About Cheryl Conner

Cheryl Conner completed her B.A. in Economics, summa cum laude at Mount Holyoke College, where she wrote an award-winning thesis critiquing mainstream economic theory. She earned the Masters in Applied Economics at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor and served as a Senior Research Associate at Charles River Associates and the Research Faculty at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. She received her law degree at Harvard Law School, where she earned awards for her mediation skills and Co-founded the first Women's Law Association.  As a lawyer, she practiced at the Boston law firm of Goodwin, Procter and Hoar, serving both private clients on antitrust, litigation and environmental matters and pro bono clients in civil rights issues. In the public sphere, she served as an Asst. Attorney General in Massachusetts, handling energy, telecommunications and appellate matters. She served in the Mass. Legislature, as Sen. Counsel on the Commerce and Labor Committee. She also served as Asst. U.S. Attorney on civil litigation and bank fraud for the Department of Justice in Boston, and on antitrust matters in the D.C. Antitrust Division. 

She taught law at Suffolk, Boston and Northeastern Law Schools and economics at Mount Holyoke College. More recently, she teaches at an MBA in Sustainability Program at Marlboro College (alternative business models, governance and systems thinking). She has managed research projects on corporate ethics and fraud at Northeastern Law School's TCRC.  

Cheryl has been a thought leader, promoting alternative holistic, collaborative and spiritual approaches to law and legal education through public speaking, conference facilitation, writing, curriculum development and experiential learning. In the business arena, she has promoted socially responsible business, conscious leadership, systems-thinking forward-dialoguing and alternative business models and governance through teaching, public speaking and consulting.

Her recent interest in local sustainable grass roots inspired alternative health organizations was spurred by a personal health crisis and federal legislation. She founded H20: Holistic Health Opportunities and co-founded the Vermont Health and Wellness Cooperative in 2010 and 2011 and continues to speak national about these opportunities for community collaboration.

Cheryl is a pianist, choral director and composer who has a regular music improvization practice and has composed two musicals, a number of choral pieces and notebooks full of piano solos. 

Cheryl now calls herself a spiritual, ecological socio-political economist, not because she has the answers, but because she continues to believe that it is the only way that questions can reasonably be framed.