Tamah Yisrael

Born and raised in Birmingham, Alabama — in a tight-knit community forged from the coal mining industry — Tamah grew up practicing cooperation before she ever had a name for it. Collective marketplaces, shared childcare, and communal economics were simply how her neighborhood functioned. She carried those roots into a professional path that moved through accounting and business management, paralegal studies, recording studio operations, artist management, financial consulting, and nonprofit leadership before converging on the cooperative movement.

When Tamah and her husband, Dr. Lud Yisrael, relocated their family to New Orleans, they brought with them the Neo Jazz School of Music — an institution Dr. Lud had founded in Birmingham in 2004, and which they reopened in New Orleans in 2011. What began as a culturally rooted music school for youth became a magnet for community organizing, and eventually the physical home base from which the Yisrael family's cooperative ecosystem grew.

Tamah's formal cooperative leadership began when she joined the New Orleans Food Co-op as a member-owner and was subsequently asked to join the Board of Directors. She stepped in at a critical moment — when the co-op was financially struggling and needed strategic governance leadership — and helped steward its turnaround as a board leader and eventually Board President. That hands-on experience leading a real, member-owned enterprise through a financial crisis is the foundation on which her expertise in cooperative governance, turnarounds, and board leadership rests.

In 2019, while still serving as Board President of the New Orleans Food Co-op, she co-founded Cooperation New Orleans — using her community center on North Claiborne Avenue in the 7th Ward of New Orleans as the original weekly gathering space.