“Economic democracy” refers to the ability of citizens to exercise the power to make major economic decisions affecting society.1 I build economic democracy by growing cooperative and public ownership of financial services, like banks and payment networks. Below are a few key experiences I bring to projects that I work on. As an entrepreneur:
- I founded a startup to help locally owned small businesses attract new customers. While ultimately unsuccessful, I learned the constraints that small businesses operate under, how to raise money from investors, and how to build, deploy, iterate and scale technological solutions.
After my stint as an entrepreneur, I received a Fulbright grant to research tech used in the Syrian refugee crisis in Jordan. This led me into a career in international aid:
- I helped governments and fintech companies design digital financial services that meet the needs of small businesses and marginalized groups like migrants. I was invited onto Jordan’s Digital Financial Services Council to advise on the development of inclusive financial services.
- I then joined GiveDirectly, where I built an incredible operations team that was able to deliver $5m+ safely to Yemen’s poorest households during an active civil war. The former Governor of Aden praised our work as what international aid is supposed to look like.
After receiving a prestigious fellowship to study at LSE, I bring my experience in operations, entrepreneurship and activism to work on projects that democratize ownership of financial services, like public and cooperative ownership of banks and payment networks.
- As an activist and organizer, I’m helping lead a campaign to start a state-owned bank in California modeled on the Bank of North Dakota. I focus on mobilizing powerful allies at the highest levels of state government, and influential donors.
Check out my writing on how to build a new economy where ownership is broadly shared. I also post regularly on LinkedIn.
| Title | Excerpt | Published |
|---|---|---|
| Why the National Wealth Fund Should Nationalize Thames Water | “As private capital continues to expect higher and higher returns, de-risking often becomes a race to the bottom, with public money subsidizing the increasing gap between a public project’s likely return and the return needed to entice private capital to invest…” | LSE Blog |
| A Plurality of Values: The Institutional Logics Shaping Economic Policy in the Shetland Islands | “Changing institutional logics is a powerful way to understand how economic change happens. Yet analytical tools for measuring institutional logics remain relatively limited compared to analysis of other mechanisms for creating economic change, such as electoral politics or mass mobilization.” | LSE Dissertation |
| “Financial inclusion” isn’t helping end poverty. Here’s how to fix it. | “Development organizations are even facilitating customer acquisition for for-profit financial-service providers that do not lead to poverty alleviation, but instead lead poor people into indebtedness and deeper poverty.” | LinkedIn article |
| Yemeni American New Yorkers Teach us How to Invest in our Communities | “They [Yemeni Americans in NYC] cannot put [their money] in the stock market or interest bearing account. So what do they do? They invest in talented entrepreneurs in their communities to start or grow profitable businesses.” | LinkedIn article |
- Thompson, J.P. and Curella, C. (2021) ‘Democratizing the knowledge economy: will labor accept the challenge?‘, New Labor Forum, 27 August ↩︎
