Maggie Cohn
Maggie is the Southeastern New England Loan and Outreach Officer for the Cooperative Fund of New England, a Community Development Finance Institution founded in 1975. She has served as the Executive Director of local non-profits, working for the Mission Hill Health Movement; for the Boston Collaborative for Food & Fitness with a broad array of community organizations, institutions and municipal agencies; and for Mission Hill Main Streets, working with local businesses and residents to improve the commercial district. Previously she worked at Red Sun Press, a worker-controlled commercial print shop in Jamaica Plain. She serves on the board of the Back of the Hill Community Development Corporation and is a member of Boston Building Resources, Harvest Cooperative Market and the Dorchester Community Food Co-op. She holds a BA from UMass Boston and a Master’s Degree in Community Economic Development from Southern New Hampshire University. She shares her home with her husband and three elderly cats, and prefers to travel by bike.
Carolyn Lagomasino Edsell-Vetter (Board Chair)
Carolyn is a Latinx Cooperative Business Support Officer at the Cooperative Fund of New England since March 2019. She works with Spanish- and English-speaking applicants and borrowers to assess project feasibility and connect with culturally-appropriate technical assistance resources. Previously, she was a worker-owner for 19 years and co-CEO for 5 years of A Yard & A Half Landscaping Cooperative in Waltham, MA. In 2013, she led the conversion of A Yard & A Half Landscaping to a worker-owned co-op, allowing the primarily Salvadoran immigrant employees to purchase the company from their retiring boss. Carolyn has been involved in co-ops and consensus communities since living in a cooperative house in college. She graduated summa cum laude in Religious Studies from Cornell University and holds an MDiv from Harvard Divinity School. She was also a graduate of the 2015 Boston cohort of Inner City Capital Connections. Carolyn, her partner Jesse, and their two boys enjoy running, dancing, and growing ridiculous amounts of food in their small urban garden. The daughter of a Cuban immigrant, Carolyn is particularly interested in using cooperatives to create social and economic justice for immigrants, BIPOC, and others who have faced structural barriers to bringing businesses to scale.
Matthew Lewis (Treasurer)
Matthew is a citizen of the Passamaquoddy Tribe at Sipayik with strong experience and expertise in non-profit, community development financial institutions. He is the Wabanaki Program Director at Four Directions Development Corporation – a Native American led organization dedicated to improving the social and economic conditions of the Wabanaki tribes in Maine. Matthew has over a decade of experience working with Municipal, State, Tribal, and Federal Governments administering revolving loan funds and carrying out community development projects. He believes the cooperative model perpetuates individual and group growth and is a fantastic succession alternative. In his spare time, he enjoys crafting Excel formulas, tinkering with electronics to automate tasks around the house, and exploring the Maine woods with his wife.
Jo Lum
Jo Lum is a Certified Professional Co-active Coach, fundraiser, organizer, and white queer inheritor deeply passionate about returning wealth to communities and funding the revolution! In their career, Jo has raised millions of dollars for several organizations and movements for justice. Currently, Jo is a coach and advisor for progressive people with wealth and class privilege at their business Outstanding Returns offering one-on-one coaching as well as monthly caucus groups. Jo holds a Bachelor of Arts from Eugene Lang College: The New School for Liberal Arts and an Associate of Applied Science in American Sign Language Interpreting from Saint Paul Community and Technical College and is the founder of the non-profit Friends of Camp Little Notch, an organization that owns and operates a summer camp in the Adirondacks. For fun, Jo likes jumping on trampolines and wandering through the forests of southern Vermont with their dog Wrigley.
Heiny Maldonado
Heiny Maldonado has a background in International Business, Urban Planning, factory work, and over 12 years organizing experience. She initiated Fuerza’s Injured Workers Committee, the Popular Education program, organized numerous wage theft actions, and was responsible for member development, and leadership training. Heiny has significantly broadened Fuerza’s organizational alliances, including building a strong relationship with unions culminating in Fuerza’s membership in the RI AFL-CIO and broadened Fuerza’s organizational alliances, leading to the POWER Network partnership, and initiation of the Worker-Owned Cooperative program. She has been publicly recognized repeatedly by the RI State Legislature for her contributions to empowering the Latino immigrant community, by the City of Central Falls on International Women’s Day and was an honoree of the RI Labor History Society in 2017.
Libby O’Flaherty (Staff Rep)
Libby O’Flaherty is a Cooperative Development Specialist under CDI’s NEROC program. Prior to joining CDI, Libby worked with the Prison Birth Project and Community Action’s Family Center, providing wrap-around care to high needs families in Franklin and Hampden counties, as well as the first point of contact for evacuees to Franklin County following Hurricane Maria in 2017. Libby has developed a workshop on compensatory options for rural survivors of Intimate Partner Violence which has been presented to the Department of Health, among others. Libby is a graduate of Tufts and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts and resides in Franklin County, MA.
Julian Rowand
Julian Rowand (he/him) recently joined Maine Initiatives as their Grants for Change Program Co-Lead at Maine, but previously worked at CDI where he focused on organizing and supporting affordable housing cooperatives across New England. Julian brings a life-long commitment to collaboration, a passion for creative and embodied practice, and a resolute belief in the need for deep solidarity with those most vulnerable among us. Prior to moving to Maine, and after briefly working with housing cooperatives in Washington, D.C., Julian was an artist / organizer in the Bay Area for many years. Most prominently, Julian was Co-Director for ‘These Walls Speak’, a multi-year, participatory research, documentary project that examines the politics of place, community resistance, and the power of artist expression in the Mission District of San Francisco. Julian inhabits a body of color (Black, mixed-raced, abled-body) and resides on unceded land of the Wabanaki Confederacy in a town now called Freedom with his sweetheart, Erika.
Shana Siegel (Staff Rep)
Shana began her community-based nonprofit work as an undergraduate student in New York City. At that time, her organizing work focused on ending prison expansion, reforming mandatory minimum sentencing drug laws, and identifying and reporting violations of the rights of Workfare workers. As she became more involved in doing policy work around those issues, she entered graduate school and eventually earned her PhD in Sociology. Throughout graduate school, Shana continued to do policy-related research and community-based nonprofit work, as well as academic teaching and research. Post-graduation, Shana spent a few years teaching Sociology in New York City and Rochester, NY, before she left academia to return to nonprofit work. She has experience doing fundraising, including grant research and writing, and experience with program coordination, event organizing, project management. She also has experience working with Boards of Directors to revise bylaws, draft policies and procedures, undertake strategic planning processes, and create, fund, and manage-to-completion various projects –including a project that brought clean drinking water to one community for the first time in over 25 years, and another project that renovated/ rehabilitated the leach fields of that same community. In her free time, Shana likes to hang out with her cat (pictured) or go hiking, camping, biking or other outdoor things.
Carlos Masashi Teuscher (Clerk)
Carlos Teuscher (he/him) is an Assistant Clinical Professor of Law at Suffolk University Law School. At Suffolk, he directs the Transactional Clinic, which provides free transactional legal support to worker cooperatives, housing cooperatives, community land trusts, and other community-based small businesses and nonprofit corporations in Massachusetts. Carlos is deeply committed to economic justice and loves how his work allows him to implement solidarity economy principles and values in community enterprises that are often led by immigrants, women, and people of color.
DeJongh ‘Dee’ Wells
DeJongh ‘Dee’ Wells calls Worcester, Massachusetts home, but grew up in the beautiful US Virgin Islands (St.Thomas & St. John). His mother, Mrs. Alecia Wells, still resides on St. John. Influenced by photography and music (Calypso, Reggae and Hip Hop), Dee has always been fascinated by people and how we connect with one another through stories, specifically photography and films. Dee is the Co-Founder of Future Focus Media and Youth Training Institute, a film production company that works with clients such as UMASS Hospital, The United Way, Cooperative Fund of New England, adidas, and The Make-A-Wish Foundation, to name a few. In 2012, the Central Mass Film Festival (CMF2) was created to highlight independent filmmakers and actors in central Massachusetts and beyond. Having sponsored a 3-day film festival previously, the Central Mass Film Festival has found its sweet spot by screening short films with the filmmakers present to allow for questions and answers. The youth-produced short film,“UnCommonWealth: Permit To Build”, explores gentrification in Worcester, MA, the second largest city (population 187,000) in New England and. Dee served as the Producer and the film was produced in 6 weeks.