Growing Investment Capital for Employee Ownership Can Fundamentally Change the Face of Ownership in The U.S. and Address Racial Wealth Gaps

Authors

  • Alison Lingane Ownership Capital Lab

Keywords:

Employee ownership, EO, Ownership economy, Ownership lens investing, Ownership investing, Impact investing, Ownership Capital Lab, PRIs, MRIs, Mission investing, Philanthropic investments, Philanthropic capital, Values-aligned investing, Catalytic capital, Guarantees, Silver tsunami, Retiring baby boomers, Great Wealth Transfer, Women wealth holders, NextGen wealth holders, Donor-advised funds, DAFs, ESOPs, Employee Stock Ownership Plans, Worker cooperatives, EOTs, Employee Ownership Trusts, Wealth building, Racial wealth gap, Wealth gap, Quality jobs, Economic mobility

Abstract

The employee ownership (EO) field sits at the precipice of massive economic and social change in the United States. There is an unprecedented opportunity to advance EO to serve as a counterbalance to the forces in our economy that are driving wealth concentration, and investment capital is a critical component to drive this growth.

Employee ownership is a bipartisan, market-based, research-backed, and proven solution to addressing the racial and wealth gaps in the United States. Today, there is a unique opportunity to scale its impact, given the Great Wealth Transfer of $124 trillion paired with the wave of retiring business owners—dubbed the silver tsunami—that represents nearly 3 million companies needing to find buyers that could be transitioned to employee ownership.

Employee ownership has myriad documented benefits at the individual, family, and community levels and for society at large, including creating quality jobs, building wealth for employee-owners, strengthening and more resilient businesses, and preserving local business ownership. Scaling this highly impactful business model addresses many issues that nonprofits and foundations work hard every day to address.

The nonprofit Ownership Capital Lab plays a critical market-making role in the EO capital marketplace. It has the ambitious goal to support the growth of EO by increasing EO investment capital by $1 billion by 2030, to create tens of thousands more employee-owners in the United States, and then to 10x employee ownership capital from there.

 There is vast potential to increase capital for EO amidst generational shifts that change who owns wealth and how that wealth is held. This includes through the Great Wealth Transfer, which will create a more diverse set of wealth holders, with more female and younger wealth holders who are more impact-oriented and aligned than any group that has come before; through unlocking investment and grant capital from donor-advised fund capital (currently at $252 billion and could increase by $3 trillion over the next two decades); and through public policy that unlocks guarantees, public investment dollars and other supports for EO.

Author Biography

Alison Lingane, Ownership Capital Lab

Alison Lingane is a nationally recognized employee ownership expert. A serial social entrepreneur, she has dedicated her career to leveraging business as a force for good. Alison is the Founder of the Ownership Capital Lab, which focuses on capital as a growth and scale lever for employee ownership. The Lab identifies, pilots, and supports the uptake of strategies for financing employee ownership at greater scale. This work builds on her 10+ years as co-founder of Project Equity, a leader in the movement to harness employee ownership to maintain thriving local business communities, honor selling owners’ legacies, and address income and wealth inequality, and on her role as founder and manager of the Employee Ownership Catalyst Fund. Alison’s successes have been recognized by fellowship invitations from Echoing Green, The Aspen Institute, Rutgers University, the Just Economy Institute, UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, and Ashoka, where her work was featured in the book America’s Path Forward. In 2022, with her co-founder Hilary Abell, Alison received the Heinz Award for the Economy, established to honor the memory of U.S. Senator John Heinz and to celebrate the vision and spirit that produce achievements of lasting good.

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Published

2025-02-19

How to Cite

Lingane, A. (2025). Growing Investment Capital for Employee Ownership Can Fundamentally Change the Face of Ownership in The U.S. and Address Racial Wealth Gaps. Social Innovations Journal, 29. Retrieved from https://socialinnovationsjournal.com/index.php/sij/article/view/9441

Issue

Vol. 29 (2025): Trends in Employee Ownership and Not-for-Profit Fiscal Sponsorship Management Models

Section

Disruptive Innovations

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Copyright (c) 2025 Alison Lingane (Author)

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