Blog
Published January 2026
Celebrating 2025 momentum and what’s ahead in 2026
2025 marked a year of meaningful progress in the effort to grow a strong, investable employee ownership marketplace—and to lay the groundwork for what comes next. Across field-building, capital mobilization and innovation, infrastructure and action planning, our work focused on turning ideas into practical tools, strengthening alignment across the field and learning where momentum is real and where more work is needed. Below is a snapshot of what we advanced in 2025 and how that work is shaping our priorities for 2026.
EO Capital Roadmap — A field-wide guide to reach our North Star
In 2025, we stewarded the EO Capital Roadmap from early concept to a widely-used field anchor. Key milestones included:
- Field-informed research drawing lessons from adjacent investing markets
- A public survey launched at the Aspen EO Ideas Forum
- 100+ Interviews and focus groups engaging advisors and practitioners both inside and outside of the EO field
- Preview and public launches at SOCAP and in December, reaching several hundred participants
- Strong coverage from both impact-focused and mainstream media
Together, these steps positioned the Roadmap as a practical guide for investors, practitioners and partners advancing employee ownership investing towards scale. We are proud of the practical, tangible tools it includes and were created alongside it, like the Capital Compass, and Guides for Investors, the EO Field and Policymakers.
Up next (2026):
We will move into a new phase of engagement through the Roadmap Roadshow, creating deeper alignment across priority action areas, and activating capital and investors across the country for further investment in EO.
Capital Mobilization
We expanded education, visibility and investor readiness across the field. In 2025, we:
Surpassed 5,000 people educated to date through events, webinars and presentations
Hosted or presented at nearly 20 public sessions, plus many private briefings
Grew the EO Investors Circle to more than 150 investors, and provided meaningful opportunities for funds to connect with investors, and for investors to learn from and alongside their peers
Launched our first EO investing course, with strong participation from philanthropy, with wonderful learnings and outcomes for our first cohort
Up next (2026):
We will continue to create learning opportunities for investors, the EO field, and policymakers/influencers, to activate capital for EO. This will include quarterly fund spotlights and Investors Circle convenings. We are excited to also be carrying out 1:1 trainings and consultations for institutional investors interested in expanding their EO investments.
Innovation Lab
In 2025, we advanced two important efforts:
Developed a deployment map for a specialized field-wide senior debt solution, and moved toward pilot design
Assessed seller owner-financing pathways for EO and shared a clear, transparent “not now” conclusion
Up next (2026):
We will move a field-wide senior debt solution to pilot (likely in partnership with Calvert Impact) and will develop prototype(s) of solutions to address personal guarantee barriers—that are particularly important for companies that can’t access ESOP bank loans.
Field Infrastructure
Roadmap input from more than 150 stakeholders clarified urgent infrastructure needs. In response, we:
- Developed the EO Fund Explorer, a searchable database of EO funds and opportunities (we are prepping it now for alpha users!)
- Published our second annual State of the Market report
- Develop plans to pilot the EO Fund Accelerator in 2026
- Began to scope development of financial benchmarking tools for investors
Up next (2026):
In 2026, we will launch the EO Fund Explorer and the EO Fund Accelerator pilot, complete scoping for a field-wide financial data benchmarking solution and advance the effort from there, and publish our third annual State of the Market report at the end of the year.
Action Lab
In 2025, we advanced work to unlock underdeveloped sources of scalable capital:
- Published our white paper on the Great Wealth Transfer and hosted well-attended webinars focused on women investors and next-gen investors
- Spoke at the Donor Advised Fund (DAF) Giving Summit about the Ownership Economy, bringing in new partners and investors into this space
- Convened partners across the DAF ecosystem to create our 2026 action plan for unlocking DAF investment capital
Up next (2026):
Powered by a team of graduate students from the Trachtenberg School of Public Policy and Public Administration, we will develop a segmentation of DAF holders—who collectively hold over $326B—to identify who to target with what messaging, identify high-leverage points within the existing donor-advised fund ecosystem, and design messaging and activation strategies that align behavioral drivers with new pathways and tools for DAF corpus investing.
Taken together, this progress reflects a broader shift from early concept to shared practice—one built through collaboration, learning, and steady engagement across the field. As we move into 2026, our focus is on deepening this momentum: translating frameworks into action, strengthening market infrastructure, and continuing to unlock pathways for capital to support employee ownership at scale. We’re grateful to the many partners, advisors and practitioners contributing to this work, and we look forward to building the next phase together.