Chris Cooper is the Director of the Ohio Employee Ownership Center (OEOC) at Kent State University. In his 20-plus years at the OEOC, he has done almost everything atone point or another, but now focuses primarily on ownership culture education and coordinating Ohio’s Employee-Owned Network; working with business owners on succession planning and sales to employees; and business development and employee-owned start-ups.
He was formerly a contributor on the COSE Mind spring website (an online resource for small business in NE Ohio), the Small Business Advocacy Blog of the Small Business Advocacy Council (Chicago), and formerly to Slate.com’s now-defunct BizBox small business blog. In 2010, Chris was designated a Certified Exit Planning Advisor (CEPA) from the Exit Planning Institute (EPI).
Chris is also active in the Center’s training programs on employee ownership, developing and implementing the OEOC’s numerous training modules and programs. He has been a featured speaker at conferences and programs across the US as well as Bermuda, Canada, and the UK, and co-written numerous articles and book chapters on employee ownership and business succession planning. Prior to joining the Center, he was a substitute teacher with the Kent City Schools; worked at SEIU Local 47 in Cleveland, OH; and is a graduate of Kent State’s Political Science program.
Email: ccooper1@kent.edu
Phone: (330) 672-0338
Responsibilities/Programs: Succession Planning, Ohio’s Employee Owned Network, Cooperative Development, ESOP Training
Kelley is the Office Manager at the OEOC and has been with the Center since January 2002. She oversees the daily financial operation and human resource functions of the Center and is the lead day-to-day contact between the OEOC and Kent State University. She provides administrative support to achieve department goals through liaison activities, coordination of daily business functions, and implementation of program/projects.
Email: kfitts@kent.edu
Phone: (330)672-0336
Responsibilities/Programs: Professional Member & Network Member Renewal, Billing, Conference Logistics
Michael Palmieri, PhD began working at the OEOC at the in 2019 when he relocated from New Jersey to Ohio to pursue a graduate degree. He is the Program Director at the Ohio Employee Ownership Center, where he coordinates the Center’s education and training programs and leads its research and outreach efforts. His research focuses on how alternative ownership structures of private enterprises and community resources can build individual and community wealth and lessen economic and political inequality.
Michael earned his doctorate in political science in 2024 from Kent State University. His dissertation focuses on the economic benefits of employee share ownership and how those benefits shape political behaviors and attitudes. He is also a part-time faculty member at Kent State University’s Political Science Department where he teaches courses on Urban Politics, American Government, Political Parties and Interest Groups, and a special topic courses on Workplace Democracy. Michael is also a Fellow at the Rutgers Institute for the Study of Employee Ownership and Profit Sharing and a contributing member of the Shares Laboratory research team at Rutgers University. In addition to his research and program work he manages student interns at the center and produces the OEOC's podcast Owners at Work, which he co-hosts with Chris Cooper.
Email: mpalmie2@kent.edu
Phone: (330) 672-0333
Responsibilities: New research, program development, website maintenance, podcast production
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On December 9, 2009, John Logue, the OEOC’s Founder and Director of 23 years passed away, about a week after being diagnosed with cancer.
We counted him rich for his intellect, honesty, persistence, justice, generosity, and an absolute inability to be mean. Of most of these gifts, he was aware, but never boasted of them. Not a month before he died, before he knew of his mortal illness, he counted himself fortunate to have “a good wife, good children, good colleagues and a good job.”
He was not born a wealthy man, nor did he die as one, contented instead with the modest security of a professor’s life as he sought to help others create a similar security for themselves.
To staunch Ohio’s job losses from deindustrialization, in 1987 he founded the Ohio Employee Ownership Center, which helped tens of thousands to share in the ownership of the companies where they worked. A great egalitarian, he was no admirer of state socialism, but advocated bringing willing sellers, mostly retiring owners of small businesses, together with willing buyers, their employees, in a market approach that kept those viable companies in business. With zest, he took on every obstacle that might stand in the way of the ownership transfers that were threatening Ohio. If owners and employees didn’t understand the complex legal arrangements of Employee Stock Ownership Plans, he explained it so they could understand. If companies were in trouble, even at the brink of closing, he would set aside other work to investigate the feasibility of a buyout. If employees lacked the funds needed to see if it made sense to buy their companies, he worked with Ohio’s Department of Development to help them. If financing couldn’t be found to close the deal, he cultivated friendly bankers and investors. If the company was too small to afford to establish an ESOP, he found a way to create employee cooperatives that could buy from owners.
If some research or scholarship was needed to make the case for employee ownership, he did it, or found someone else who had. A quick and fluent writer whose gifts were developed under a devoted father’s tutelage, he willingly shared his access to publishers and journals in coauthored articles, lending not just his name, but his considerable scholarly powers to every endeavor. Through his research, he helped scholars writing about different kinds of broad-based ownership in several countries to find what they had in common and what they could learn from each other.
No one was too great or too small to be asked for help, nor to be thanked for it publicly.
He was usually at his cluttered table in the hall at home by 8 a.m., and he was often at the Center until 7 p.m. Six or seven days a week. His office was the same size as everyone else’s, but had at least twice as much paper in it, because he had an interest in every project the Center undertook, and maintained at least a little involvement in even the most smoothly running aspects of its work.
To honor him for the rich gifts he bestowed on us, we have pledged to continue the Center and its work as long as we are needed. There continues to be much to be done.
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