Leslie Watson joined CDS as its Executive Director in November 2024.
Cooperation has been the foundation of Leslie’s civic participation in her own neighborhood as well as her professional career for many years. Her belief in the power of cooperation led her to become involved in two projects in her community of Northeast Minneapolis. She joined the board of the Eastside Food Co-op during its startup phase, and her decade of service spanned the thrilling moment of opening the store, the anxiety of financial crisis in the early years, and the eventual joy of achieving stability and growth. She is also one of the founding organizers of the Northeast Investment Cooperative a co-op formed to make transformative investments in distressed real estate along her neighborhood’s commercial corridor.
Prior to stepping into the ED role, Leslie spent over a decade with Columinate, a consulting cooperative with a nationwide practice focused on supporting co-ops and other organizations that exist to serve the common good. She managed Columinate’s governance service program and provided governance support and leadership coaching to co-ops during all phases of their maturation, from startup to stabilized and expanding. While her consulting work focused primarily on retail food co-ops, she has also collaborated with CDS on a number of projects over the years, providing governance and organizational development support to a variety of co-ops in our region.
Leslie holds a JD (non-practicing) from the University of Minnesota Law School and a Master’s in Public Affairs from the Humphrey School of Public Affairs. She was awarded a Bush Fellowship in 2015 and was a 2012 recipient of a Howard Bowers Award for Cooperative Board Service. She embraces the co-op model as a great way to shape our relationships with our communities and orient commerce and industry to serve people’s economic, social, and cultural needs. But she thinks cooperative Scrabble is just wrong.