JESSICA GORDON NEMBHARD is currently a visiting scholar in the Economics Department’s Center on... more

JESSICA GORDON NEMBHARD is currently a visiting scholar in the Economics Department’s Center on Race and Wealth at Howard University, and Master Teacher at the Center’s Summer Institute 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, and is a research affiliate for that Centre’s “Linking, Leverage, Learning: Social Enterprises, Knowledgeable Economies and Sustainable Communities” project. Starting September 2009 she will join the faculty of John Jay College of the City University of New York (CUNY) as Associate Professor of Community Justice and Social Economic Development. She is a political economist specializing in economic development policy, Black political economy, and popular economic literacy. Her research focuses on community- and asset- based economic development and democratic community economics, cooperative economics and worker ownership, alternative urban economic and educational development strategies, and racial wealth inequality and wealth accumulation in communities of color. She 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, and Organizing Neighborhood Equity (ONE) DC. She has been a member of the Black Enterprise Board of Economists since October 1999. She has published widely and 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). less