Minsun Ji, Executive Director
Minsun Ji (Ph.D.) is a labor-community organizer, activist scholar and popular educator, inspired by Paulo Friere. She has long experience in non-profit management and employee ownership efforts.
Minsun was a graduate program director of the Center for New Directions in Politics and Public Policy in the Political Science Department at the University of Colorado Denver where she created the first graduate program tracks in the social economy and community-labor organizing to grow leaders of social economy-labor organizing in Colorado. With a strong belief in robust university-community partnerships, she developed a labor-community fellowship program, including paid student internships to support community and labor activist students.
Minsun also comes with a background as a labor organizer and worker coop educator. Minsun organized immigrant janitors with SEIU, and immigrant workers as program director with the American Friends Service Committee. Minsun also became the founder and Executive Director of Denver’s first immigrant worker center, El Centro Humanitario para los Trabajadores (Humanitarian Center for Workers), where she served for a decade. Minsun helped build the power of one of vulnerable immigrant population through policy advocacy, popular educational programs, and leadership development. During this time, Minsun helped create Denver’s first immigrant worker cooperative (Green Clean for Life) and co-authored Immigrant Worker-Owned Cooperatives: A User’s Manual to share knowledge about building worker cooperatives for immigrants. Beginning in 2019, Minsun began a series of worker cooperative training for diverse immigrant groups.
As an activist-scholar, Minsun has published various articles regarding the social economy, worker cooperatives, social/labor movements, community economic development and innovative social financing. She serves as a research fellow at the Institute for Cooperative Digital Economy at the New School of Social Science, and a J. Robert Beyster Employee Ownership Fellow at the School of Management and Labor Relations at Rutgers University. She was also a Colorado Governor’s Commissioner on Employee Ownership (FY 2019-2020) and has been actively engaged in labor-cooperative issues as an Executive Committee Member at the Union-Coop Council of the US Federation of Worker Cooperatives (USFWC). Currently, she is also engaged in building worker-owned platform cooperatives in different cities in the U.S. and other countries, in connection with the worker-owned Drivers Cooperative in New York.
minsun@rmeoc.org
303.250.5920
