About Gatebridge
GateBridge Community is a Washington, DC–based nonprofit working to build community wealth in neighborhoods that have been left out of economic growth. We design and launch locally rooted ventures, businesses that residents help shape, lead, and own, and build them to be replicated in other communities. By bridging community priorities with institutional expertise and capital, we turn local needs into lasting, community-owned assets.
Mission
To build community wealth by designing and scaling economic systems that expand ownership, opportunity, and long-term economic mobility for local communities.
Vision
A future in which local economies are structured to generate shared prosperity, with communities participating not only as workers and consumers, but as owners and stakeholders.
Anthony E. Cook
Founder & President
GateBridge Community was founded by Anthony E. Cook, a tenured professor at Georgetown University Law Center, a magna cum laude graduate of Princeton University, and an alum of Yale Law School. He has completed two Harvard fellowships and was recognized by the American Bar Association as one of 21 lawyers leading America into the 21st century. His work bridges research, practice, and community, drawing on decades of scholarship in law, economic justice, and community wealth building to guide GateBridge's model from idea to implementation.
Founder's Message
I was born in rural southwest Mississippi to a father with a 3rd grade and mother with an 8th grade education. One of my earliest childhood memories was of a Ku Klux Klan cross being burned in the church yard across the dirt road from our home. I was 10 before we had running water and indoor plumbing. I vividly remember when the first telephone, television and “Internet” – World Book Encyclopedia, it was called then – arrived in our home.
Today, I am a tenured full professor at Georgetown Law Center – a magna cum laude graduate of Princeton University and alum of the Yale School of Law. I have completed two Harvard fellowships and was recognized by the American Bar Association as one of 21 lawyers leading America into the 21st century.
The most common question I’m asked by those familiar with my story is how did I bridge the very different worlds between paragraphs one and two? The answer always comes back to the cultural, spiritual, and intellectual wealth of my childhood experience. Long before the terms were coined by think tanks and universities, I grew up in a “mixed income,” “intentional,” and “cooperative” community.
Pastors, teachers, and school administrators, along with blue-collar workers, entrepreneurs and artists, the unemployed and disabled, all lived together. Everyone knew everyone else or their families, and in one manner or another, took responsibility for each other. They cooperated across educational, class, and cultural lines. These lines were never rigidly drawn, and, as a kid, I benefited from seeing individuals move fluidly and creatively between roles and functions, as opportunity permitted and circumstances required.
This diverse community of residents, supported by Guardians (pastors and churches in my time), Artists, Teachers and Entrepreneurs, all lived, worked, and raised their children together, as Partners, in a common enterprise.
They strove to ensure that the next generation had the opportunity to go as far as their imagination could conceive and determination could achieve. In the process they produced many forms of wealth – cultural, social, and economic – that was recirculated within the community to enrich the lives of all.
Board of Directors
C.E. Pugh served as Chief Executive Officer of National Co+op Grocers, a business services cooperative representing more than 240 retail food cooperatives operating across 40 states with combined annual sales exceeding $2.8 billion. During his tenure Pugh built NCG into the second-largest purchaser in the natural foods market and one of the most successful cooperative enterprises in the country. He brings to GateBridge four decades of cooperative grocery expertise, supply chain mastery, and operational leadership at national scale. As Interim Managing Director of the Rosie's Grocery Cooperative Network, Pugh is responsible for standing up hub operations to the highest professional standards. His presence on the GateBridge board ensures that every financial projection, every operational assumption, and every partnership decision is grounded in the lived experience of someone who has built and run the most successful cooperative grocery network in the United States.
Vernon Oakes holds an MBA from Stanford University and has dedicated three decades to the cooperative movement in Washington, DC, building a property management company that specialized in limited equity housing cooperatives before serving as President of the National Association of Housing Cooperatives. In 2024, the National Cooperative Business Association inducted Oakes into the Cooperative Hall of Fame in recognition of his decades of contributions to cooperative development, education, and advocacy. He hosts Everything Co-op, a nationally syndicated weekly radio program with more than 400 episodes covering cooperative governance, development, and community impact. Oakes brings to the GateBridge board an unmatched depth of cooperative economics knowledge, a national network of cooperative leaders, and a lifelong commitment to the principle that cooperatives help people come out of poverty with dignity -- the same principle that animates every enterprise GateBridge builds.
Bryan A. Thomas brings more than two decades of financial services and investment management experience to his role as GateBridge Treasurer. His career spans leadership positions at Morgan Stanley Wealth Management, Bank of America Private Bank, and T. Rowe Price Group, where as Vice President and Senior Regional Investment Consultant he drove more than $500 million in gross sales and net new flows. His investment management background gives GateBridge's board the financial rigor and institutional credibility that philanthropic investors and impact lenders expect when making long-term capital commitments. A multi-generational Washingtonian who holds a BA in Economics from the University of Virginia and an MBA in Finance from Howard University, Thomas brings both the technical expertise and the community rootedness that define GateBridge's governance culture. He also serves on the board of United Church Funds, where he chairs the Business Development Committee.
Dr. Frederick W. Gooding, Jr. is the Dr. Ronald E. Moore Endowed Professor in Humanities and associate professor of African American Studies within the John V. Roach Honors College at Texas Christian University. Featured in national outlets including the New York Times, USA Today, and TIME magazine, Gooding is a scholar of popular culture who engages audiences on subtle racial patterns hidden in plain sight. A trained historian who earned his Ph.D. from Georgetown University, Gooding has authored multiple books including American Dream Deferred, which examines the growth and structural constraints of Black economic advancement in the postwar era. His scholarship on race, structural economic inequality, and the arrested economic development of Black communities provides GateBridge's board with the intellectual framework that grounds every enterprise the platform builds -- that community wealth building is not a supplement to economic justice but its prerequisite.
Jaslyn Bryant is an attorney whose career sits at the intersection of tax law, regulatory policy, and public advocacy -- precisely the expertise GateBridge's cooperative governance and 501(c)(3) architecture require. As a Tax Editor at Bloomberg Tax, she analyzed state and local tax laws for legal and financial professionals across the country. In her work with the DC government, she led the implementation and tax policy design of Washington's Paid Family Leave Program, coordinating across the DC Council, local businesses, workers' rights advocates, and the public to draft the regulations and policies that brought the program to life. That experience -- translating complex tax and regulatory frameworks into workable policy with real community consequences -- is directly applicable to the legal and policy architecture GateBridge builds for every enterprise in its platform. Bryant holds a BA in History from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte and a JD from The George Washington University Law School.
Richard F. Riley, Jr. is a partner in the Taxation Practice at Foley and Lardner in Washington, DC, where he focuses his practice on tax-exempt and nonprofit organizations, taxation of insurance companies, employment and withholding taxes, and tax litigation at the administrative, trial, and appellate levels. He has served as outside tax counsel to one of the nation's largest tax-exempt social welfare organizations and as tax and transactional counsel to a nationwide multi-campus nonprofit university through its conversion from for-profit to nonprofit status. Riley holds a BA from Yale University and a JD from Duke University School of Law and is rated AV Preeminent by Martindale-Hubbell, the highest performance rating in the peer review system. He has served as outside legal counsel to GateBridge since the organization's founding, providing the nonprofit tax expertise that ensures the platform fee architecture, 501(c)(3) compliance framework, and cooperative governance structure meet the highest standards of legal and regulatory integrity.
Dr. Anthony Goodwin serves as Chief Executive Officer of NCG Development Corporation, the development arm of National Co+op Grocers, the nation's largest cooperative grocery network representing more than 240 retail cooperatives with combined annual sales exceeding $2.8 billion. In this role Goodwin leads NCG's efforts to launch, capitalize, and support new cooperative grocery enterprises in underserved communities -- making him the national authority on exactly what GateBridge is building. He brings to his advisory role with GateBridge direct knowledge of cooperative development finance, NCG startup protocols, supply chain integration, and the operational benchmarks that distinguish successful cooperative grocery enterprises from those that fail. As Senior Advisor, Goodwin ensures that GateBridge and Rosie's benefit from the full institutional capacity of NCG at every stage of development.
Community Advisory Councils (CAC) or Community Leadership
Real community wealth can't be built for a community, it has to be built with one. That's why every GateBridge venture is guided by a Community Advisory Council (CAC): a group of residents and local leaders who shape priorities, give honest feedback, and help steer each project from the ground up. Paired with our commitment to source and hire locally, the CACs ensure that the people who live in a community lead the work and share in the wealth it creates.