Matthew Epperson (he/him) is the Athens (GA) Local Outreach Coordinator with the Georgia Center for Employee Ownership. He is also a Board Director with Hive Mind Community Investment Co-op, and Shared Capital Co-op. He is a solidarity economy practitioner and community organizer by passion and by training, having invested ~10 years within the US consumer-owned grocery retail natural foods co-op movement at Daily Groceries Co-op, and collaborating with the Economic Justice Coalition to form the first worker co-op in Athens, Peachy Green Clean Co-op. In 2019 he moved on to work in retail finance for one of the country's largest credit unions by asset size (Suncoast Credit Union), and then onto a platform healthcare research co-op (Savvy Co-op). He recently served as the Employee Ownership (EO) Domain Expert for Zolidar (including hosting the podcast Bicycle for the EO Mind available wherever podcasts are), which is a generative AI and SaaS platform building the “easier button” for the employees of small to medium businesses to buyout their workplaces through broad-based EO (whether worker co-op, EOT, or ESOP).

He is a 2015 graduate of the Master's of Management: Co-operatives and Credit Unions program from Saint Mary's Sobey School of Business. In 2017 he founded the Georgia Co-op Development Center, the only statewide technical assistance provider in Georgia to startup and post-buyout co-ops. He is a contributing author to the newly released report The Practice and Promise of Social Co-ops in collaboration with the Rocky Mountain Employee Ownership Center.

He loves teaching about shared ownership, biking, hiking, zazen meditation with his local sangha Athens Zen Group, discussing books and movies with his wife, Julia, and being cat dad to Happy and Marvin. He is a black belt in a Japanese-Korean family of martial arts (Tango Su Doo, Aikido and Jujitsu), a regular performer with the Athens local improv comedy troupe Flying Squid Comedy, and identifies as an ambivert but is probably actually an introvert if he's being honest.