Margaret Bau

Over her decades-long career at the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), Margaret Bau incorporated more than 40 cooperatives, trained over 500 cooperative development specialists, and graced over 9,000 conference and meeting attendees with presentations full of knowledge, warmth, and passion for cooperatives. While she would no doubt be the first to deny it, she is, as one fellow cooperator once called her, a “national treasure.”

After being introduced to cooperatives in Costa Rica during her Peace Corps service, Margaret returned to the U.S. and enrolled in a graduate program in Community and Economic Development at the Humphrey School of Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota. There she learned about the impact and potential of cooperatives in the United States, and–seeing co-ops as a more effective and sustainable model of development than other popular solutions of the time–she was offered a job just as USDA was merging two programs into what became Rural Development. Margaret hadn’t grown up on a farm, but her wider perspective and experience was just what the agency needed to approach new rural cooperative development opportunities outside USDA’s traditional agricultural focus.

Initially hired as a state-level cooperative development specialist, Margaret engaged with worker, consumer, producer, and innovative multi-stakeholder cooperatives in Wisconsin. But from her small office in Steven’s Point, well before her position at USDA was formally expanded to a nationwide role, Margaret started getting calls from across the U.S. and Canada from people seeking her insight. There is likely not a cooperative development professional in the country who has not interacted with, or been impacted by, Margaret in some way.

And yet, Margaret has never been one to seek the spotlight. And perhaps that very inclination toward hard work and humility is what built such a relationship of mutual respect and trust when Margaret began exploring the replication of a successful Bronx home care worker cooperative model with rural women in eastern Wisconsin. In 2001, she helped found Cooperative Care, the first new worker-owned home care cooperative that had been organized in 15 years–then she championed the idea in her quiet, persistent way to bring the model to even more communities. Within a few decades, there were 25 worker-owned home care cooperatives in 12 states and a dozen more in development. 

With expertise spanning from home care and social services, to timber, grocery and local foods, Margaret’s approach combines thinking and doing, development and education. This special ability has made her a valued member of professional communities in the co-op ecosystem, including the Association of Cooperative Educators and CooperationWorks!, a national network of cooperative development centers. 

Margaret Bau has a unique ability to integrate both cooperative education and cooperative development into any project in which she is involved; she understands and can communicate both theory and practice to a wide variety of audiences. And when a leader with that kind of  capacity is in a position to bring federal resources to support grassroots efforts, the result is real social impact.