Cameron Bacher is a worker-owner at The Cheese Board Collective, a 57-year-old cooperative Pizzeria and Bakery in Berkeley, California. There, Cameron does production work and committee work that supports the overall health of the co-op. Cameron enthusiastically works within the beauty and mess of co-ops. She values the ways cooperation drives change while acknowledging the challenges of working together in a way that goes against the mainstream. In 2022 she received a grant to explore worker-owned food co-ops and the impacts they have on the communities they exist in. Cameron has a BA in Feminist and Gender Studies. She believes working collectively can serve as a place of practice for fighting different forms of oppression and their intersections such as racism, sexism, homophobia, and ableism. She is curious about questions like: how do co-ops allow for the cultivation of care in the workplace? In what ways are co-ops lacking this? Cameron explores these questions by serving on committees like the Big Picture committee, Personnel, sponsoring candidates, and a SuperGroup for conflict management. Cameron hopes to bring her curiosity, care for co-ops, and enthusiasm for this work to the USFWC board.

My experience as a Cooperative Specialist at MCDC, Montana's only statewide cooperative development center, along with our focus on cooperative education and development in worker conversion, investment cooperatives, and cooperative housing, uniquely positions me to contribute meaningfully to USFWC’s goals for a strong democratic workforce.

I care deeply about rural Montana and am dedicated to helping these communities find solutions through the cooperative business model. Engagement with national cooperative organizations like USFWC is crucial for MCDC. It keeps us informed about best practices, policy developments, and innovative strategies in the cooperative sector while ensuring the rural perspective is heard. This engagement empowers us to better educate Montana’s economic development professionals and businesses on the worker cooperative model, highlighting the value of democratic workplaces.

Bringing worker cooperatives and business conversions to rural Montana is especially important to me. This approach offers rural business owners a sustainable succession plan and a powerful tool for community economic development. By participating in USFWC leadership, I will ensure MCDC remains a strong advocate for cooperatives, enhancing our ability to support and expand this transformative economic model in Montana.

Kim is a founding member and board president of ChiFresh Kitchen, a women and minority-owned worker cooperative that offers fresh, nutritious, delicious prepared meals to schools, community organizations, and other institutions working to improve the health and wellness of the individuals they serve. Having recruited three out of the other four founding members, she was a driving force in assembling the team. At ChiFresh, Kim leads the delivery team and is also responsible for purchasing and receiving. Kim has management experience in other food businesses as well.

As a cooperative developer with The Center for Community Wealth Building, I serve the Denver communities in developing worker-cooperatives. The organization is democratically-led with a mission of racial and economic justice working to transform the economy. As an advocate of worker-led organizations, I serve communities that are most impacted by economic disparities in particular immigrants and women. As a co-leader of the educational and training programs, I expanded the Train-the-Trainer in Cooperative Development alumni to over 70 people. I translated the curriculum of the training into Spanish and emphasized outreach and inclusion of the Hispanic community for greater impact. I am an advocate of creating spaces of inclusion and participation of those most impacted by economic disparities by centering their experiences and uplifting their voice to create systems that are responsive to their needs. As a community organizer who has served the Denver-community, I bring experience building coalitions of people with diverse backgrounds by finding common goals that bring people together. My passion is empowering workers who are seeking to establish cooperatives able to provide a better livelihood without extracting from their labor. By being able to serve as a bridge to the national movement, I will help bring worker’s voices to the Federation.

I have been working in co-ops across Turtle Island for a decade, mostly with Black, Brown and Native folks in the South, Midwest and the D.C.-Maryland-Virginia area and currently reside in Los Angeles. I am Afro-Indigenous, with deep roots in the South and the Caribbean, which inform my work really deeply. The power of the co-op is the people, and the power of the people is interdependent. I am always interested in rooting us in the ancestral power of food, medicine and community, especially in a business context, where so many of our perspectives can get lost or overshadowed. The best co-ops are created by folks who care, and that care should be displayed at every point in the process. My hope is to support co-ops in the creation of healthy, supportive atmospheres that exist in harmony with their workers, communities, and the greater world we live in.

As someone who came to the U.S. as a political refugee, I have always understood my work as a therapist to be linked to an understanding of how political realities shape our internal worlds. Two years ago, I co-founded a worker cooperative group therapy practice, Catalyst Cooperative Healing, because I had worked in exploitative workplaces throughout my career and saw the perceived “apolitical” stance of many of my colleagues as implicated in that exploitation. As I got to know others working in cooperative businesses, I became excited about the potential to own my own labor and create the conditions for others to do so as well. Since then, I've found this to be tremendously healing to my own mental health. I have also experienced the unique and valuable perspectives that care workers bring to the cooperative ecosystem and am eager to represent that perspective on the USFWC Board of Directors. It is my aspiration that having a mental health professional serving on the USFWC Board will invite other mental health workers to expand their imagination about what is possible in our field. As a worker-owner of a relatively new business, I also bring a fresh perspective informed by a practical understanding of the opportunities and challenges facing worker-owners and aspiring worker-owners today.

As a worker-owner at Colmenar Cooperative Consulting and Dorchester Art Project, I’ve seen how cooperation and tangible ownership fosters harmony both within and beyond the workplace and offers a transformed sense of participation in society. This has great potential to heal our fractured times.

As a board member, I’ll nurture the emphasis on cooperatives as a cornerstone of collective liberation. Viewing ownership and collaboration as a way of exploring existentialism and deeper connection.

Growing up in Miami, with my Cuban and Chilean family, I experienced the beauty of community and the fractures caused by capitalism. My path to cooperatives began immersed in the contemplative movement while living in an intentional community. There I nurtured self led staff initiatives and offered self regulation tools to organizers.

As a cooperative organizer with Boston Center for Community Ownership, I learned the intricacies of the cooperative development process and what it means to be part of an ecosystem. Now, as a worker-owner, I directly experience the complexities and rewards of collective ownership— freedom, overwhelm, unknown, adventure.

Bilingual (ES, EN) and skilled in team building, facilitation, decision-making and governance, I'll ensure the worker-owner experience remains central as we build sustainable businesses and foster human growth.

Hello there! My name is Kyle Schmolze, and I am a coop enthusiast, engineer, dog dad and music organizer currently living in Oakland, CA. I personally believe that a healthy cooperative ecosystem is a necessary component of the social and economic revolution we need in the United States, and I am very committed to serving the growth of that ecosystem. Thus far, my cooperative work has consisted primarily of movement-building at Groupmuse, a worker- and musician-owned coop that has organized over 10,000 living room concerts across the US and around the world, which I co-founded 11 years ago.

I've been a software engineer and computer-tinkerer my whole life. Before Groupmuse, I ran a successful tech startup called JumpOffCampus (which I still own and operate part-time). With JumpOffCampus, I attended two startup accelerators with JumpOffCampus, and learned a lot about traditional startup paradigms and practices. And although traditional startups are usually NOT a good vehicle for economic justice (and are often the opposite!), I believe there are many good lessons which can be transferred over to the practice of building new cooperatives, especially when it comes to the world of platform cooperatives, like Groupmuse.

I continually educate myself on cooperative economics, methods, and practices, and have years of facilitation experience (both professional and musical!). I am a diligent worker, a good listener, and my Spanish is decent (although not strong enough that I checked it off above).

I would be honored to serve on the USFWC Board.

Evelyn Torres graduated from Lycoming College with a Bachelor's in Accounting and a Minor in Business Administration. She is hardworking, passionate, self-motivated, and a Mexican native. She enjoys being involved in the community and embraces diversity as they are essential components for organizations to prosper. Evelyn has a background in working with non-profits, for-profits, and is a recipient of the Seal of Biliteracy. She is proficient with QuickBooks, Bill, Expensify, ADP Payroll, and Accounting CS. She enjoys hiking and her favorite food is enchiladas.

I would be honored to join the leadership of the USFWC. Over the years of being part of a cooperative and working with those in the cleaning and refurbished industry I have come to observe areas in which we all need more assistance in understanding how our business impacts our community and ecosystem. A few goals of mine would be for coop members to know coop history, to look at coops outside the US and see what worked and didn't, and how to incorporate this system in our daily education. Lastly, provide an equal playing field for the undocumented cooperatives by bringing to spaces Language Justice and encouraging their participation to better understand the hurdles encountered.

Peace, Hello, and Greetings,

Thank you for your cooperation and for your dedication to the work. It's revolutionary and pays homage to our ancestors. The transformation, abundance, and wisdom cultivated through collective economics and community building inspires and fills me with hope. Embracing cooperative frameworks affirms the value of Black and Indigenous and queer and trans and unhoused and intersected voices as a gift and beautiful force, fostering space for a diverse range of remarkable people and innovative ideas, specifically including refined and more sustainable alternatives to our current capitalist system.

I dove all in from my first encounter with shared power within the Treasure City collective, and my dedication has only grown stronger through my work with SSG and USFWC. If serving on the USFWC Board means investing in a promising and intentional future for future generations, count me in! If it means creating space for more individuals to build community through shared power, count me in! And if it means engaging in life-affirming reciprocity, count me in!

I'm excited about tangibly manifesting and supporting ideas that align with a cooperative and compassionate way of living, shared by myself and many of my comrades. A world where harmony with all beings and organic structures seems crucial and complex, yet entirely achievable, and I'm totally here for it!