Transform Finance

🔥Today, we are thrilled to release Ownership Lens Investing: Capitalizing the employee ownership opportunity. This briefing is designed for investors and funders who are looking for effective ways to accelerate the growth of Employee Ownership (EO). 🕶️Ownership lens investing is a growing movement, akin to climate or gender lens investing, that focuses on expanding ownership opportunities of businesses, real estate, and other assets for individuals and households who are disconnected from the asset-building tools that create wealth. The urgency is huge, given our nation’s stubborn wage and wealth gaps, with inequality arguably being one of the great crises of our time. 👩🏭Broad-based employee ownership is a powerful solution to address growing economic inequality. Employee-owned businesses build wealth for workers, have higher financial performance, lower turnover rates, better measures of job quality, are more resilient to economic shocks and, importantly, reduce gender and racial inequality. 🤝We partnered with the Ownership Capital Lab to dive deep into the challenges and opportunities facing Employee Ownership funds. The briefing is informed by in-depth interviews we conducted with the vast majority of funds in the U.S. that are currently operating or being planned, as well as our teams’ past research and experience. ➡️Access the briefing here: https://lnkd.in/g5mdqnEV

Our Program Director Julie Menter shared some highlights from our research into Alternative Ownership Enterprises on The Ownership Economy podcast. Check-it out!

🎇We're looking forward to our next webinar on Thursday, December 12th at 11am PT / 2pm ET to share the latest in-depth research into employee ownership investing opportunities, which we conducted with the Ownership Capital Lab! 💡Julie Menter and Alison Lingane will share the key insights from the research. 🧠Experienced investors in employee ownership Priya Parrish, Partner and Chief Investment Officer at Impact Engine and Amon Anderson, Managing Director at Acumen America will also join to share their practical experience and advice. ➡️Register now! https://lnkd.in/gA_xADqP

Curt Lyon and Julie Menter just wrapped up 3 days at the SOCAP conference, a gathering of the "impact economy". Want to learn more? ⬇️⬇️⬇️

We are thrilled to welcome Susan Ozawa Perez, Ph.D. to the Transform Finance team! 🌟🤩🔥 Susan is an economist, policy advocate, and social impact investment expert committed to advancing economic and social equity. She has managed over $230 million in impact investments, led shareholder campaigns at major corporations, and worked on significant labor and financial reforms. With her expertise and passion for sustainability and equity, she will serve as Lead Researcher on a new initiative that will research the structures, contexts, and frameworks that allow businesses to prioritize a set of values rather than financial returns. Our team is distributed around the US but Curt and Julie had a chance to meet Susan in person in Los Angeles last week. Please join us in welcoming her to the team! 👏👏👏

Curious about Cooperatives and how to finance them? Our colleague Julie Menter is moderating a panel at the upcoming Opportunity Finance Network conference on this topic (Tuesday 10/22, 4pm).

If you're a fellow traveler in the shared ownership world, you can feel the momentum that we've built and the opportunities to level up scale. To make the most of this momentum, and build off of recent conversations at the field level, TF, the Predistribution Initiative, and many others (all mentioned below!) have organized a community-building session next week. This gathering is a collective, pivotal conversation, where we'll discuss as a group how to collaborate, and what needs can be filled by a central organizing body. If you see yourself as a fellow traveler in this world of shared ownership, please RSVP in the link below! All voices are needed to make this as collective as possible.

In our work, we focus on aligning the flow of capital with Transformative Finance principles: 1️⃣ Those affected have the chance to design outcomes, govern processes, and share in ownership. 2️⃣ Investors add more value than what they extract as returns. 3️⃣ Risks and returns are fairly allocated among stakeholders. 💵While an estimated $8 trillion is invested in impact-driven projects, only a small fraction truly follows these principles. We often point to inspiring examples as demonstrations that these principles can be implemented in practice, with real dollars. One community that is paving that path is Collective Action for Just Finance, for whom our Program Director Julie Menter recently moderated a webinar highlighting ⭐Cooperatives and Community Ownership funds ⭐ 💻During the webinar, we heard from four innovative funds from the Transformative 25 portfolio that prioritize communities over external investors and empower those communities to govern the funds. In addition to their innovative structures, these funds are building bold solutions to critical challenges of our time in housing, food, climate and inequality. 👁️🗨️Watch the recording to learn how these funds, FINAPOP, People's Solar Energy Fund, Right To The City Alliance and Seed Commons, are working to create community controlled energy systems, land, housing, farming, financial and community resources. While these funds might still be operating at a smaller scale, they are already seeing how the example they are setting is showing what’s possible and shaping policy and the behavior of larger institutions. https://lnkd.in/gYmDRFnH ❓What funds are you looking to for inspiration?

So grateful I got to participate in what might have been the birth of the Ownership Investing movement at Assemble100! 🎇   🕶️Ownership-lens investing is about growing the assets of lower income communities, recognizing that wealth, not just income, is a key lever to reduce inequality.   Here are few insights and questions I'm walking away with: ⭐ Eliminating the wealth gap is possible - we saw unprecedented drop during COVID thanks to government funding. There are an impressive array of proven efforts - such as employee ownership, baby bonds and shared ownership of real estate - that can shrink the gap even further. 🌩️This broad movement seeks to bring together people with a range of perspectives, in particular about whether our current economic system needs to be fundamentally changed. Can we hold the tensions and be explicit about trade-offs while still working together to build a movement? 💪The conversations about ownership investing often focus on wealth building, but true ownership provides governance rights also. Can this movement contribute to building power for lower income communities and communities of color to build an economy that truly works for everyone?   🙏Many thanks to Gary Community Ventures, The Aspen Institute Financial Security Program and The Bridgespan Group for hosting a great set of conversations and intentional connections.   🤔If you want to learn more about Ownership Investing, check-out the Transform Finance webinar from earlier this year featuring the most excellent Smitha Das and Santhosh Ramdoss https://lnkd.in/g-W_pw9X

🔓To unlock regenerative business, we need new models of business ownership! Check out Julie Menter and Erinch Sahan's article in Pioneers Post published today. 💪Some good quotes: - Investors [...] might support your mission when it helps those financial parameters, but challenge it where returns are below expected benchmarks - Alternative Ownership Enterprises (AOEs) have demonstrated better financial performance, lower turnover, improved job quality, and higher wages, while expanding wealth-building opportunities to more people and reducing gender and racial inequality - The question that faces us now is not whether Alternative Ownership Enterprises are desirable (socially, ecologically and economically), but how to ensure they are financed. This requires innovation and ambition not just among entrepreneurs, but among investors as well 📰 Read the full article here:  https://lnkd.in/g_K-r6kR