for healthy communities.

Isobel works closely with community groups, non-profits, and the public and private sectors designing and conducting research to promote and support economic development, community entrepreneurship, and environmental sustainability.

She has served on and chaired boards, run her own business, and facilitated workshops for a variety of businesses and organizations. A proud recipient of a University of Saskatchewan Students’ Union Teaching Excellence Award, she is also co-winner of the Saskatchewan Book Awards Scholarly Writing Award, 2000.

Find more at Dr. Findlay’s personal website.

December 2010

Catherine Leviten-Reid

Assistant Professor
Shannon School of Business
Cape Breton University
Sydney, Nova Scotia

Catherine was a postdoctoral fellow with the Centre for the Study of Co-operatives from January of 2008 to June of 2009.  She is currently an Assistant Professor in the Shannon School of Business at Cape Breton University, where she teaches in the MBA in Community Economic Development program. Catherine’s current research focus is on how co-operatives and other community-based enterprises may increase family and consumer well-being. She has studied child care organizations and home support agencies, and is currently doing research on health co-operatives as well as co-operative housing. Catherine has a Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she also worked as a research assistant at the Center for Cooperatives.  She has served on the boards of the Saskatoon Community Clinic and the Ottawa Women’s Credit Union, and is a past president of the Canadian Association for Studies in Co-operation (CASC).

Please see Catherine’s CV.

October 2010

Jessica Gordon Nembhard

Associate Professor of Community Justice and Social Economic Development
Department of African American Studies
John Jay College
City University of New York (CUNY)

Jessica concluded her year (2009-2010) with us as a visiting scholar but continues to work on the research it generated within the Social Economy project. Her work focuses on three areas within the broad topic of Measuring the Impacts of Social Enterprises and Co-operatives:

• measuring the impact of the social economy on communities;
• wealth accumulation and asset building through co-operative and shared ownership;
• a comparison between the development, functions, and accomplishments of Aboriginal/First Nations co-operatives in Canada and African-American- owned co-operatives in the US.

Jessica is working with Lou and researcher Dwayne Pattison on a pilot study titled “Impacts of Credit Unions on Communities in Saskatchewan and Manitoba: Measuring Member and Community Benefits and Asset Building from Credit Union Ownership.”

Jessica is also a Co-Principal Investigator with Lou Hammond-Ketilson on the new CURA: “Measuring the Social, Environmental and Economic Impact of Co-operatives in Canada”.

Read about Jessica’s current research (pdf).

________________

BIOGRAPHY: JESSICA GORDON NEMBHARD, PH.D.

JESSICA GORDON NEMBHARD is 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) in New York City, USA. She 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. She has also been a visiting scholar at the Centre for the Study of Cooperatives at the University of Saskatchewan in Canada (academic year 2008-09), and is a research affiliate for that Centre’s “Linking, Leverage, Learning: Social Enterprises, Knowledgeable Economies and Sustainable Communities” project.

Dr. Gordon Nembhard is a political economist specializing in economic development policy, Black political economy, popular economic literacy, and community justice. Her 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. Her future research and policy analyses will connect community-based economic development, asset building, and economic justice strategies with community-based approaches to justice.

Gordon Nembhard’s 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, she is the author of Capital Control, Financial Regulation, and Industrial Policy in South Korea and Brazil (Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers, 1996), and is completing a manuscript on the history of African American cooperative businesses. Other publications include: “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).

Dr. Gordon Nembhard 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. She is 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. Dr. Gordon Nembhard was a Visiting Scholar and Senior Urban Fellow at Brown University’s Annenberg Institute for School Reform from June 1998-June 2000. She was Treasurer of the National Economic Association (NEA) from 2001-2008, and continues as a member of the board of directors of the NEA, in addition to being a board member of the Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She began her appointment to the Black Enterprise Board of Economists in October 1999.

Gordon Nembhard is 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, she is a founding member of the US Federation of Worker Cooperatives; and 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.

Jessica Gordon Nembhard earned a Ph.D. and an M.A. in economics from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst (1992 and 1989, respectively). She earned her 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). She is the proud mother of two children (Stephen and Susan) and one grandson (Stephon).