September 25, 2025 - This episode features a tribute to the 2025 Coop Hall of Fame Unsung Hero Estelle Whitherspoon. Jessica Gordon Nembhard, Ph.D., Margaret Lund, and Alice Paris honor her legacy and tell the story of her cooperative journey. Author of Collective Courage: A History of African American Cooperative Economic Thought and Practice (2014) and 2016 inductee into the U.S. Cooperative Hall of Fame, Jessica Gordon-Nembhard, Ph.D., is a Professor at John Jay College, City University of NY. She is a political economist specializing in cooperative economics, community economic development, racial wealth inequality, Black Political Economy. She is a member of the Cooperative Economics Council of NCBA/CLUSA; the ICA Committee on Co-operative Research; an affiliate scholar with the Centre for the Study of Co-operatives, University of Saskatchewan; and past board member of Association of Cooperative Educators. Margaret Lund is an independent consultant specializing in the areas of community development, finance and shared ownership strategies. Throughout her career she has worked across cooperative sectors including credit unions, consumer co-ops, housing co-ops, worker co-ops, healthcare and sustainable food systems. Before launching her consulting practice in 2008, Margaret spent 16 years as a small business lender to cooperatives. Lund is a past member of the boards of the U.S. National Cooperative Business Association, and Health Partners, the largest consumer-governed healthcare organization in the United States. Past awards include the Howard Bowers Cooperative Service Award from the Consumer Cooperative Managers Association, and the 2014 John Logue Award for "acting as a catalyst for innovation and change" from the Association of Cooperative Educators. Alice Paris has dedicated her life to cooperative agriculture and land justice. As one of the founding staff of the Rural Training & Research Center in Epes, Alabama, she and her husband, George, along with Wendell Paris, John and Carol Zippert, and Jim Jones, helped establish the center by living on site, contributing part of her salary, and even working in construction during its early years. In 1970, she joined an FSC/LAF delegation to Israel to study vegetable production and cooperative marketing systems, an experience that shaped her decades of service with the Federation of Southern Cooperatives/Land Assistance Fund. Throughout her work with the Federation, she demonstrated both a commitment to advancing its mission and a respect for its legacy, forming a close bond with leaders such as Estelle Witherspoon. In 2001, Alice brought her expertise to Tuskegee University as a project coordinator, where she continued empowering rural communities until her retirement in 2014. For her lifelong dedication and personification of cooperative values, Estelle Witherspoon was posthumously inducted into the Cooperative Hall of Fame on October 9 in Washington, DC. For more information regarding the inductees visit Heroes.coop
