Esteban Kelly

Esteban Kelly is a visionary leader and compassionate strategist who inspires organizers by drawing on science fiction, social theory, and collective liberation. Throughout Esteban’s 25 years of professional facilitation, lies a sweeping range of principled organizing. Firmly rooted in West Philly, Esteban infuses popular education, systemic thinking, and anti-oppression analysis into all of his organizing and advocacy work. In addition to working at AORTA, he is the Executive Director for the US Federation of Worker Co-ops and the founder and President of the freelancer cooperative platform, Guilded.

Uniting close friends and long-time co-organizers, Esteban was inspired to co-create AORTA culling together his creative energy and organizational skills for expanding food sovereignty, economic justice and the solidarity economy, gender justice & queer liberation, prison abolition, and movements for racial justice. He has brought many of these sectors together through his efforts to expand economic democracy, chiefly using the cooperative business model for community ownership and worker’s control. 

Esteban is a co-founder and former board President of the cross-sector Philadelphia Area Cooperative Alliance (PACA). He served on the first board of the Cooperative Innovation Lab, and he designed and facilitated the founding general assemblies of The Movement Cooperative. Internationally, Esteban has advocated for workplace democracy through the ICA (International Cooperative Alliance) and for land reform and other social movements from Canada to Brazil. In 2019 Esteban was elected to the board of the international worker co-op federation known as CICOPA. He has been a board member (and is current Vice Chair) of the National Cooperative Business Association (NCBA–CLUSA) since 2011, which under their CLUSA program, has developed cooperatives in dozens of countries on five continents for over 50 years. 

After many years as a PhD student of Marxist Geographers at the CUNY Graduate Center, Esteban exited academia (A.B.D), with a Masters in Anthropology. After graduate school he worked at the New Economy Coalition and has since consulted with them and other organizations in converting to a worker self-directed nonprofit structure. From 2009-2011, Esteban served as Vice President of the USFWC, and a founding board member of the Democracy At Work Institute (DAWI) and of the US Solidarity Economy Network (US SEN). He is also a previous Director of Education & Training and Board President of NASCO (North American Students for Cooperation) where he was inducted into their Cooperative Hall of Fame in 2011. He served one term on the board of the Cooperative Development Foundation (CDF) and has emceed their Cooperative Hall of Fame induction ceremony.

Esteban is a Ford Global Fellow, a Margaret Burroughs Fellow in the Social Justice Portals Project at University of Illinois-Chicago, an Executive Fellow of the Institute for the Study of Employee Ownership and Profit Sharing at Rutgers University, and a Futures 4 Good Fellow in the Equitable Enterprise Initiative at the Institute for the Future. He is a member of the Climate + Community Project and now serves on the CCP advisory board. Esteban is also an advisor to the multi-stakeholder musician’s co-op Ampled, the Platform Co-ops Consortium, Making Worlds Bookstore Cooperative, and the Movement for Black Lives.

In 2018, Esteban won a Philadelphia Social Innovation Award for Public Policy, the same year he helped get the Main Street Employee Ownership Act passed by Congress. He has since advanced worker co-op causes embedded in legislation like the 2022 CHIPS Act and state and local legislation. Esteban served two terms as a mayoral appointee and one year as co-chair of the Philadelphia Food Policy Advisory Council. His appointment followed eight years as a worker-owner at Mariposa Food Co-op, where he organized the grocery store's Food Justice and Anti-Racism working group, expanding food access in West Philly while the store was still collectively managed. 

His leadership in abolitionist frameworks of transformative justice stem from his 15 years of organizing with the Philly Stands Up collective, partially documented in his contribution to anthologies like “Beyond Survival: Strategies and Stories from the Transformative Justice Movement” and the “Creative Interventions Toolkit: A Practical Guide to Stop Interpersonal Violence.” His writing also appears in the Summer 2022 issue of NonProfit Quarterly, and in the books “Revolting New York: How 400 Years of Riot, Rebellion, Uprising, and Revolution Shaped a City,” "When to Talk and When to Fight: The Strategic Choice Between Dialogue and Resistance," and “Beyond Racial Capitalism: Cooperatives in the African Diaspora,” on Routledge Press.