Leigh brings interdisciplinary experience spanning design, facilitation, and management to their role as Project Manager & Research Consultant, including backbone support for a collective impact initiative, directing the production of public artworks, and convening creatives to create community archives. 

Leigh’s career was jump-started at the Democracy at Work Institute, an affiliate of the U.S. Federation of Worker Cooperatives. They coordinated the New York City Worker Cooperative Business Development Initiative, one of the largest American municipal efforts to address inequality through worker ownership.

Leigh also helped launch Best for NYC, a partnership between local government and service organisations for guiding local businesses to improve job quality and community impact. Leigh holds an MA from the Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths, University of London. 

In their own words:

At Collaborate, I join a cohort of other systems thinkers who similarly think about the fact that how people come together changes what’s possible. Like my team members, I am oriented both toward infrastructures and also to the needs and capacities of people – and how they shape each other.

I come to this work from a place of pondering power shifts and reparative relations to bring about systemic change and draw upon participatory research methods, ecological references, and facilitative and artistic practices in doing so. I am endlessly stimulated by learning new pedagogies and frameworks.

Every day, I recommit to radical imagination and transformation, to collective action for greater equity and collective liberation.

Leigh Brown Projects