Tuesday, November 18th
Juliet Kego Ume-Onyido, MBA – Keynote
Juliet ‘Kego is Financial Advisor with one of Canada’s leading Financial Institutions; an international Speaker-Poet, and a Master-Certified Leadership Coach-Trainer-Consultant.
She is a passionate proponent of the cooperative movement and the solidarity economy using an ecosystem approach, and committed to fostering financial inclusion, dignity and shared prosperity, by bridging the gap between formal and informal cooperative institutions.
She is the Co-founder of Whole Woman Network Social Enterprise, and Whole Women Network Co-operative (WWN Co-op); a worker co-operative focused on culturally informed financial literacy, peer-to-peer funding and cooperative education for historically underrepresented Women and Youth, using an iterated digital model of ROSCA – Rotating Saving and Credit Association (SUSU) and community-based ‘village banking’ models.
Juliet is one of the ten founding members of Black Women Professional Co-operative Inc.; a multi-stakeholder consulting co-operative offering strategic planning, ESG advisory and business analysis training services, while providing linkages for Black Women co-operators from the global South and North to share resources towards socio-economic agency.
As a Feminist and Poet, her poems amplify the lived experiences of women and girls, with proceeds from all global poetry recitals and speaking engagements supporting the education and empowerment of vulnerable demographics in under-served communities.
Her professional and educational experience spanning several companies (Honeywell Group, American Express, Emex Systems, MIS Systems, Edward Jones Investments, & Sun Life Financial), and multi-disciplinary fields: Engineering, International Business, Gender Studies, Wealth Management and Financial Advisory. She has an MBA from the Manchester Business School, UK, and a Credit Union Development Educator designation (CUDE), from the International Centre for Co-operative Management at St. Mary’s University, Canada. She is a coach-strategist for organizations and leaders in civic and corporate sectors.
A recipient of several awards including the 2023 Co-operative Spirit Award by the Ontario Co-operative Association (OCA), for outstanding contribution to Awareness, Diversity & Equity building in the Co-operative sector, and CWCF’s 2024 Mark Goldblatt Merit Award.
She serves on the board of organizations in Canada, USA, Nigeria, such as: PARO Women’s Enterprise Centre, Canadian Association for the Studies in Cooperation (CASC), Global Rights, and BOATS Foundation (Life Bank). She is the Board Equity Advisor to Canadian Worker Co-op Federation (CWCF); a member of the Black Food Sovereignty Advisory Circle under the City of Toronto Confronting Anti Black Racism unit (CABR); and a founding member of the Banker Ladies Council of Canada and the ROSCA Network.
Camille Drummond
Camille Dumond (she/they) MEd Counselling Psychology, MA Conflict Facilitation, MA Adult Education is a settler of Indo-Caribbean and French-Irish descent living on unceded territories of the xwməθkwəy̓ əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish) and səlil̓ilw̓ətaʔɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) peoples. Her practice is as a somatic therapist, conflict and group facilitator. With over 20 years experience facilitating change processes, she brings depth psychology, social movement analysis, and embodied spirituality to organizational change. This allows her to support a sense of center and even playfulness in complex, emergent situations. Camille co-founded the Refugee Livelihood Lab with Nada Elmasry to amplify the impact and transformational influence of racialized leaders with lived experience of forced displacement and migration. She is a co-director of Waterline Coop and principal at Dignity Facilitation.
Zsuzsi Fodor
Sunflower Facilitation & Counselling Co-op
Zsuzsi works as a facilitator on Snuneymuxw territory. She holds Jewish and French ancestry, rooted in liberatory responsibility as a settler to these lands. Zsuzsi’s background is as a radical planner who’s worked mostly in food justice. She’s jumped around through many institutions and sure feels like she’s found a home in the workers co-op world with Sunflower.
Keira McPhee
Sunflower Facilitation & Counselling Co-op
Keira’s work as a counsellor and facilitator began 30 years ago in a feminist organization engaged in ‘unlearning oppression.’ Guided in practice by elders, teachers, mentors and healers, guiding is a metaphor Keira often uses to describe how she shows up as a therapist and as a facilitator. Their practice is grounded in experiencing and growing a sense of ourselves as an integral part of community and nature. Keira loves Sunflower’s focus on healing ourselves in relation to the world and times we live in.
Michelle Tsutsumi
Sunflower Facilitation & Counselling Co-op
Michelle is learning to be in better relationship with self, as well as with community, land and water by exploring her responsibilities as a settler with Scandinavian, European, and Japanese ancestry. This personal process is supported through her work as a facilitator and small-scale organic farmer on Secwepemc territory. Her facilitation practice weaves together processes from her past work life providing body-centred trauma therapy and collectively tending to safer spaces that can hold the tension of curiosity and care.
Wednesday, November 19th
Mathew Grogono
Rethink, Reduce, Reuse, Recycle: at the CWCF 2025 conference, discover how Old Town Glassworks, with 32 years in business and 20 years as a workers’ cooperative, champions democracy, diversity, and justice. In just 10 minutes, Matthew Grogono will show how community-driven action can build a better world by turning waste into opportunity.
Hope Docking
Cozy Comet Games Workers Cooperative
Hope Docking is a game producer and QA lead based in Edmonton, co-founder of Cozy Comet Games Workers Cooperative. With credits on Dragon Age: The Veilguard and Mass Effect: Legendary Edition, she specializes in cross-team collaboration, testing strategy, and inclusive development. Hope was also an organizing member of one of Canada’s first video game worker unions (under UFCW 401), where she contributed to communications and outreach.
Now that she’s escaped AAA game development she’s focused on ways we can build a better, more sustainable games industry together.
Malcolm McClintock
Malcolm McClintock is a software developer and advocate for the solidarity economy, located in Montreal, QC. Malcolm is a founding member of Bar Milton-Parc Coopérative de Solidarité and current Operations Coordinator for SEIZE (Solidarity Economy Incubation for Zero Emissions. They aim to help demystify the techno-hellscape that we currently inhabit, and put tools in the hands of actors to better democratize our efforts towards stronger, community powered ecosystems.
Hazel Corcoran
Canadian Worker Co-op Federation
Based primarily in Calgary, Hazel Corcoran has served as CWCF’s Executive Director since 1995. She first became interested in the idea of employee ownership while completing a Master’s in Linguistics at Berkeley. She later went on to study law, and discovered the worker co-op model while completing a research paper on various models of workplace democracy. Coincidentally, CWCF was in the process of forming nearby, and Hazel attended the founding AGM and ultimately helped the Federation draft its bylaws. Worker co-ops appeal to Hazel as a way to empower workers and help them flourish in the workplace and learn new skills.
Dan Brunette
Co-operatives and Mutuals Canada (CMC)
Daniel is an experienced and bilingual professional dedicated to building a better world. He has more than 20 years of stakeholder relations and philanthropic management experience with non-profit organizations and charities, as both an employee and consummate volunteer. Daniel is currently the Senior Director, Co-operation and Engagement with Co-operatives and Mutuals Canada (CMC), the national apex organization, where he has worked since 2019.
Joseph Luri
Multicultural Health Brokers Cooperative
Joseph Luri Kichere, commonly known as Joseph Luri, is a respected natural community leader. He is one of the original members who founded the Africa Centre and made Edmonton his home in 1998. Joseph is a true community-minded individual with a passion for community development. He is a founding member of the Sudanese Christian Fellowship and the South Sudanese Community Association in Edmonton.
Joseph Luri enjoys soccer, watching hockey, and football. He has supported students while working in schools as a settlement practitioner between 2007 and 2014. With a background in business, Joseph holds a Bachelor of Commerce Degree and a Diploma in Social Work. He has been honoured with numerous awards, including the Provincial Crime Prevention Award twice and the Men of Honour Award.
Norma Mora
Multicultural Health Brokers Cooperative
Norma Mora has been working with Multicultural Health Brokers for almost five years, mostly supporting families involved with Children Services. Her first language is Spanish and many of her clients are women, who are very isolated and have difficulties accessing various services due to language barrier and domestic violence. She came to Canada in 1999 with her husband and soon after became a mother of two children. She lived in Vancouver for thirteen years and moved to Edmonton in 2012.
Norma has a dental medicine degree from her home country, Colombia, and completed a graduate diploma program in Global Health from Simon Fraser University in Vancouver. In the past, she worked with the non- profit sector supporting families with children 0- 6 years old, and with the Edmonton Public school board as Educational Assistant. She has volunteered with different community and health organizations and is very passionate about working with vulnerable individuals and families to advocate for their rights, help them understand the systems and access the services they require to have a better life in Canada.
Tigist Dafla
Multicultural Health Brokers Cooperative
Tigist hails from northeast Africa’s tiny Eritrea, but she grew up in now- nemy Ethiopia, and married an Ethiopian. Tigist is also one of the first cultural brokers when the Coop started in 1998 serving the Ethiopian and Eritrean communities. She speaks multiple languages – Amharic, Tigrinya, Oromo among others. She also served on the MCHB Board formany years.
Tigist has worked as a Settlement Counselor and Outreach Worker for the past 20 years. In these roles, she has developed many useful programs for immigrants, youth, and refugee women. She has promoted awareness of gender-specific issues such as female genital mutilation in the larger African community. Tigist has worked closely with core groups of the Canadian Council of Refugees and represented it at the World Conference Against Racism in 2001. She has helped launch the Injera project to bring EPS and refugee communities together to end violence. She has also educated 30 cultural brokers to prevent family violence in ethnocultural communities.
Thursday, November 20th
Tara Williams
With the life motto of “The world hasn’t been given us to contemplate but to transform” (Arizmendiarrieta), Tara is inspired not only by the potential of Co-operatives as a whole but by the strength of the Worker Co-operative movement to lead this change towards a transformed future.
Tara (she/her) is a bi-racial woman of Cantonese American-born Chinese and White Canadian-born English, Welsh and Dutch descent. She grew up and now lives on the lands of the Coast Salish Peoples, the Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam) səl̓ílwətaʔɬ /Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations and has immigrant roots to the lands of the Muwekma Ohlone peoples. She acknowledges her privilege of being a cisgender settler, masters educated, neurotypical, partial woman of colour and how this impacts her lived experience.
As a visionary leader in the Co-operative landscape, Tara leverages her expertise to shape strategic visions and curate collaborative experiences. A founding Member of GIA Consulting Co-operative, she supports Co-ops and Impact-based businesses to build comprehensive and actionable solutions in Member Engagement, Marketing, Human Resources, business and strategic planning and incorporation, setting the stage for Co-operative success. With a profound understanding of the Co-operative model’s potential, Tara champions its power to dismantle systemic barriers and foster inclusive growth.
Tara has worked at Vancity Credit Union for over 16 years in a variety of roles from Human Resources, Marketing, Member Engagement, Project Management, Product Management, Payments, Systems, Policies and Processes, Technology, and Operations. She is passionate about building community and, where asked, being a strong ally, using her voice and power to amplify those of others.
Tara also acts as the lead of Vancity’s Women’s Equity Employee Resource Group and previously led the Women’s Networking organization Bringing Women Together. Through these groups, Tara has actively challenged the limitations of white feminism, pushing for a truly intersectional understanding of women’s struggles.
Tara has served on several Co-operative Boards including as Co-Chair and HR Lead for Terminal City Glass Co-operative – the first Glass Blowing Not-for-Profit Producer Co-op in Canada, the Co-operative Management Education Alumni and Student Co-operative where she held several roles including President and the Co-operative Management Education Co-operative.
Emily McQuarrie
Sustainability Solutions Group
Emily (she/her) contributes to keeping the heart of SSG pumping. She develops tools that help our co-op evaluate how we are doing and where we are going, then analyzes the results to offer recommendations and insights for problem solving. Emily is passionate about collective ownership and loves that the work that she does supports co-op members in making informed decisions. Prior to her work with SSG, Emily was an early organizer of the grassroots artist platform and collective, Weird Canada. She helped establish the Ottawa-based arts presentation collective Debaser and was one of its first board members. When she’s not staring at spreadsheets, Emily enjoys exploring the woods, making music, gardening, or volunteering at her local library.
Susanna Collins
Susanna is a Founder and Principal Consultant at GIA Consulting Co-operative, a firm focused on strengthening co-operatives through strategic management, marketing, and member engagement. With over 20 years of experience, Susanna helps co-operatives develop strategic plans, engage members, and create marketing strategies that align with cooperative values. Since founding GIA in 2021, she has supported numerous co-operatives in achieving long-term sustainability and growth.
Kisa Hamilton
Kisa Hamilton, Co-founder / Worker Member, Transform Practice – is a facilitator and evaluator who accompanies grassroots groups and organizations on their transformational journey. She focuses on equity, diversity, and inclusion through an intersectional lens and brings a trauma informed healing centered approach to her work. Kisa started organizing community safety initiatives in 2005 when communities across Toronto started to face a new and emerging crisis, gun violence. She’s held diverse leadership roles (project management, co-chair, organizer, researcher etc) supporting diverse communities’ initiatives within Toronto and the GTA via community networks, Toronto Community Housing, the City of Toronto, community health centers, local schools, elected officials, and many other community-based service partners. Kisa knows the power a voice holds and continually works to encourage others to step up and be heard to support civic actions that impact us all!
Chris Gallaway
Chris is the financial strategist at CoActive, specializing in guiding businesses through the financial complexities of employee ownership transitions. With over a decade of experience in Canada’s financial cooperative sector, Chris brings a unique blend of financial acumen and passion for the cooperative movement.
Chris is dedicated to crafting sustainable financial pathways that empower businesses to thrive under employee ownership, ensuring a smooth and successful transition for both owners and employees.
Marty Frost
A champion for the co-op model, Marty has served as a worker, a manager, a director and an adviser in and to organizations that populate all levels of the cooperative ecosystem. For the past 45 years, Marty has devoted his energies to the development and promotion of cooperatives and non-profit enterprises. During that time he has had the privilege of working with some 240 groups of people to develop their ideas for strong community-based businesses, with a high launch/operation
