| Ted L. Howard | |
|---|---|
| Born | March 3, 1950 Ohio |
| Residence | Takoma Park, Maryland |
| Occupation | Author, Social Entrepreneur |
| Website | |
| Democracy Collaborative Homepage | |
Ted Howard (born 1950, Ohio) is a social entrepreneur and author. He is the founder and Executive Director of The Democracy Collaborative at the University of Maryland and serves as the Minter Senior Fellow for Social Justice with the Cleveland Foundation.[1][2] For more than 30 years, Howard has worked for non-profit organizations including UN agencies and The Hunger Project.
Since 2001, Howard has served as Chairman of the Board of Search for Common Ground, the world’s largest conflict resolution NGO. He is chairman of the board of ocean advocacy group Blue Frontier,[3] and a board member of LIFT, a national anti-poverty organization. In the early 1970s, he co-directed The People's Bicentennial Commission with Jeremy Rifkin, and in 1977 the pair co-founded the Foundation of Economic Trends.[4]
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Howard is the architect of the green jobs and wealth building strategy launched in Cleveland, OH known as the Evergreen Cooperatives, based in part on the Mondragon Cooperatives in the Basque Region of Spain. Characterized in many press accounts as "The Cleveland Model," Evergreen is an effort to create green jobs in low-income neighborhoods using the purchasing power of the City's anchor institutions (hospitals, universities, etc.) to create local worker cooperative businesses.[5] The program has received international attention from media outlets including The Economist, Al Jazeera, BusinessWeek, and Time.[6][7]
Howard has co-authored several books with economist Jeremy Rifkin, including Entropy: A New World View, Voices of the American Revolution, and Who Should Play God?.[8] While at The Hunger Project, he and Dana Meadows et al. co-wrote Ending Hunger: An Idea Whose Time has Come.
He and the Democracy Collaborative's research director Steve Dubb have collaborated on a number of articles with political economist Gar Alperovitz, most recently "The Cleveland Model," which appeared in The Nation, and "Cleveland’s Worker-Owned Boom" in Yes Magazine.[9][10]
Howard has given speeches at conferences and to groups including the Council on Foundations, the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland Seminar on Green Recovery, and the 2010 Microenterprise National Conference.
In 2010, Utne Reader magazine named Howard as one of the "25 Visionaries Who Are Changing Your World" for his foundation of the Democracy Collaborative.[11]