Felipe Ventura
Oct 10, 2025
How do we build an economy where workers and communities build wealth, rather than having it extracted from them?
On October 9th, the Sustainable & Impact Finance Initiative at Berkeley Haas and the Center for Responsible Business brought together five leaders at the forefront of the ownership economy movement. The panel featured Nicole Middleton Holloway (Natural Investments), Michael Brownrigg (Apis & Heritage Capital Partners), Julie Menter (Transform Finance), leo freeman (Obran Cooperative), and Lindsay Smalling (Mission Driven Finance).
Understanding the Ownership Economy
The ownership economy represents a fundamental shift from concentrated ownership toward distributing both ownership and decision-making power to workers and communities who create value within businesses.
Here are some insights from the panelists:
Nicole Middleton Holloway shared Natural Investments’ 2023 transition to a perpetual purpose trust. The firm, founded 40 years ago and valued at $4 million, faced a succession challenge: advisors were independent contractors, not employees, making an ESOP impossible. The purpose trust model delivered multiple benefits including democratic decision-making, profit sharing, and mission protection in perpetuity.
Leo freeman described Obran Cooperative as a “worker-owned conglomerate with approximately 555 employees across healthcare, staffing, and financial services.” What makes Obran distinctive is its cross-sector ownership structure, where workers practice governance and shared decision-making across industries.
Michael Brownrigg shared that Apis & Heritage’s first fund raised $58 million and their second fund is targeting $250 million. The firm uses debt instead of equity products, a strategy that yields lower returns but aligns incentives between workers and investors. His advice: impact equity is measured against venture returns, but impact debt can be benchmarked to private credit.
Julie Menter identified key barriers to growth: tax advantages vary widely between ownership models, and converting lower-wage workplaces, while socially powerful, often yields modest financial returns. Perhaps most importantly, the field still lacks standardized metrics for evaluating “deep impact.”
The Power of Ownership: A Field Story
Michael shared a powerful story from a commercial landscaping company in El Paso. Before becoming employee-owned, crews routinely over-ordered plants for projects, throwing the extras away. A year after conversion, a worker suggested returning unused plants to the nursery for credit, finding a way to save $100,000 in a single quarter. The supervisor later reflected: “Before, that worker wouldn’t have spoken up. It wasn’t his money, and I wouldn’t have listened anyway. Ownership changed everything.”
Practical Steps for Getting Involved
The panelists offered several tangible next steps:
For individual investors:
• Examine your current holdings and understand what you’re investing in.
• Use tools like Invest Your Values and As You Sow’s Heart Rating tool.
• Explore funds and platforms through Transform Finance.
For impact investors:
• Consider patient, flexible debt that aligns with worker and business repayment capacities.
• Avoid short-term, extractive capital structures.
The resilience data: During the pandemic, 120 of 121 worker-owned cooperatives in the Seed Commons network survived through 2022 — compared to massive closures among traditional businesses. The difference was patient capital and relational financing.
For everyone:
Normalize the conversation. When you learn that companies like Publix are employee-owned, mention it. Every small conversation helps mainstream the ownership economy.
Resources for Learning More
Leo recommended the Social Movement Investing framework from the Center for Economic Democracy, which compares investment models and offers metrics for evaluating social transformation.
Also mentioned:
• Ownership Capital Lab
• Transform Finance educational webinars
Looking Ahead
The ownership economy is no longer fringe. It’s a fast-growing sector with proven models and significant capital flows. The challenge now is standardization, education, and scale.
As Michael noted, many investors want their capital to matter and to support community wealth, but they need pathways that balance return expectations with impact integrity.
The ownership economy offers that rare balance: building wealth for those who create it while producing resilient, thriving enterprises.
The question is no longer “Does this work?” it’s “How do we scale this?”
How Blueprint Helps Scale the Ownership Economy
At Blueprint, we’re building the digital infrastructure that helps funds, intermediaries, and community enterprises operationalize the ownership economy and turn values into measurable impact.
If your organization is exploring how to structure, deploy, or track capital in alignment with community ownership, we’d love to connect. Book a call with our team to explore how Blueprint can support your strategy.
