Who are we?
Meet the schools starting sustainable, student-run cafes here!
The CoFED Core Staff is:
Yonatan Landau, Chief Evangelist
Yoni is the co-founder of CoFED (the Cooperative Food Empowerment Directive). After launching a successful campaign to prevent the first fast food chain from opening at UC Berkeley, he helped raise over $120,000 for a cooperative alternative, the Berkeley Student Food Collective. He’s been a fellow of the New Leader’s council, spoken at conferences like the Slow Money National Gathering and been featured as Huffington Post’s “Greatest Person of the Day” He loves to cook vegetables in his Bay Area kitchen and enjoys improv theater, singing and smiling.
Danny Spitzberg, Lead Trainer
Danny Spitzberg works to promote civic entrepreneurship in society. As CoFED’s Lead Trainer, he coordinates efforts to help students bridge idealism in education with real-world experience in cooperative enterprise. Danny completed his Masters degree on entrepreneurship’s role in space exploration, but his passion for on-the-ground progress is rooted in food and agriculture. His training is in sociology and public policy, and he has developed curriculum for and taught several environmental studies courses. Danny lived and studied in Montreal, where people defeat winter by snowshoeing to cook dinner together. He co-founded Gorilla Composting, a student group at McGill University that campaigned for $250,00 to implement its organic waste recycling plan. At the University of Wisconsin–Madison, Danny helped create Slow Food UW, a group that began with weekly dinners and grew into a multi-stakeholder cooperative with 25 student interns running a café, a CSA share, and several community outreach projects – all built on the “Wisconsin Idea” of service-learning. As a Fellow at the Breakthrough Institute, Danny researched how smart public investment can build a better society, an approach that inspires most of his work. On land, Danny builds and rides bikes. On water, he rows on the Charles River.
Andrew McLeod, Team Facilitor
Andrew has been involved in the cooperative movement since 1992, most recently serving as editor of the Cooperative Business Journal. His interests include democratic processes, the intersection of cooperative economics and religion, community-based food production and distribution, international models for power-sharing, and cooperative disaster recovery techniques. His past work includes serving on the organizing committees for several conferences on the regional and national levels.
CoFED Interns and Volunteers include:
Ava Churchill – ava@cofed.org
Ava graduated from UC Davis with a B.A. in World Trade and Latin American Studies in 2009. She has traveled extensively in Latin America and has a comprehensive view of development issues in a global context. Ava spent her college years living in the Tri Co-ops at UC Davis, where she was trained in the consensus decision-making process and headed up multiple outreach projects to preserve and recruit for her community. She hopes to use the skills she aquired as an intern at the California Center for Cooperative Development to develop worker-cooperatives in her community.
Didi Xie – didi@cofed.org
Didi is a Computer Science major at Harvard College. She has played around with websites since she was twelve, while her backyard was ripe with fruits such as strawberries, apricots, plums. She worked on her first blog and MySQL database shortly afterwards and has watched blogging expand into the area of cooking. Since college, Didi has picked up PHP and Javascript in addition to C, C++, and Scheme, and after joining CoFED, Didi is developing better food habits and is learning to eat organic. On the weekdays, she often likes eating vegetarian. Didi normally enjoys cooking healthy foods at home, and seasonally her backyard sprouts into a mini vegetable garden.
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