Air Date: March 26, 2026
Cooperative Development

Jamila Medley: Leading the Change Through Cooperative Economics and Community Wealth Building

Share

Add to Calendar

Tune in Live Here

This Thursday @ 10:30am ET
for Everything Co-op, hosted by Vernon Oakes

This week Everything Co-op closes its Women’s History Month series with Jamila Medley, a relationship weaver, culture worker, and artist working at the intersections of the personal and organizational. Jamila will discuss how women are not only responding to today’s challenges but are actively designing inclusive, community-centered solutions that ensure a more sustainable and equitable future for generations to come.

Jamila Medley is a relationship weaver, culture worker, and artist working at the intersections of the personal and organizational. She cocreates what is needed to experience systemic durability through her organizational development consultancy and the Black Women at Home Project (BW@H). Her work is a commitment to ensuring that the structures we build serve as sites of liberation, resilience, and care.

For over 25 years, Jamila has supported cooperatives and non-profits through emergent change, helping groups operationalize their values. From 2012-2021, she served as Executive Director of the Philadelphia Area Cooperative Alliance (PACA). Currently, she stewards the Collective Courage Fund, serves on the boards of the People’s Media Fund and Food Co-op Initiative, and builds essential tools for co-op development with Solidarity Resource.

In 2023, Jamila launched BW@H to visibilize how Black women embody home as a site of sacred wellness. In 2026, she will launch Seed and Structure, a framework weaving personal wholeness into collective strength—so our lives and our structures finally tell the same story.

A Brooklyn native based in Philadelphia, Jamila is a proud mama and Mimi. She holds an M.S. in Organizational Dynamics from the University of Pennsylvania.

Our host, Vernon Oakes, is a consummate advocate for cooperatives. He is a Past President of the National Association of Housing Cooperatives, and he’s served on several boards and committees to advance the interests of cooperatives. Recently, he served on the Limited Equity Cooperative Task Force, established by Anita Bonds, At-Large Member of the Council of the District of Columbia. Vernon is an MBA graduate of Stanford University, who has used his business acumen to benefit the community, by promoting the added value of the cooperative business model.