Joshua Mathews Cook

Agricultural Advisor

Chef's Ingredient Farm Initiative — Washington–Baltimore Region

• Advise a private investor group siting an intensive ingredient farm for chefs, on the model Stone Barns established in the Hudson Valley: livestock, orchard, garden, and fermentary run as one system, with trial rows grown to the specifications of the kitchens that buy from them.
• Assess candidate properties for soil, water, and existing plantings, and design the crop and orchard program.
• Build the case for how a historic property pays for the care it needs — county permitting and health-department capacity, historic rehabilitation tax credits, agricultural operating credit and grant capital, and the agreements between the people who own the ground and the people who farm it.
• Work week to week across the corridor's chef, grower, and supplier community.

Principal, Independent Practice

Baltimore, MD & West Virginia

• Advise institutions, public agencies, and founders on strategy, capital access, and program design.
• Secured U.S. Economic Development Administration grant funding for remote-work market research for the City of Wheeling, WV; held a State of West Virginia Small Business Development Center vendor contract delivering small-business recovery services.
• Designing a Baltimore vacant-property proposal that pairs row-house acquisition with a trades-skills series and shared tool access, so young Baltimoreans build equity by owning a building outright and improving it — with the Maryland film production tax credit structured as one leg of the financing.

Program Manager

Jefferson County Development Authority — Harpers Ferry, WV

• Served as the county's primary point of contact for a proposed $100M destination performing arts and agritourism development — leading site visits and stakeholder engagement and speaking to the County Commission on project matters.
• Drafted and administered a competitive RFP end to end: distribution to 100+ contacts, intake and evaluation of eight bids, interviews, and a formal recommendation to the Board of Directors.
• Coordinated capital and site development across County Engineering, Planning, Zoning, and Parks & Recreation, aligning schedules, permitting, and contract services against budget.

Appointed Member, Agritourism Task Force

Jefferson County, West Virginia

• Appointed for hospitality and visitor-economy expertise; interviewed dozens of regional operators alongside the county agricultural extension office to develop guidance on visitor experience, access, and safety on working agricultural properties.

Visual Arts Chair, Organizing Committee

WorldPride 2025 — Washington, DC

• Built the citywide visual arts program for an international cultural event — the exhibition and installation slate, and the artists, galleries, venues, foreign embassies, corporate sponsors, and cultural institutions coordinated into one public program across the District.

Independent Curator

Eleven:11 Gallery — Washington, DC

• Curated MEN ARE ANIMALS, an exhibition of photography, painting, and sculpture by queer artists from DC, Maryland, West Virginia, and New York — including Gio Black Peter, former Tom of Finland Foundation artist-in-residence, and Jeanette Spicer, whose work is held in the Museum of Modern Art Library.
• Handled artist relations, selection, install, opening night, and press.

Founder, Artist Collective & Creative Producer

New York City

• Founded a collective of nightlife performers and photographers — Chantis Parks, Eva Mueller, Nico Kiray, Austin Ruffer — that produced a photography collection still serving as source material for exhibitions and film projects.
• Managed production, booking, and budgets, including commercial engagements with Soho House, Tommy Hilfiger, and Playboy; served as business manager for a New York production company.

Economic Development Research Fellow & Adjunct Professor

Office of the Provost, West Virginia University

• Held a statewide fellowship on West Virginia Forward in partnership with the WV Department of Commerce, coordinating initiatives on Opportunity Zones, small-business capital access, fintech policy, and cybersecurity workforce development.
• Built and led capital-access working groups with the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond, the U.S. Small Business Administration, and the Benedum Foundation; advanced food access and rural food-business capital under the University's land-grant mission.
• Created the WV Blockchain Working Group with the Secretary of State; the group's work contributed to one of the first state fintech sandbox innovation frameworks in the country.
• Taught undergraduate Entrepreneurial Finance in the College of Business and Economics.

Founder & Chief Executive Officer

Nextdoorganics — New York City & North Scituate, RI

• Grew the entire first season by hand on a family farm in North Scituate, Rhode Island, and sold it at farmers markets across New York City.
• Built it into a multi-million-dollar sustainable food and agriculture business serving Brooklyn and Manhattan out of its own processing and distribution hub — a seven-day operation with perishable inventory and thin margins.
• Owned the full P&L: annual budgeting, labor forecasting, food and COGS management, purchasing controls, vendor contracts, facilities, and month-end analysis.
• Hired, trained, scheduled, and managed a staff of 12 and a network of 50+ growers and makers — urban rooftop farms, hydroponic greenhouses, foragers, regional organic growers, small-batch producers — and built the service standards and performance practices the team ran on.
• Led the company through a transition to worker ownership, putting it in the hands of the people who ran it.

Residential Teacher & Farm Staff

500-acre Montessori-model wilderness school

• Lived on site and worked the school's land and animals alongside teaching — the daily rhythm of a working property that also has to be safe and legible to visitors.

Organic Farm Apprentice

WWOOF — Hungary, Greece, and the Netherlands

• Worked a season of apprenticeships on organic farms across three countries, learning growing systems from the people running them.

London School of Economics and Political Science

Anthropology of Learning & Cognition — with Merit

On completing the program, drove from London to Timbuktu, Mali, with fifteen other students over six weeks in a caravan.

Georgetown University, Walsh School of Foreign Service

Culture & Politics — cum laude, Honors