Melissa Hoover is the founding executive director of the Democracy At Work Institute, a think-and-do-tank whose mission is to expand worker ownership to people locked out of good jobs and business ownership. She is an executive fellow at the Rutgers Institute for the Study of Employee Ownership and Profit Sharing, and started her career as a cooperative business developer with the Arizmendi Association of Cooperatives and as the first executive director of the U.S. Federation of Worker Cooperatives.