June 18, 2024 | By: Heather Holland

In honor of CDI’s 30th anniversary, we tracked down our founders and founding board members to learn more about our history and understand the big dreams they had when they started our organization back in 1994. Many of them had not been in touch with CDI for decades and were happily surprised to receive our phone call.

“Do you really have 30 people working at CDI?” asked Anders Ferguson. It was the first time I had spoken with Mr. Ferguson, who cofounded CDI with the founding team and served as CDI’s first executive director until 2000. He was amazed by how much we had grown and touched by our continued dedication to developing co-ops and creating new opportunities across many business sectors.

“It takes tremendous resources and a laser focus on where you can actually make a difference,” said Mr. Ferguson. “It is one thing to be visionary. It is another thing to come out of it in a durable fashion. It is being intensely strategic where difference can be made. We had a big vision. We made a difference. It is inspiring to know that CDI is still thriving.”

The idea to create CDI started with our founders’ work participating in a national movement to secure funding for new cooperative development centers across the country.

CDI cofounder Brian Henehan, who was researching cooperatives at Cornell University, joined the National Rural Cooperative Task Force, which was lobbying Congress to create a fund for cooperative development in rural communities. Mr. Ferguson, who had years of experience working with many different types of cooperatives, joined Mr. Henehan on the task force.

At the time, there was a high demand for starting cooperatives in areas outside of agriculture, but funding was needed, said Judy Ziewacz, who was executive director of the National Rural Cooperative Task Force at the time, during a recent conversation. “The existing technical assistance for rural cooperative development resided in the county extension network and what was left of this expertise focused on agriculture,” she said.

In 1990, the task force, which was made up of about 80 organizations and representatives from across the country including Mr. Henehan and Mr. Ferguson, successfully lobbied to secure a federal funding program, today called the Rural Cooperative Development Grant (RCDG).

By that point, Mr. Ferguson and Mr. Henehan started thinking more seriously about launching a cooperative development center dedicated to the Northeast.

The field of cooperative development was largely vacant at the time, reflected Lynn Benander during a recent phone call. Ms. Benander joined CDI leadership in 1995 and served as CDI’s executive director after Mr. Ferguson.

They weren’t teaching co-op law in law schools or how to run a co-op in business school, she said. Even though cooperatives existed all around the country, their development was really piece-meal. That’s why cooperative development centers were so important and in high demand, Ms. Benander said.

“There was this collaborative effort going around the country with employee ownership and community economic development. It had legs and there were qualified and serious people and institutions that could bring resources to bear,” Mr. Ferguson said.

Starting around 1992, Mr. Ferguson and Mr. Henehan began bringing together cooperative leaders from different sectors, urban and rural, in the Northeast — including agriculture, housing, rural electrics, and credit unions — to identify opportunities for joint activities and business development.

(Mr. Henehan passed away on Feb. 16, 2023, before we could interview him for this article.)

Two years later, in the summer of 1994, CDI received its federal tax-exempt 501(c)3 status. CDI received its first RCDG award for the Federal fiscal year 1997-1998 and Mr. Ferguson became CDI’s first executive director.

“That was the foundational investment,” said Mr. Ferguson. “It wasn’t a fortune, but it was enough to work from.”

Mr. Ferguson and Mr. Henehan recruited CDI’s founding board from different industries and sectors and were able to bring their unique experiences to CDI.

From the agricultural sector, they brought on Roger Allbee, who was working at Springfield Farm Credit Banks when he joined CDI’s board. He later became Secretary of Agriculture for the state of Vermont.

Mr. Allbee, now retired, grew up on a hilltop dairy farm in Vermont and understood the economic needs of farmers. Even today, during a recent phone call, Mr. Allbee spoke passionately against the continued consolidation of our food system and described the need for legislative advocacy to protect today’s farmers who have become “price takers, not makers.”

“There was a recognition that we had at the time,” Mr. Albee said. “There was a great need to further the local food movement in New England, to empower people away from the non-cooperative side of business, so people could have a stake in things.”

On the credit union side, Mr. Ferguson brought in Joseph Bergeron, who worked for the Association of Vermont Credit Unions. Mr. Bergeron is now president of the association, where he has worked for the past 40 years.

At the time, and even still today, legislators and federal regulators often think of credit unions as banks and not cooperatives, said Mr. Bergeron. His challenge is to advocate and market credit unions as cooperatives that “are by the people and for the people, instead of just another cold bank.” Credit unions weren’t talking to other cooperatives back then. They were more internally focused, and CDI hoped to “bring different co-op interests together and do some cross pollination,” Mr. Bergeron said.

Other board members recruited by Mr. Henehan and Mr. Ferguson included Thomas Davenport of the National Grape Growers Association (Welch), Cindy Foley of National Cooperative Bank, Robert Loeb of Telecommunications Cooperative Network, James Megson of ICA Group, Nancy Wasserman of the Vermont Community Loan Fund, and Robert Wellington of Agri-Mark Cooperative.

We tried to reach each of them for this story (Linkedin messages, emails, letters, and phone calls), but we did not hear back from them in time.

Some of CDI’s most notable work during its early years includes helping to form the CooperationWorks! Network and the US Federation of Cooperatives. CDI also made partnerships in Canada, including an educational partnership with St. Mary’s University in Nova Scotia.

One CDI initiative that made a national impact was the “Marketing Our Cooperative Advantage” report, published in 2005. Mr. Ferguson and Ms. Benander worked with a leading marketer on research that proved that marketing a business as a cooperative can improve member engagement and their bottom line.

“It was a novel idea at the time that you could market yourself as a cooperative business,” said Ms. Benander. “Our research showed that consumers wanted to do business with cooperatives. It talked about asking customers what they want, then delivering it and reporting the outcomes.”

“After the report came out, people kept coming back to us year after year, bringing their marketing programs and the results on their cooperatives, across industry sectors. Themes were resonating across North America. There was a commonality.”

Near the end of Mr. Ferguson’s tenure, CDI embarked on a major energy project, specifically, restructuring rural communities and electric industries.

The group working on the project included CDI leadership, a representative of the Vermont Public Service Commission and leaders from electric cooperatives in Vermont, New Hampshire, and North Carolina. The project successfully brought many stakeholders together, but in the end, the costs were an obstacle.

“We got support from other parts of the country and lots of people were involved. A lot of money was raised for the work, but we just did not raise enough. We had $1 million, but we needed $20-50 million,” Mr. Ferguson said.

While these early efforts lasted a short while, CDI used the lessons learned from that project to support the development of several other energy cooperatives including Co-op Power, a consumer-owned energy co-op serving the Northeast, said Ms. Benander, who has served as the President and CEO of Co-op Power for the last 20 years.

Today, CDI still relies very much on RCDG awards for funding and must apply for the funding every year. CDI has received RCDG awards every year since it received that first award in 1997, except for two years in 2005 and 2008. Those unfunded years were detrimental to CDI’s capacity. In late 2008, CDI’s board faced a stark choice about whether to close the organization entirely or allow it to continue with a much leaner staff.

“The USDA had to approve the grants each year for the co-op development centers,” said Ms. Benander. “And every year, one or two centers didn’t get funding and lost the capacity that they had started. It’s very hard to maintain capacity. That was stressful.”

Despite these pressures, CDI has prospered. CDI turns 30 years old on August 26, 2024. Today, our non-profit employs 31 people, has preserved more than 5,000 affordable homes in New England, created more than 800 cooperative jobs, transitioned 28 businesses into employee-owned companies, and secured millions in funding for water and wastewater infrastructure projects in rural communities. The impact we made is a testament to the passion, hard work, and conviction of our team, of everyone who has ever worked for or supported us, and our founders whose big vision fuels our ambition to create a more democratic and equitable place to live and work.

Support our mission to create economic opportunities for communities in the Northeast by donating today.

“Cooperatives, Credit Unions and Employee-owned companies play an important role in our regional and national economy,” said Mr. Ferguson. “They connect and empower people and build communities. The Cooperative Development Institute has played and still plays a meaningful role.”

Help us reach our $30,000 goal!

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