Who We Are

Fred has been a politically engaged sociologist for more than forty years. His books include: The Origins of International Economic Disorder, Postindustrial Possibilities, and with Margaret Somers, The Power of Market Fundamentalism. He is a research professor of sociology at U.C. Davis. To learn more about Fred, click here.

Amy has over 15 years of experience supporting nonprofits in program management and administration. Most recently she was with Harvard Business School Community Partners of Northern California, where she managed their executive education scholarships. Prior to this she supervised a stipend program at the Education Fund, a nonprofit designed to support health care workers who were seeking higher education. Amy earned her B.A. in Psychology at the University of Michigan and her M.S. in Counseling at San Francisco State University.

Mridula has retired after nearly ten years of work at CES. She is Professor Emeritus at the Department of Sociology, California State University, Sacramento.

Jasmine is a researcher and practitioner in philanthropy with a background in American politics. As a Program Associate at the Hyams Foundation she engaged in grantmaking, communications and research on youth organizing in Boston. She is a former Justice fellow with the Field Foundation of Illinois where she conducted grantmaking in the Justice Portfolio.

She is a former fellow of the Center for Engaged Scholarship and earned a PhD in Political Science from the University of Chicago in 2020. Her research examined Black political attitudes towards police and local government officials in the City of Chicago following events of highly publicized police misconduct. Jasmine has held a number of academic fellowships including the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship and the UChicago Urban Doctoral Fellowship.

Steve Dubb has been written about and participated in cooperative education and development for the past three decades. Steve is currently senior editor at Nonprofit Quarterly (NPQ), where he directs NPQ’s economic justice program. Steve is the lead author of Building Wealth: The Asset-Based Approach to Solving Social and Economic Problems (Aspen 2005), coauthor (with Rita Hodges) of The Road Half Traveled: University Engagement at a Crossroads (MSU Press, 2012, and editor of Conversations on Community Wealth Building (Democracy Collaborative 2016).

Deborah Gould is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her first book, Moving Politics: Emotion and ACT UP’s Fight Against AIDS (University of Chicago Press 2009), eplores the affective stimuli and blockages to political activism while documenting a disappearing queer history, all with an eye toward opening imaginative possibilities for the present. Involved in ACT UP/Chicago for many years, and later in Queer to the Left, she also was a founding member of the research/art/activist collaborative group, Feel Tank Chicago, most famous for its International Parades of the Politically Depressed. For more information, click here.

Minsun Ji (Ph.D.) is a labor-community organizer, activist scholar, and popular educator. Currently, Minsun is the Executive Director of the Rocky Mountain Employee Ownership Center (RMEOC), which promotes employee ownership through coop conversion, coop incubation, research, and policy.

Minsun was the graduate program director of the Center for New Directions in Politics and Public Policy in the Political Science Department at the University of Colorado Denver where she created graduate program tracks in the social economy and community/labor organizing. Minsun organized immigrant janitors, immigrant day laborers and domestic workers and she was the founder and executive director of Denver’s first worker center, El Centro Humanitario para los Trabajadores (Humanitarian Center for Workers).

Carole has worked for decades to help protect women’s reproductive health from continuing right-wing attacks. Her influential books include Doctors of Conscience and Dispatches from the Abortion Wars. She is currently affiliated with the Bixby Center in the Department of Obstetrics, Gynecology, and Reproductive Sciences, UCSF.

Karl is the George J. and Kathleen Waters Matthews Distinguished University Professor of Law at Northeastern University. His research has centered on labor law and constitutional law with a special focus on South Africa. He received an honorary doctorate from the University of Pretoria in recognition of his scholarship on transformative constitutionalism, which, according to the University’s citation, “has precipitated in South Africa no less than a paradigm shift in post-apartheid legal thinking.”

Aldon Morris is the Leon Forrest Professor of Sociology and African American Studies at Northwestern University. He is a past President of the American Sociological Association. His books include The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement and The Scholar Denied: W.E.B. DuBois and the Birth of Modern Sociology. In that latter book, Morris challenges the conventional account that credits Robert Park and his colleagues at the University of Chicago for developing modern sociology. He argues instead that the pioneering work had been done years earlier at Atlanta University by DuBois and his collaborators.

Francisco Pérez is an activist, educator and researcher. He is currently an Assistant Professor of Economics at the University of Utah and a Senior Economist at the Center for Economic Democracy. Previously, he served as Director of the Center for Popular Economics, a nonprofit collective of political economists whose programs and publications demystify the economy and put useful economic tools in the hands of people fighting for social and economic justice. Francisco has worked on social and economic development projects in Brazil, the Dominican Republic, Guinea, Senegal, Sierra Leone, the US and Venezuela. He worked for the Museum for African Art in NYC and was a member of a collective of artists fighting to free political prisoners called the “Scientific Soul Sessions.” He was also a Margaret Burroughs Fellow at the Social Justice Initiative at the University of Illinois-Chicago. He has a PhD in economics from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, an MPA from the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs and an AB from Harvard University.

Margaret is a Professor of Sociology at the University of Michigan. Her books include Genealogies of Citizenship and The Power of Market Fundamentalism (with Fred Block). Her work has been broadly influential in cultural sociology, economic sociology, citizenship studies, and social movement research.

Patricia Zavella is Professor Emerita of Latin American and Latino Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her books include The Movement for Reproductive Justice: Empowering Women of Color through Social Activism. She serves on several nonprofit boards including California Latinas for Reproductive Justice and Community Agroecology Network. Patricia retired from the board for medical reasons.