I enjoyed interviewing Vernon Oakes and asked him a few questions about his remarkable career.

Vernon, tell us a few things to help Columinate readers know you better: people and places that are most important to you.

My parents, Odell Oakes Sr. and Florrie Smith Oakes, met while serving in the US Army during World War II and married in New York City, where I was born. We later moved to Bluefield, West Virginia. I attended public schools, and due to a speech impediment, I was put in a “special ed” class in the 4th, 5th, and 6th grades. Words and reading didn’t come naturally to me, and reading still isn’t my favorite thing. But math made sense and would later help me to make sense of life and the business pursuits I had. School was tough due to the added factor of racism and integration in 1955, when I was entering the 3rd grade.

I experienced racism often from the elementary school level, where the white kids called me the “N” word so often that it could have been my middle name, to college level, where our once-black-majority campus would spend quality time protesting the actions and policies of the first white college president, who was accused of intentionally pursuing the reduction of Black student enrollment. [After] what many perceived as a racially motivated bombing of our campus gymnasium, I had difficulty engaging in my studies, and my grades dropped, even for my favorite courses. I had to take a few courses at other colleges while working.

Despite the discrimination I faced and the added pressures of speech challenges, I excelled and became well-known through playing sports, but I decided I would choose academics to be strong in. Before I knew it, I was surprising myself by making great grades and making the Dean’s list. From there, things looked up, and I never looked back.

“Columinate is the culmination of all that I have learned. It’s at the very heart and intersection of my commitment to empowering people, communities, and the co-op movement itself.”

Describe your education, professional work history, organizations and people that have been especially influential.

I attended the HBCU, Bluefield State College, obtained a Master’s degree at Penn State in mathematics and was working on a doctorate, but paused to begin teaching at City University in New York, then two years at San Diego State, becoming the first Chair of African American studies. I taught math there as well and then resumed my studies and went on to obtain my MBA from Stanford University.

After doing market research for Cummins Engine Company, and running a distributorship for them in San Juan, Puerto Rico for many years, I taught marketing at Howard University and ran their MBA program. I decided to start my own business and established Oakes Management Inc., managing multi-family apartments, condos, and co-ops in and around D.C.

Important influencers would have to be my mother: Florrie Oakes taught me how to study, as I watched her wake up in the wee hours of the morning to study to complete her undergraduate degree at Bluefield State College, when I was in my early teens. Merrill Gainer, my high school football coach, taught me that “A winner never quits and a quitter never wins,” and “When the going gets tough, the tough gets going.” Larry A. Johnson, Dean of the Business School at Howard University and my boss, taught me what he calls “Simplistic Living” and how to have joy in life.

How were you introduced to the idea of cooperatives?

Oakes Management Inc. started managing housing cooperatives, and I fell in love with the co-op concept while observing mostly older black women who were running these businesses exceptionally well, holding each other and everyone accountable, and making extremely good long-term decisions for the business.

Another thing that impressed me about co-ops was when Dame Pauline Green, who was president of the International Cooperative Alliance at the time and a guest on my radio show, said, “Co-ops help people come out of poverty with dignity.” When members have a voice, control, ownership, and income, their self-worth increases.

While I was doing some work with the Potomac Association of Housing Co-ops, becoming the President of the National Housing Co-op Association and serving on their Development Preservation Committee, it was suggested that if developers could build housing co-ops, then people would buy them. I knew we would first have to create momentum by first sharing the benefits. This was the inspiration for starting my own radio program. In June of 2013, immediately following my first appearance on another local show, I was offered my own, scheduled to run through National Co-op Month. Everything Co-op Communications LLC was born and has been alive for ten years. We have over 350 show archives on our Everything Co-op webpage, on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and Sound Cloud.

How did you come to join Columinate?

One year, while serving on the Cooperative Hall of Fame inductees committee, someone shared an idea about starting a property management business to manage mobile homes that residents bought as a co-op. That someone sitting next to me was Mark Goehring, the manager of Columinate. One key factor for me regarding a true co-op is not so much calling themselves a co-op or the legal business structure, but rather how an organization applies the cooperative values and principles, particularly the ethical values of honesty, openness, social responsibility, and caring for others. I felt that Columinate was doing that with their transparency around finances, soliciting input, and genuinely caring for people, so I decided to join.

How do you envision your work and Columinate’s as mutually supportive? What are some challenges in this work?

I would like to focus more on the distinction of balancing management vs. governance of a property and ensuring they work hand in hand. The challenges: getting all information and accurate reports in a timely manner, consistently. Improvement of emergency service response times. Balancing the median family income with providing quality and cost friendly services for the families that own the co-op. It’s exciting, and we’re doing a good job, but there is always room for improvement.

What are you most excited about?

1. Improving the consistency of reporting systems, processes, distribution, and accuracy of reporting, so that the reports can provide the data for proper analysis and use for efficient decision-making that would build, grow, and help the business to be more successful.

2. Columinate’s heart for service and helping people—I’m not just excited about that, but also very proud.

3. Learning more about and applying the Policy Governance model to housing co-ops.

You mentioned earlier that math would later shape or influence some things later in life. How did mathematics do that?

I love math for the utility of it. But I was always looking for, “How can I apply this math to everyday life?” In the MBA program, I ran into internal conflicts with the probabilities of management vs. the black and white of math—with an 80 percent chance of something happening or not happening, you may have to fall back on something else. That was difficult for me, because I required a more definitive answer, the way math resolves.

The marketing research involved cost studies, distribution, markups, etc., I would have to analyze what happens to each product—in terms of the distribution locations, price changes in different locations, cost differentials, cost analysis, savings, where the gaps were, and more. Working it all out and making sense of it was all math! So, math integrated with marketing and business perfectly for me, and I had the most phenomenal time teaching that at Howard. That was the equation I was personally always seeking to solve.

Everything Co-op and my work at Columinate is the culmination of all that I have learned, experienced, and groomed for. It’s at the very heart and intersection of my commitment to empowering people, communities, and the co-op movement itself. The icing on the cake now is that I also get to do some really great math.