Executive Director
New Zealand Cooperatives Association

In the role of Executive Director of the New Zealand Cooperatives Association since November 2006, Ramsey Margolis brought with him a wealth of experience in communications and business development.

His interest in cooperatives began as a child in London when the family’s milk was delivered by the Cooperative Dairy’s electric milk floats.

With a working life moulded in London’s typesetting trade, when technology was reducing the number of jobs in the printing industry in the seventies and eighties, Ramsey helped some of his colleagues set up worker co-ops in the print and the building industries.

In late eighties London, he set up a specialist foreign language typesetting business, Accent On Type. Very successful, this morphed into one of the UK’s premier translation agencies, renaming itself World Accent.

As well as remaining a director of World Accent, until May 2011 Ramsey served on the Board of Managers of Washington DC-based DotCooperation LLC, sponsor of .coop, the top-level internet domain exclusively for cooperatives.

For seven years a volunteer on the phones at Samaritans of Wellington, Ramsey now serves as a trustee for St Andrews Trust for the study of Religion and Society, and the Aotearoa Buddhist Education Trust.