“Ownership is having a moment.” It is thrilling to hear David Banks or Roody Senatus from ImpactAlpha utter these words, given their bird’s eye view of everything going on in our space.

These stats from the Aspen Institute underscore the need for us to focus on Ownership, and to move it from a moment to a movement:

“A stunning 51% of U.S. households have expenses that are at least equal to—if not greater than—their income, and 55% lack the necessary savings to weather a simultaneous income drop and expense spike. And the bottom 50% of the population holds just 3% of the nation’s wealth.”

I am feeling very hopeful about our ability to do this. The energy and the desire to build and grow and expand and come together to do more is palpable. Increasingly, we are putting our proverbial oars in the water and rowing in the same direction.

Last month, I participated in three distinct in-person gatherings where conversations focused on visioning, aligning, organizing, and action planning: 

• September kicked off with a powerful conversation at the Worker Coop Conference focused on capital action planning, that I co-facilitated with Greg Brodsky at Start.coop.
• Gary Community Ventures, Aspen and Bridgespan hosted ASSEMBLE 100, a curated convening on ownership lens investing. “[W]e believe that the ownership economy is here. It’s time to transform the future of wealth and ownership in this country, a movement that will require conviction, disruption and an unwavering commitment to equity.”
• September wrapped with a powerful Summit of faith- based investors, where Felipe Witchger organized a group of family offices for action-oriented planning around employee ownership investing, that we will be carrying forward together as a blueprint for investor engagement. 

 

Then, earlier this month, we hosted a virtual conversation, focused on donor-advised funds (DAFs), lifting up the reality that today there are nearly a quarter-of-a-trillion dollars in assets sitting in DAF accounts, with at least $3 trillion of new monies forecast to move into DAFs through the Great Wealth Transfer. DAFs are likely to eclipse private foundations in grant dollars deployed, and potentially also in the value of the underlying corpus, over the next couple of decades. Getting ourselves organized to leverage the corpus of DAFs for investment into the Ownership Economy has huge potential.

To top things off, we also came together with over 80 individuals in a conversation (access passcode: &UNF@d7r) hosted by the Predistribution Initiative and our core working group of field leaders to gather feedback around interest in a movement-building collaboration focused on expanding ownership lens investing. Interest was high, and we are mapping next steps.

It is clear that there’s a real desire to advance the Ownership Economy, to lean into ownership lens investing, and to get more capital into the funds that are focused on increasing the balance sheets of American households who need it most.

Together, we are taking this moment that ownership is having, and turning it into a movement. It is an exciting time!