Amanda Branch is the IT Director
Why did you choose to participate in the Worker Owner transition team?
I like the idea of the workers getting a say in decisions that affect them. I’ve worked for a lot of companies where the CEO can just change policies on a whim, to the detriment of the workers, so I like the idea of a collaborative approach much better.
Why is it important to you for D3 to operate cooperatively? And what about co-ops are important to you?
I think it’s very important to make decisions with different points of view taken into account. With us working cooperatively, everyone’s lived experience can be used to inform those decisions. This enables us to achieve a greater level of success than if those experiences and points of view weren’t involved in the process.
What key takeaways do you have from your involvement with the D3 Worker Owner transition?
You learn a lot about the values of the people you’re working with, going through this process. In our case, it turns out our values are pretty much in alignment, in a lot of ways, so it really helped to make the process easier.
What are you most looking forward to as a worker owner in 2022?
Seeing how I can help guide D3 towards reaching more and more people, with the work we do.
More about Amanda
Amanda comes to D3 with a diverse IT background, spanning the last 25 years. In her previous jobs, most of her work either as a software developer, or as a systems administrator, involved working with databases to some degree – but it wasn’t until her first work in data warehousing that she really realized the depth of her passion for working with data. She currently serves as D3’s IT Director. Amanda has always had a passion for computing, which she discovered early in her childhood, writing code for the first time at 6 years old. She started working in IT shortly after high school, having found a desire to learn skills in more depth than the Computer Science curricula of the early 90s were able to provide.