EARTH EQUITY
EARTH EQUITY 

Senior Advisory & Governing Board

Dr. Jessica Gordon Nembhard (she/her)

 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 Professor of Community Justice and Social Economic Development, in the Department of Africana Studies, John Jay College, City University of NY. Dr. Gordon-Nembhard is an internationally recognized and widely published political economist specializing in cooperative economics, community economic development and community-based asset building, racial wealth inequality, solidarity economics, Black Political Economy, and community-based approaches to justice. Additionally, she is a member of the Cooperative Economics Council of NCBA/CLUSA and a Faculty Fellow and Mentor with the Institute for the Study of Employee Ownership and Profit Sharing at Rutgers University School of Management and Labor Relations.

Most recently, recipient of the Association for Social Economics’ 2022 Thomas F. Divine Award for lifetime contributions to social economics; the Association of Co-operative Educators 2021 award for Outstanding Contribution to Co-operative Education and Training (award was named for her in 2022); and the 2017 CASC Merit Award for exemplary contributions to the field of co-operative studies (from the Canadian Association for Studies in Co-operation).

Please visit her webpage to learn more about Dr Gordon Nembhard and her work.

Ricardo Samir Nuñez (he/him) 

Ricardo Samir Nuñez is a worker cooperative ecosystem development specialist supporting cultural practices, policies, organizations, and systemic changes that allow communities to build beyond the interlocking systems of imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy. He is currently the Director of Economic Democracy and a Staff Attorney at the Sustainable Economies Law Center where he collaborates on educational programs, legal services, policy advocacy, and regional and national ecosystem development to restore human labor to right relationship with people and the planet. He is board president of the US Federation of Worker Cooperatives and at-large board member at the California Center for Cooperative Development and the Southern California Focus on Cooperation.

Ricardo became a lawyer without going to law school through California’s Law Office Study Program.

Please visit The Sustainable Economies Law Center website to learn more about Ricardo Nuñez and his work.

Kelton Packard O'Connor (he/him)

Kelton O’Connor is an incarcerated person who writes about the modern day asylum, the friends he has made in these places, and a range of public policy issues. He is a co-founder of Earth Equity, a food policy organizer, and the creator of Earth Equity's Diabetes Justice Workshop curriculum – a course designed to help incarcerated people explore links between healing foods and healing the planet. He is also the author of the Right 2 Heal (R2H) Strategy, a food justice proposal he was invited to submit as part of an advisory report to California Governor Gavin Newsom’s current prison reform project.  

Kelton is a student at Mount Tamalpais College and is pursuing an Associate degree in Liberal Arts. He is generating scholarship related to the role of meaningful work in anti-recidivism, and has been invited to present his work at the National Conference on Higher Education in Prison (NCHEP) as well as the Sustainable Economies Law Center Conference. His activism focuses on systems that heal both people and ecology. He is working to connect incarcerated people and people in reentry to career paths that increase opportunity for self actualization, community formation, and discovery of life mission. Presently this includes work in the area of ocean stewardship and public advocacy. Kelton is particularly passionate about programmatic design and the advancement of Food Is Medicine systems.

To learn more about his views on this subject, please read the R2H Strategy

Daniel Sheehan, Esq. (he/him)

Daniel Sheehan is president and co-founder of the Romero Institute and former president and co-founder of the Christic Institute.

Carrying degrees from Harvard College and Harvard Law School, Danny has helped lead multiple lawsuits of historic importance, including three Supreme Court cases. Prior to forming the Christic Institute, he litigated a number of high-profile social justice cases, including the judgment on behalf of nuclear worker and whistleblower Karen Silkwood that effectively ended construction of all new nuclear power plants in the United States. 

Danny formed the Romero Institute in 1992 with Christic Institute co-founder Sara Nelson. A law and policy center based in Santa Cruz, CA, the Institute exposes and implements solutions to serious threats to the environment, structural injustice, and human and constitutional rights violations.

Please visit the Romero Institute website to learn more about Danny Sheehan and his work.

Mary Sutton (she/her)

Mary Sutton was an activist in the anti-apartheid movement in Minneapolis. More recently, she has been active in Los Angeles as part of the local and statewide coalition work to stop prison and jail expansion. Mary designed Collective REMAKE in the MA in Urban Sustainability program at Antioch University Los Angeles; and now works full-time to move Collective REMAKE forward through cooperative education and development programs, the implementation of democratic participatory practices, and diverse fundraising efforts.

Collective REMAKE Board Co-Chair, Mary has over 20 years experience in non-profit management, development, and programming. She is also a graphic designer and print production artist. She is currently a PhD candidate in the Graduate School for Leadership and Change at Antioch University.

Please visit the Collective REMAKE website to learn more about           Mary Sutton and her work.

Ronald White (he/him)

Ron's quarter century involvement in social change was incubated in the crucible of southern civil rights struggles during his youth in Columbus, Georgia, and college anti-war, pro-feminist activism.  

Ron's professional and consulting work with and for grantmakers has encompassed the full variety of foundations: private, religious, family foundations, individual donors, and public charities. These 25 years of work have included positions as senior program officer, program director, executive director and board trustee. 

Since 2004, after founding Building Utopia consulting, LLC, Ron has assisted foundations and funding “collaboratives”, with program planning, evaluations, organizational and leadership development, board training, executive coaching, and a variety of other personalized services. Ron has focused on promoting and evaluating bottom-up strategies of community engagement, policy, and institutional change. 

Ron is married with two adult children.  Meditation has accompanied him in a life long pursuit of blending spirituality and social justice.  He is also an adventurous eater and a lover of jazz, blues, and the performing arts.

Veryl Pow (he/they)

Veryl aspires to be, in the words of Joy James, a “guerrilla” teacher and scholar. Veryl’s politics developed from his grassroots organizing experiences in Seattle around Palestine and Third World solidarity, abolition, and anti-austerity campaigns; and refined through his rebellious lawyering experiences in South Los Angeles around traffic court debt. As a teacher of law, Veryl challenges his students to critique black letter legal doctrines in their origins and material outcomes, while simultaneously reimagine and repurpose the law towards collective liberation. His scholarly musings center on racial capitalism, critical race theory, and destituent power.

A lawyer by training, Veryl’s conception of movement lawyering has been inspired by his tenure in Baltimore, where grassroots community members have creatively and resiliently built urban farms, cooperatives, and community land trusts in response to neoliberal conditions of disinvestment, immiseration, and death. Rather than litigate or legislate to reform a broken system, he encourages movement lawyers to instead support such grassroots prefigurative efforts that are attempting to remake social relations to land and people from extraction and competition to stewardship and mutual aid. In his previous capacity as a clinical instructor at the University of Baltimore School of Law, Veryl provided legal representation to these forms of nontraditional organizations, and to other activist organizations fighting to end police violence or resist displacement from gentrification.

In his free time, Veryl dabbles in basketball, high-intensity interval training, improv, nature, and the culinary arts.

Erika Siao (she/they)


Joseph M Krauter (he/him)


Daniel Paul Nelson (he/him)

Daniel is co-director for the Romero Institute. The institute was originally founded to seek justice for Karen Silkwood — a safety inspector with the Oil, Chemical, and Atomic Workers Union who was run off the road on her way to expose environmental injustice and safety violations in her workplace. The jury in the ensuing Silkwood v. Kerr-McGee case, awarded a record-setting $10.5 million to Silkwood’s estate, established new precedent in liability law, and effectively ended construction of nuclear power plants in the US.

Daniel continues this legacy of Envirionmental Justice as he decides strategic direction for the institute as he works in solidarity with Family and Water Protectors through the Lakota Law Project. 

Daniel has over 15 years of experience as a deputy director, organizer, researcher, fundraiser, and writer. He holds a BA in Political Theory from Harvard College and an MA in Social Science from the University of Chicago.