Nikishka Iyengar is the founder of The Guild, a worker-owned cooperative building community ownership of land, housing, and real estate as a pathway to economic democracy. As a social entrepreneur, community organizer, and writer, she works across the pillars of land, labor, and capital to advance economic and racial justice, community-led development, and climate resilience. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and Nonprofit Quarterly.
Nikishka was a 2025 Loeb Fellow at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and is currently a Democracy Visiting Fellow at the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation at Harvard Kennedy School. Her research interests include the histories and contemporary ecologies of alternative institution-building; the intersections of worker cooperatives and union organizing; cross-movement strategies linking labor and tenant organizing; and coordinated capital strategies in worker pension funds, including divest/invest efforts, shareholder advocacy, and directing worker capital away from war and oppression. She is currently working on a book project tentatively titled, The Means Are The Ends: Building Economic Democracy and a World Beyond Capitalism.