Labor Coop Connections
Partners
Labor Coop Connections works with multiple community partners who share the values of worker empowerment and cooperative economics.
Here are just some of our partners
Minsun Ji, Ph.D.
Founder and Principal
Labor Coop Connections
Minsun Ji (Ph.D.) is a labor-community organizer, activist scholar and popular educator, inspired by Paulo Friere.
Minsun served as Director of the Center for New Directions in Politics and Public Policy program in the political science department at the University of Colorado Denver that focused on developing program tracks in local government, labor-community organizing and social economy innovation programs. By building robust community-university partnerships, Minsun focused on developing the leadership of social and labor activist students.
Minsun also comes with a diverse labor organizing background. Minsun organized immigrant janitors with SEIU, and immigrant day laborers in Denver. Minsun was the founder and the Executive Director of Denver’s first immigrant day laborer center, El Centro Humanitario para los Trabajadores (Humanitarian Center for Workers), where she focused on leadership development, diverse educational programs, and policy advocacy to empower workers. Minsun helped create Denver’s first immigrant worker cooperative (Green Clean) with domestic workers in 2009.
Minsun has published numerous academic and popular press articles regarding worker cooperatives, social/labor movements, community economic development and community organizing strategies. Minsun provided a multi-week Colorado Worker Cooperative Academy workshop series (in Spanish) to educate immigrants with step-by-step guidelines on forming a worker cooperative. She published Immigrant Worker Owned Cooperatives: A User’s Manual in 2012, which has been widely used by immigrant organizations nationwide. She has served on the Colorado Governor’s Commissioner on Employee Ownership, is a research fellow at the Institute for Cooperative Digital Economy at the New School of Social Science, and a J. Robert Beyster Employee Ownership Fellow with Rutgers University, School of Management and Labor Relations.
Through diverse experiences, Minsun is committed to providing diverse popular education materials and experiences for workers and diverse groups working in grass-roots solidarity with workers.
Tony Robinson, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of Political Science
University of Colorado Denver
Dr. Robinson received his Ph.D. from the UC Berkeley, based on participant-observation field work in anti-gentrification campaigns in San Francisco’s low income Tenderloin neighborhood. At CU Denver, Dr. Robinson specializes in Urban Politics, with a focus on issues of immigration and homelessness, community development strategies, and grass-roots social activism.
Dr. Robinson has directed the Westside Outreach Center for Community Organizing in Denver’s La Alma & Cole neighborhoods, was Board President of Denver’s El Centro Humanitario (an immigrant rights center), and has served as advisor and Board member to community organizations such as Padres/Jovenos Unidos, Jobs With Justice, and the Front Range Economic Strategy Center. He also leads study abroad trips to Berlin, Germany and Seoul, South Korea, to examine global urban development challenges and solutions.
Dr. Robinson has a range of community-engaged research publications, including research on:
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Workplace exploitation facing immigrant domestic workers
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Workplace safety training programs for day laborers
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The criminalization of homelessness in the Denver area
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Denver’s urban development subsidies:who benefits and who loses?
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A political-economy atlas of landscapes of power, race, and class in the Denver area
