IAM2411 – Founder and Radio Host Shares the Impact of Co-ops on Communities
Podcast Interview with Vernon Oakes
Vernon Oakes is the host of the leading weekly national radio program for the U.S. cooperative community. He is also a general partner in Everything Co-op Communications, LLC, a media company focused on cooperative business models.
Vernon shares his journey, starting with his upbringing in Bluefield, West Virginia, and his experience attending Bluefield State College.
He delved into real estate, property management, and eventually, co-op housing, specifically limited equity co-ops.
Vernon explains that co-ops are businesses owned and controlled by their members. A well-known example is worker co-ops, where employees have a say in business operations and profits.
Vernon emphasizes that co-ops allow workers to petition for better pay and benefits from the government.
He highlights the importance of involving underrepresented groups, like Black women, in decision-making and leadership roles, as they often don’t receive the recognition they deserve in capitalist systems.
Vernon discusses the importance of communication and feedback, citing principles from The One Minute Manager.
LinkedIn: Vernon Oakes
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Transcription:
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Vernon Oakes Teaser 00:00
A co-op is a business that's created by and for its members. Whatever the members are who owns it, they create the business and they get the benefit of whatever the co-op produces.
Let's take, if the business is owned and controlled by the employees, it's called a worker co-op. So you can have any business you can think of could be a worker co-op.
Intro 00:27
Are you ready to hear business stories and learn effective ways to build relationships, generate sales, and level up your business from awesome CEOs, entrepreneurs, and founders without listening to a long, long, long interview?
If so, you've come to the right place. Gresh values your time and is ready to share with you the valuable info you're in search of. This is the I AM CEO Podcast.
Gresham Harkless 00:51
Hello, hello, hello. This is Gresh from the IMCEO podcast, and I have an awesome guest on the show today. I have Vernon Oaks. Vernon, excited to have you on.
Vernon Oakes 01:01
Thank you, Gresh.
Gresham Harkless 01:02
I am excited to be here. Thank you for having me. Absolutely. And Vernon is doing so many awesome things.
I'm super excited to have him on to get the opportunity to hear his story, hear about all the awesome things that he's doing.
And of course, before we do that, I want to read a little bit more about Vernon so you can hear about some of those awesome things.
And Vernon hosts the leading weekly national radio program for the U.S. cooperative community.
He is general partner in Everything Co-op Communications, LLC, a media company that promotes cooperative business models by providing education and resources specifically for under-resourced Americans and their communities.
And I was doing a little bit of homework before we jumped on the podcast. Vernon's doing so many awesome things.
One of the things that was really cool is that he taught at Howard University, which I graduated from, so I have to make sure to shout that out. as a fellow bison.
And then he also has recognition for his contributions in the cooperative movement. He was inducted into the U.S. Cooperative Hall of Fame in October 2024.
And one of the really powerful things I was listening to when I was listening to his video is that they said that he seeks transformation through co-op education.
And I think that I'm a big quotes person. I was an English major, so one of the things that I think he said that his coach said when he was in high school is that winners never quit and a quitter never wins.
So I'm super excited to talk about everything co-op and all the education that we can have. But Vernon, I have one question for you. Are you ready to speak to the I AM CEO community?
Vernon Oakes 02:28
Absolutely.
[restrict paid=”true”]
Gresham Harkless 02:29
All right, let's get it started then. So to kind of kick everything off, I know I touched on it a little bit.
Let's rewind the clock, hear a little bit more on how you got started with a call your CEO story.
Vernon Oakes 02:38
So I grew up in Bluefield, West Virginia, which is a very small town. And I ended up, we integrated schools in 1955.
I was in the third grade. West Virginia integrated schools earlier than most. So I went through majority white schools and elementary, middle school, and high school.
And then I went to Bluefield State College, which is right there in Bluefield. It's a historically black college that is now 95% white. Okay.
They took it, literally took it over. And so from Stanford, I worked at Cummings Engine Company, and I then took a job as international parts marketing director.
So I literally traveled the world and I took the job to go to Africa. And I went everywhere, but I even went to Australia. Okay.
And I traveled the world and saw, and I would want to, I would walk to see how people live. That's what I was extremely interested in.
How do different people live? From Cummings in Columbus, Indiana, I went to Puerto Rico and I ran a distributorship for them in Puerto Rico and got really bit by the entrepreneur spirit.
I had an option to buy this company. It didn't work, but it was a great, great deal if it had worked.
And so then I just came to DC. I just pick and choose where I was. I decided either Atlanta or DC. I wanted to be around Black folk.
I'd been around white people all of this time, and I just wanted to be in communities, so I went to DC.
A little bit closer to Bluefield, where my mom was still living, so that was the main trigger. Ended up teaching at Howard, doing some consulting, selling real estate.
And then I started a property management business, and I started managing and got introduced to cooperative, affordable housing cooperatives.
They were called limited equity co-ops. When I first heard about them, Gresh, I thought it was white folks trying to make sure that black folks couldn't get any equity.
They were limited equity co-op. And I just got fascinated about it. There's seven co-op principles. The fifth one is education, training, and information.
Since education is part of my background, I had 11 years of teaching. It was fascinating watching people, adults, get the education they needed, just-in-time education, to run a business.
From there, I got that most people didn't know what a co-op is. Even if they were in a credit union, they didn't know it was a co-op.
Even if they bought cabbage, cheese, or what's this? These different drinks, they are co-ops, but people don't know it.
So I started as the president of NAHC going to podcasts, radio shows, everywhere I could and spread the word.
And so I'm on my cousin's radio show at WOL in DC. It's called a Thornton Business Hour. And she, when we finished, the person that runs the station, Karen Jackson, came out and put her finger in my face and said, you should have your own show.
That's where the idea came, okay? That's 12 years ago, June, 12 years ago. And we decided, Pat and I, that we would do it for one month. October is co-op month.
So we decided we would do the show for one month, that month came, we did the show, and I just thoroughly enjoyed the conversations.
Like you enjoy your conversations with your guests, I enjoyed the conversation. And just constantly learning about co-ops and people that are into co-ops and the different types of co-ops.
So looking at all of the different co-ops and then all of the people that support co-ops is the ecosystem.
So I have people on the show that talks about all of this and then government officials that know about co-op.
Gresham Harkless 06:41
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And I definitely do want to drill down a little bit deeper, because I imagine that's a lot of the conversations that you're having on your show as well, too, is like, first and foremost, like, what is a co-op?
And then like, kind of understanding, like, the benefit for black and brown people and how this I don't know if that's even doing it justice.
This opportunity may be a better way to say or just awareness of it can provide so much opportunity for people that don't know much about it.
Vernon Oakes 07:08
So this thing is a business. Okay. So this business, a co-op is a business. that's created by and for its members.
Whatever the members are who owns it, they create the business and they get the benefit of whatever the co-op produces.
Let's take, if the business is owned and controlled by the employees, okay? It's called a worker co-op.
So you can have any business you can think of, could be a worker co-op. I've had some people say to me, if you get over 500 people, employees, then that may not make a good co-op, but I don't buy that.
In Mondragon, Spain, they have a consortium of co-ops, and they, I don't know, 20,000 people in them or something. They have a bank, a school, they have a lot.
So I don't buy this worker co-op can be no larger than 500 employees. Yeah, it's already proven that's not the case.
So if you, I, and two other people, well, there's everything co-op communications. There's four of us that started that. It's a work, we own it. It's a media company.
And so we created a company and then we created a nonprofit also that the company owns. The largest worker co-op in the U.S. is 1,500 member home health care in New York.
So if you take home health care like child care, they don't normally get paid much and they are at the bottom of the level.
They're essential workers that are not paid and treated essentially, okay? So they now have a say in their scheduling because they're members, which is huge because a lot of these folks have children and they have to be able to do their scheduling.
They have a say in creating how much they get paid. The problem with home health care is that the government sets what Medicare can pay for home health care.
So now if you have a group of home healthcare workers or co-op organizations working together.
They can now petition the U.S. government to change the pay step so that these workers can get more money so that they can live a quality life. So there's a lot of benefits for cooperation.
Gresham Harkless 09:53
Yeah, that's a huge thing. And I appreciate you so much and breaking that down. And I almost feel like in this might be part of your secret sauce or just your show and everything is the ability.
I think, it comes in my mind is like you can you can go faster, you can go farther. And in order to go farther, you want to go together.
And it sounds like that's the spirit of like understanding not just the collective, but actually that business model and what it can do.
I think if you think strategically on how you can employ that, like you said, all the examples that you give, it gives a great opportunity where it's not a win-lose or a lose-win.
It's a win-win-win because you pull things collectively so that you can reach whatever goal you want to reach.
You're a convert. There we go. For me, it sounds like it's very much so rooted in abundance. I don't know if you feel like that'd be a hack and that's something that is so huge.
Vernon Oakes 10:43
When you sell something, you sell it for a little less than what it's worth. So you're giving somebody something to start with. Right. Okay. I had a guy on the show named Joseph. Okay.
So I had him on the show. He talked about umbuntu. Umbuntu is, he said, an African way of being, a Southern African way of being that says that I am because Gresh is, and Gresh is because Vernon is.
We're constantly looking out for each other. He said the reason Mandela could not hurt the jailers and the people that put him in jail, because he would be hurting himself.
And I was going to say, boy, it would have been great if those Europeans felt that way. But that Umbuntu is at the core of cooperative. I am because you are and you are because I am. we exist for each other.
Gresham Harkless 11:48
That's such a huge thing. So I wanted to ask you a little bit more of what I call a CEO nugget. So this is kind of like a word of wisdom or piece of advice.
But I really want to drill down and understand, like, if someone is listening to this and they understand that that is a business model that I want to try to adopt, like, how do people do it?
And also, like, when is it a good fit for people to start to adopt that within their business structure or their organization that they have?
Vernon Oakes 12:14
A lady by the name of Dane Pauline Green, this is a nugget. She was the president of the International Cooperative Alliance.
Had her on a show and she said, co-ops help people to come out of poverty with dignity. That thing dignity is more important to me than the monetary wealth.
When a senior woman has a say in a business, how that business operates. Now I put women because our black women, they get it because they're a woman and they get it because they're black. Okay.
And they're not, women are not listened to in the, in the, in the, in the capitalistic world.
Black women definitely are not, unless they act like an angry black woman, whether angry or not.
But at any rate, when you're in an organization and people will hear you, and your word directs and helps to direct that company. That's where the dignity comes.
Gresham Harkless 13:14
Absolutely. So I want to ask you now my absolute favorite question, which is the definition of what it means to be a CEO.
And our goal is to have different quote-unquote CEOs on this show. So Vernon, what does being a CEO mean to you?
Vernon Oakes 13:25
Right now, I'm in a interim position with a group called Columinate. They can do what's expected of them.
They've got the training, they got the material, whether it's computers or lasers or whatever they need, they've got what they need to do their job.
They know what to do. They have the materials to do what they need to do. And then they hold them accountable.
They tell them when they do it right. They tell them when they do it wrong. But you don't tell them when they do it wrong until you know they can do it and they got everything they need.
That to me is what a CEO or anybody with any title ought to be doing. In the workplace, I tell people something's going to change.
You're either going to do it or I'm going to have to find somebody else to do it. But the work is going to get done. That's my job. Make sure the work is done.
So change is going to happen here if you're not doing it. And if you're doing it right, The only change I would want is if you can figure out a way of maybe even doing it more efficiently or effectively.
But it's having those communications with people, the CEO, the manager, supervisor. It doesn't make any difference.
They know what they're supposed to do. They can do it. You hold them accountable. Tell them why it's important to continue to do or to change. Give them the feedback.
And the greatest feedback is communications and pats on the back. accomplishments. Next is money.
Okay, so you line up all of that. That to me is what a manager does. And you get that from the book, The One Minute Manager.
And I learned about that in the 80s. I graduated from Stanford in 76. So I didn't learn about that until afterwards and then put it in place.
Gresham Harkless 15:27
Vernon, truly appreciate that. And of course, I appreciate your time even more. So what I want to do now is pass you the mic, so to speak, just to see if there's anything additional that you can let our readers and listeners know.
And of course, how best people can get on view, subscribe, or find out about your radio show and find out about all the awesome things that you all are doing.
Vernon Oakes 15:43
You can go to everything.coop, and you can listen to 430 episodes on there. Put in Dr. Jessica Gordon-Nembhard and you can get the five or so.
A guy named Malik McKinney was on. McKinney was on. He's out of Detroit, the Detroit Food Co-op.
Gresham Harkless 16:03
Absolutely. Well, I truly appreciate that, Vernon. Of course, we're going to have the links and information in the show notes as well, too, so that everybody can find out about all the awesome shows.
There's loads and loads and loads and loads of nuggets and resources and conversations that you're having, and I hope you have a phenomenal rest of the day.
Vernon Oakes 16:18
Thank you, sir. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I love talking to you anytime.
Outro 16:23
Thank you for listening to the I AM CEO Podcast powered by CBNation and Blue 16 Media. Tune in next time and visit us at iamceo.co. I AM CEO is not just a phrase, it's a community.
Don't forget to schedule your complimentary digital marketing consultation at Blue16media.com. This has been the I AM CEO Podcast with Gresham Harkless Jr. Thank you for listening.
Vernon Oakes
00:00 - 00:27
A co-op is a business that's created by and for its members. Whatever the members are who owns it, they create the business and they get the benefit of whatever the co-op produces. Let's take, if the business is owned and controlled by the employees, it's called a worker co-op. So you can have any business you can think of could be a worker co-op. Are you
Intro
00:27 - 00:50
ready to hear business stories and learn effective ways to build relationships, generate sales, and level up your business from awesome CEOs, entrepreneurs, and founders without listening to a long, long, long interview? If so, you've come to the right place. Gresh values your time and is ready to share with you the valuable info you're in search of.
Gresham Harkless
00:51 - 01:01
This is the IMCEO podcast. Hello, hello, hello. This is Gresh from the IMCEO podcast, and I have an awesome guest on the show today. I have Vernon Oaks. Vernon, excited to have you on. Thank
Vernon Oakes
01:01 - 01:02
you, Gresh.
Gresham Harkless
01:02 - 01:35
I am excited to be here. Thank you for having me. Absolutely. And Vernon is doing so many awesome things. I'm super excited to have him on to get the opportunity to hear his story, hear about all the awesome things that he's doing. And of course, Before we do that, I want to read a little bit more about Vernon so you can hear about some of those awesome things. And Vernon hosts the leading weekly national radio program for the U.S. cooperative community. He is general partner in Everything Co-op Communications, LLC, a media company that promotes cooperative business models by providing education and resources specifically for under-resourced Americans and their communities.
Gresham Harkless
01:35 - 02:08
And I was doing a little bit of homework before we jumped on the podcast. Vernon's doing so many awesome things. One of the things that was really cool is that he taught at Howard University, which I graduated from, so I have to make sure to shout that out. as a fellow bison. Yeah, you know. And then he also has recognition for his contributions in the cooperative movement. He was inducted into the U.S. Cooperative Hall of Fame in October 2024. And one of the really powerful things I was listening to when I was listening to his video is that they said that he seeks transformation through co-op education.
Gresham Harkless
02:09 - 02:34
And I think that I'm a big quotes person. I was an English major, so One of the things that I think he said that his coach said when he was in high school is that winners never quit and a quitter never wins. So I'm super excited to talk about everything co-op and all the education that we can have. But Vernon, I have one question for you. Are you ready to speak to the IMCO community? Absolutely. All right, let's get it started then. So to kind of kick everything off, I know I touched on it a little bit.
Gresham Harkless
02:34 - 02:38
Let's rewind the clock, hear a little bit more on how you got started with a call your CEO story.
Vernon Oakes
02:38 - 03:21
So I grew up in Bluefield, West Virginia, which is a very small town. And I ended up, we integrated schools in 1955. I was in the third grade. West Virginia integrated schools earlier than most. So I went through majority white schools and elementary, middle school, and high school. And then I went to Bluefield State College, which is right there in Bluefield. It's a historically black college that is now 95% white. Okay. They took it, literally took it over. And so from Stanford, I worked at Cummings Engine Company, and I then took a job as international parts marketing director.
Vernon Oakes
03:21 - 03:54
So I literally traveled the world and I took the job to go to Africa. And I went everywhere, but I even went to Australia. Okay. And I traveled the world and saw, and I would want to, I would walk to see how people live. That's what I was extremely interested in. How do different people live? From Cummings in Columbus, Indiana, I went to Puerto Rico and I ran a distributorship for them in Puerto Rico and got really bit by the entrepreneur spirit. I had an option to buy this company. It didn't work, but it was a great, great deal if it had worked.
Vernon Oakes
03:54 - 04:28
And so then I just came to DC. I just pick and choose where I was. I decided either Atlanta or DC. I wanted to be around Black folk. I'd been around white people all of this time, and I just wanted to be in communities, so I went to DC. A little bit closer to Bluefield, where my mom was still living, so that was the main trigger. Ended up teaching at Howard, doing some consulting, selling real estate. Cool, and then I started a property management business, and I started managing and got introduced to cooperative, affordable housing cooperatives.
Vernon Oakes
04:28 - 05:10
They were called limited equity co-ops. When I first heard about them, Gresh, I thought it was white folks trying to make sure that black folks couldn't get any equity. They were limited equity co-op. And I just got fascinated about it. There's seven co-op principles. The fifth one is education, training, and information. Since education is part of my background, I had 11 years of teaching. It was fascinating watching people, adults, get the education they needed, just-in-time education, to run a business. From there, I got that most people didn't know what a co-op is. Even if they were in a credit union, they didn't know it was a co-op.
Vernon Oakes
05:11 - 06:00
Even if they bought cabbage, cheese, or what's this? These different drinks, they are co-ops, but people don't know it. So I started as the president of NAHC going to podcasts, radio shows, everywhere I could and spread the word. And so I'm on my cousin's radio show at WOL in DC. It's called a Thornton Business Hour. And she, when we finished, the person that runs the station, Karen Jackson, came out and put her finger in my face and said, you should have your own show. That's where the idea came, okay? That's 12 years ago, June, 12 years ago.
Vernon Oakes
06:00 - 06:39
And we decided, Pat and I, that we would do it for one month. October is co-op month. So we decided we would do the show for one month, That month came, we did the show, and I just thoroughly enjoyed the conversations. Like you enjoy your conversations with your guests, I enjoyed the conversation. And just constantly learning about co-ops and people that are into co-ops and the different types of co-ops. So looking at all of the different co-ops and then all of the people that support co-ops is the ecosystem. So I have people on the show that talks about all of this and then government officials.
Vernon Oakes
06:40 - 06:41
that know about co-op.
Gresham Harkless
06:41 - 07:08
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And I definitely do want to, you know, drill down a little bit deeper, because I imagine that's a lot of the conversations that you're having on your show as well, too, is like, you know, first and foremost, like, what is a co-op? And then like, kind of understanding, like, the benefit for black and brown people and how this I don't know if that's even doing it justice. This opportunity may be a better way to say or just awareness of it can provide so much opportunity for people that don't know much about it.
Vernon Oakes
07:08 - 07:50
So this thing is a business. Okay. So this business, a co-op is a business. that's created by and for its members. Whatever the members are who owns it, they create the business and they get the benefit of whatever the co-op produces. Let's take, if the business is owned and controlled by the employees, okay? It's called a worker co-op. So you can have any business you can think of, could be a worker co-op. I've had some people say to me, if you get over 500 people, employees, then that may not make a good co-op, but I don't buy that.
Vernon Oakes
07:51 - 08:42
In Mondragon, Spain, they have a consortium of co-ops, and they, I don't know, 20,000 people in them or something. They have a bank, a school, they have a lot. So I don't buy this worker co-op can be no larger than 500 employees. Yeah, it's already proven that's not the case. So if you, I, and two other people, well, there's everything co-op communications. There's four of us that started that. It's a work, we own it. It's a media company. And so we created a company and then we created a nonprofit also that the company owns. The largest worker co-op in the U.S.
Vernon Oakes
08:42 - 09:25
is 1,500 member home health care in New York. So if you take home health care like child care, they don't normally get paid much and they are at the bottom of the level. They're essential workers that are not paid and treated essentially, okay? So they now have a say in their scheduling because they're members, which is huge because a lot of these folks have children and they have to be able to do their scheduling. They have a say in creating how much they get paid. The problem with home health care is that the government sets what Medicare can pay for home health care.
Vernon Oakes
09:26 - 09:51
So now if you have a group of home healthcare workers or co-op organizations working together, they can now petition the U.S. government to change the pay step so that these workers can get more money so that they can live a quality life. So there's a lot of benefits for cooperation.
Gresham Harkless
09:53 - 10:26
Yeah, that's a huge thing. And I appreciate you so much and breaking that down. And I almost feel like in this might be part of your secret sauce or, you know, just your show and everything is the ability. I think, you know, it comes in my mind is like, you know, you can you can go faster, you can go farther. And in order to go farther, you want to go together. And it sounds like that's the spirit of like understanding not just the collective, but actually that business model and what it can do. I think if you think strategically on how you can employ that, like you said, all the examples that you give, it gives a great opportunity where it's not a win-lose or a lose-win.
Gresham Harkless
10:26 - 10:43
It's a win-win-win because you pull things collectively so that you can reach whatever goal you want to reach. Oh, you got it. You're a convert. There we go. For me, it sounds like it's very much so rooted in abundance. I don't know if you feel like that'd be a hack and that's something that is so huge.
Vernon Oakes
10:43 - 11:24
When you sell something, you sell it for a little less than what it's worth. So you're giving somebody something to start with. Right. Okay. I had a guy on the show named Joseph. Okay. So I had him on the show. He talked about umbuntu. Umbuntu is, he said, an African way of being, a Southern African way of being that says that I am because Gresh is, and Gresh is because Vernon is. We're constantly looking out for each other. He said the reason Mandela could not hurt the jailers and the people that put him in jail, because he would be hurting himself.
Vernon Oakes
11:26 - 11:48
And I was going to say, boy, it would have been great if those Europeans felt that way. But that Ubuntu is at the core of cooperative. I am because you are and you are because I am. we exist for each other.
Gresham Harkless
11:48 - 12:14
That's such a huge thing. So I wanted to ask you a little bit more of what I call a CEO nugget. So this is kind of like a word of wisdom or piece of advice, but I really want to drill down and understand, like, if someone is listening to this and they understand that that is a business model that I want to try to adopt, like, how do people do it? And also, like, when is it a good fit for people to start to adopt that within their business structure or their organization that they have?
Vernon Oakes
12:14 - 12:57
A lady by the name of Dane Pauline Green, this is a nugget. She was the president of the International Cooperative Alliance. Had her on a show and she said, co-ops help people to come out of poverty with dignity. That thing dignity is more important to me than the monetary wealth. When a senior woman has a say in a business, how that business operates. Now I put women because our black women, they get it because they're a woman and they get it because they're black. Okay. And they're not, women are not listened to in the, in the, in the, in the capitalistic world.
Vernon Oakes
12:57 - 13:13
Black women definitely are not, unless they act like an angry black woman, whether angry or not. But at any rate, when you're in an organization and people will hear you, And your word directs and helps to direct that company. That's where the dignity comes.
Gresham Harkless
13:14 - 13:24
Absolutely. So I want to ask you now my absolute favorite question, which is the definition of what it means to be a CEO. And our goal is to have different quote unquote CEOs on this show. So Vernon, what does being a CEO mean to you?
Vernon Oakes
13:25 - 14:01
Right now, I'm in a interim position with a group called Columinate. They can do what's expected of them. They've got the training, they got the material, whether it's computers or lasers or whatever they need, they've got what they need to do their job. They know what to do. They have the materials to do what they need to do. And then they hold them accountable. They tell them when they do it right. They tell them when they do it wrong. But you don't tell them when they do it wrong until you know they can do it and they got everything they need.
Vernon Oakes
14:05 - 14:39
That to me is what a CEO or anybody with any title ought to be doing. In the workplace, I tell people something's going to change. You're either going to do it or I'm going to have to find somebody else to do it. But the work is going to get done. That's my job. Make sure the work is done. So change is going to happen here if you're not doing it. And if you're doing it right, The only change I would want is if you can figure out a way of maybe even doing it more efficiently or effectively.
Vernon Oakes
14:40 - 15:22
But it's having those communications with people, the CEO, the manager, supervisor. It doesn't make any difference. They know what they're supposed to do. They can do it. You hold them accountable. Tell them why it's important to continue to do or to change. Give them the feedback. And the greatest feedback is communications and pats on the back. accomplishments. Next is money. Okay, so you line up all of that. That to me is what a manager does. And you get that from the book, The One Minute Manager. And I learned about that in the 80s. I graduated from Stanford in 76.
Vernon Oakes
15:22 - 15:26
So I didn't learn about that until afterwards and then put it in place.
Gresham Harkless
15:27 - 15:43
Vernon, truly appreciate that. And of course, I appreciate your time even more. So what I want to do now is pass you the mic, so to speak, just to see if there's anything additional that you can let our readers and listeners know. And of course, how best people can get on view, subscribe, or find out about your radio show and find out about all the awesome things that you all are doing.
Vernon Oakes
15:43 - 16:03
You can go to everything.coop, everything.coop, and you can listen to 430 episodes on there. Put in Dr. Jessica Gordon-Emhardt and you can get the five or so. A guy named Malik McKinney was on. McKinney was on. He's out of Detroit, the
Gresham Harkless
16:03 - 16:18
Detroit Food Co-op. Absolutely. Well, I truly appreciate that, Vernon. Of course, we're going to have the links and information in the show notes as well, too, so that everybody can find out about all the awesome shows. There's loads and loads and loads and loads of nuggets and resources and conversations that you're having, and I hope you have a phenomenal rest of the day.
Vernon Oakes
16:18 - 16:22
Thank you, sir. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I love talking to you anytime.
Intro
16:23 - 16:51
Thank you for listening to the IMCEO podcast powered by CB Nation and Blue 16 Media. Tune in next time and visit us at imceo.co. IMCEO is not just a phrase, it's a community. Don't forget to schedule your complimentary digital marketing consultation at bluesixtymedia.com. This has been the IMCEO podcast with Gresham Harkless Jr. Thank you for listening.
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