Mike Sandmel joined ICA in 2023 and serves as a Senior Cooperative Business Consultant on ICA’s Cross Program Team, supporting conversions and existing cooperatives.
Prior to joining ICA, Mike worked as the Membership Director at New Economy Coalition and as a Senior Campaign Organizer at New Economy Project, where he coordinated coalition efforts to advance cooperative and community wealth building policies in New York City and State. Mike holds a B.A. in Economics and Ecology and a Masters in Public and Nonprofit Administration, both from New York University.
I work on the cross-program team to support new cooperative conversions as well as supporting the success of existing worker-owned businesses.
I am inspired by the White Electric Coffee Co-op in Providence, RI, which transitioned to employee We have so many great worker co-ops in NYC I can’t pick just one. I’m a subscriber to Hell Gate and love the way they employ the cooperative model in service of great local journalism. I love the ambition of the Drivers Cooperative, which is building a worker-owned alternative to Uber and Lyft. When I lived in their delivery zone, I loved getting fresh produce from Brooklyn Packers. Recently, I’ve been enjoying stopping by Donna, NYC’s newest worker-owned cocktail bar, for a happy hour drink.
It’s not a TED talk officially, but when I was a senior in college I saw Gar Alperovitz give a version of this talk about the role that worker and community ownership can play in systemic transformation and it had a pretty enormous impact on me and my path to this work.
In all but the very coldest months of the year you can find me taking the subway to one of NYC’s many wonderful public beaches. If I’m not doing that I’m probably cooking, watching basketball, listening to music, reading a science fiction novel, or playing cards with friends.
I live in beautiful Brooklyn, NY and work out of our NYC office.
I’ve frequently found myself going back to For All The People by John Curl and Collective Courage by Jessica Gordon Nembhard – two great and complementary histories of the cooperative movement in the United States. In particular, these texts have helped me understand how cooperative and community ownership strategies have been leveraged as part of larger struggles for labor, environmental, and racial justice.
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