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Edward W. De Barbieri ’08 Awarded Fulbright to Study Irish Co-operative Enterprise
The Irish Fulbright Commission is very selective, choosing about five graduate students from the United States each year. Students are responsible for securing their own placements at universities in Ireland. De Barbieri, an Edward V. Sparer Public Interest Law Fellow, had support in preparing his application materials from Professor Maryellen Fullerton, Fulbright advisor at the Law School, and Professor Stacy Caplow, who was a Fulbright scholar herself last fall, teaching at the University College Cork Faculty of Law. The grandson of a Brooklyn grocery store owner, De Barbieri grew up in New Haven, Connecticut, and earned a B.A. in Philosophy at Boston College and an M.A. in Religion with an Ethics concentration from Yale Divinity School. The germ of the idea for his study took root right after college, when he spent a year at a community development clinic at Yale Law School. In researching innovative banking programs for poor workers, he visited a successful credit union that was more akin to the Irish model of a workers’ co-op than most in the United States. “The Irish model is compelling to me because it has traditionally played a central role in tackling problems associated with disadvantage and exclusion,” De Barbieri said. The idea developed further during the summer before law school, when De Barbieri visited Ireland. His interest continued to grow with each new law school experience. As a Sparer Fellow he worked on affordable housing at Enterprise Community Partners, Inc.; as a BLSPI Fellow this summer he is working at the Urban Justice Center’s Community Development Project, which represents several worker co-ops in New York City; and he interned at the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. In his proposal for the scholarship, De Barbieri wrote, “Co-operative movements have proven to be economically more viable in poor and isolated communities than free market enterprises. The question is why? It has been shown that co-operative models hold certain values in common,” he explained, such as “self-help, self-reliance, democracy, equality, equity and solidarity.” He plans to explore these aspects in his research of Barryroe Co-op, which was organized under the leadership of a Catholic priest. “What people believe and how they make their daily living is very connected. How they relate to one another sets forth an ideal for human interaction.”
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