Our Team

CO-DIRECTOR

Angela DeFelice (she/her) grew up in a rural, working class community in Western NY, and for 14 years has lived in and around Poughkeepsie (Lenape/Mohican territory). Community based work both in Ithaca, NY and Ocotal, Nicaragua led Angela to a decade-long career in agriculture. Her work with cooperatives started as a co-founder and worker-owner of Rock Steady Farm, a queer-owned cooperative farm rooted in social justice and food access in Millerton, New York. Since 2018, she has worked toward cooperative and community ownership in the region, and brings over 10 years of business management and consulting experience to her role as Managing Director & Senior Project Steward. Angela is motivated by the community wealth and power building potential of cooperatives, and is excited about moving the control of resources back into the hands of the community, where it belongs. Angela is a Good Work Institute Fellow and serves on the founding board of the Dutchess County-Poughkeepsie Land Bank.

CO-DIRECTOR

DeeArah is an artist, writer, mama, mover, and facilitator of adventurous learning and collaborative greatness. Born, raised, and wrapped in Black American Southern ways, her decades of community-based practice in the Northeast are steeped in reverence for relationships and everyday magic. 

DeeArah’s workflow has been informed by deep curiosity, experimentation, and listening in diverse fields, such as: African Diasporic dance and performance; commons and cooperatives; entrepreneurship, agriculture; cultural organizing; radical archive; and, popular education. Highlights include: co-stewardship of a cultural commons in Bedford Stuyvesant and co-leadership at JACK and Brooklyn Children's Museum. DeeArah has collaborated with various NYC and Hudson Valley-based people-powered projects, including: The Laundromat Project, Urban Bush Women, Naturally-Occurring Cultural Districts of New York, Wildseed Community Farm and Healing Village, and Webatuck Valley Farm Collaborative. DeeArah is also a former Community Fellow of the Mellon Initiative for Inclusive Faculty Excellence at The New School. 

DeeArah resides on Mohican-Munsee Lenape land [Poughkeepsie, NY], where she nurtures her connection to people, place, and transformative work in service to building the just communities of our dreams.

ADVISOR

Hélène Lesterlin’s work focuses on regenerative finance, community-building, and helping social-impact entrepreneurs and activists find pathways to Just Transition-aligned resources for their work. She is a start-up coach and board member at Start.coop, an accelerator for scalable cooperatives, run by Cooperatives for a Better World; co-founder of CO, a co-working co-op; and often volunteers or consults to support the creation of new initiatives. At Idealab NY, in partnership with Idealab Studio (Pasadena), she helped launch a startup accelerator, an incubator specialized in equity crowdfunding, a VC fund, and provided entrepreneur coaching. To this work, she brings creativity and grit from a 15-year career as a producer, curator, and interdisciplinary artist in international contemporary art and performance. She currently serves as Worker Trustee/Co-ED at the Good Work Institute, stewarding a community-design process to launch a democratically-managed community fund in Kingston, NY. LinkedIn.

ADVISOR

Nina Stender is the Director of the Rapid Response Cooperative Development Project at the Democracy at Work Institute. Her work is centered around creating access to entrepreneurship and stable, career-building work for immigrants and other excluded workers. Her passion for worker ownership was shaped by her work at the Brownsville Community Justice Center in Brooklyn, where she learned about worker co-ops as a tool for economic self-determination. Nina was raised in Hong Kong and is now based in the Hudson Valley in New York. She previously served on the board of the Kingston Food Co-op and is a former Fellow at the Coro New York Leadership Center and the CUNY School for Civic and Global Leadership. Nina holds a BA in Social Studies and Government from Wesleyan University and completed a Graduate Certificate in Workplace Democracy and Community Ownership at the CUNY School of Labor and Urban Studies.