Dr. Jessica Gordon Nembhard
Author of Collective Courage: A History of African American Cooperative Economic Thought and Practice (2014), and 2016 inductee into the U.S. Cooperative Hall of Fame, Jessica Gordon-Nembhard, Ph.D., is Professor of Community Justice and Social Economic Development, in the Department of Africana Studies, John Jay College, City University of NY; and affiliate faculty with John Jay’s Economics Masters Program, as well with the Environmental Psychology Ph.D. program in the School of Earth and Environmental Sciences at CUNY Graduate Center. Dr. Gordon-Nembhard is an internationally recognized and widely published political economist specializing in cooperative economics, community economic development and community-based asset building, racial wealth inequality, solidarity economics, Black Political Economy, community-based approaches to justice, and popular economic literacy. Recipient of numerous awards in social economics and cooperative studies, she earned M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in Economics from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst; an M.A.T. in Elementary Curriculum and Teaching from Howard University; and B.A. degree (double major in Literature and African American Studies) from Yale University. She is a member of the Cooperative Economics Council of NCBA/CLUSA; the International Co-operative Alliance Committee on Co-operative Research; a Faculty Fellow and Mentor with the Institute for the Study of Employee Ownership and Profit Sharing at Rutgers University School of Management and Labor Relations; an affiliate scholar with the Centre for the Study of Co-operatives (University of Saskatchewan, Canada); and adjunct professor with the International Centre for Co-operative Management, Sobey School of Business, St. Mary’s University (Halifax, NS, Canada). Gordon-Nembhard is also a board member of The Association for Social Economics, Organizing Neighborhood Equity (ONE DC), Grassroots Economic Organizing Newsletter/Ecological Democracy Institute of North America, Green Worker Cooperatives, The CEJJES Institute; and past board member of the Association of Cooperative Educators; a past fellow with the Center on Race and Wealth at Howard University; and a member and past President (as well as past Treasurer) of the National Economic Association. She is the proud mother of Stephen and Susan, and the grandmother of Stephon, Hugo, Ismaél, and Gisèle Nembhard.