About Noémi

Hi there! Here’s a little bit of information about me.

Where I Live

I live in Montclair, NJ in the US.
Not long ago I was living in Genoa, Italy — the left armpit of Italy. Here are pictures of our apartment.

My Family

I married Paul Fitzpatrick in 2005. My parents live in New Jersey. My eldest brother Nicolas lives in Los Angeles. My next eldest brother Vladimir lives in New Jersey.

Where I’m From

Three of my grandparents were Polish Jews and one was a Romanian Jew. My parents grew up in Poland and married there. Then they left Poland and moved to France, where they had my two older brothers and me. When I was three we moved to New Jersey. This is the short version.

Education

My undergraduate degrees (from 1998) in economics and chemistry/science journalism are from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. My master’s (from 2005) in community economic development is from the school of CED at Southern New Hampshire University. (more information)

Work

My first job out of university was as a junior research assistant at the World Bank, in the Office of the Vice President for Development Economics (Joseph Stiglitz, at the time).

Next I moved to Boston to be the associate editor at the Nonprofit Quarterly, a magazine for nonprofit managers.

I then became a consultant and principal at Ownership Associates, a small consulting firm serving employee-owned companies throughout the U.S. and abroad.

In Italy I started an informal support group for spouses and partners of researchers at the Italian Institute of Technology, to help newcomers adjust to life in Genoa.

I am currently a freelance editor, writer, and researcher focusing on community economic development issues, and I am an Adjunct Professor at Montclair State University, teaching a freshman honors seminar on Global Civilization.

Extracurricular

In Genoa, I volunteered about once a week at the Bottega Solidale fair trade shop beneath the Genoa Aquarium. I was also part of the volunteer school outreach team for the Bottega Solidale.

In the past I have done quite a lot of volunteer teaching, including designing an economics course for my friends. This “mainstream” course was a necessary complement to the “alternative” course I taught with my friend Owen the year before at MIT.

Other volunteer work has centered around cooperatives, in particular worker cooperatives. I am participating in the Data Commons Project to design and build an accurate, comprehensive, public database of cooperative economic initiatives. (This is in many ways a continuation of my master’s thesis work.) I am on the board of Green Worker Cooperatives, which helps to create environmentally beneficial worker-owned businesses in the South Bronx. Previously I served on the coordinating committee of the Eastern Conference for Workplace Democracy (ECWD), helping to put together the 2005 conference. I was also on the board of Cooperative Life, the Northeastern federation of cooperatives, for about two years.

During my stay in Italy I took a comics-drawing course at Art’Intorno.

While in Boston, before I started my master’s degree, I frequently wrote art reviews for ArtsMedia Magazine.

As an undergraduate at M.I.T. I started and ran “How to Achieve World Peace Using Common Kitchen Utensils,” a cooking and discussion group.

Some Pictures

We keep photos here.