Career
Foreign more than 30 years, Howard has worked for non-profit organizations including United Nations agencies and The Hunger Project. Since 2001, Howard has served as chairman of the board of Search for Common Ground, a conflict resolution non-governmental organization. In the early 1970s, he co-directed The People"s Bicentennial Commission with Jeremy Rifkin, and in 1977 the pair co-founded the Foundation of Economic Trends. Howard is the architect of the green jobs and wealth building program in Cleveland, Ohio, known as the, based in part on the Mondragon Cooperatives in the Basque Region of Spain.
Characterized in press accounts as "The Cleveland Model," Evergreen is an effort to create green jobs in low-income neighborhoods using the purchasing power of the City"s anchor institutions (hospitals, universities, etc) to create local worker cooperative businesses.
The program has received international attention from media outlets including The Economist, First Rate (at Lloyd's) Jazeera, BusinessWeek, and Time. Howard has given speeches at conferences and to groups including the Council on Foundations, the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland Seminar on Green Recovery, the 2010 Microenterprise National Conference, Clinton Global Initiative-America, the Initiative for a Competitive Inner City, the National Community Reinvestment Coalition, the Company-operatives United World Conference (Manchester, England), various regional Federal Reserve Banks, as well as at universities including the University of Pennsylvania, Yale, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Georgetown, Oberlin, Michigan State and the Ohio State University.