Employee ownership fund spotlights
July 17, 2025 | 11:00 AM – 12:30 PM PT (2:00 PM – 3:30 PM ET) — Virtual
EO fund spotlight: Catalytic, place-based funds
If you are interested in employee ownership (EO) investing, but don’t know where to begin, this educational session is for you!
In our next EO Fund Spotlight, we lift up a set of funds that share a commitment to economic justice and democratic ownership. All three funds are grounded in:
- Place-based investment: They focus on specific regions—Evergreen’s Fund for Employee Ownership in Northeast Ohio, Cooperative Fund of the Northeast in New England and New York, and Seed Commons through a national network of local partners.
- Democratic ownership: Each fund supports worker-owned or democratically governed enterprises, aiming to shift economic power to local communities.
- Catalytic capital: They deploy flexible, mission-aligned capital to support businesses that traditional finance often overlooks, particularly in communities of color and low-income areas.
This session is the second of an ongoing “EO Fund Spotlight” series that will run throughout 2025, co-hosted by Ownership Capital Lab and Francesco Collaborative.
Our featured funds & speakers:
Jeanette Webster, Chief Investment Officer & Chief Financial Officer, Evergreen’s Fund for Employee Ownership
Jeanette oversees Evergreen’s Fund for Employee Ownership, which supports good sustainable jobs through acquiring and converting companies to employee-owned organizations.
She has served in senior finance positions in major manufacturing and service companies, including as CFO. She has years of mergers and acquisition experience, having overseen acquisitions in 17 countries. She is a Certified Public Accountant and a Certified Financial Planner™.
Micha Josephy, Executive Director, Cooperative Fund of the Northeast (CFNE)
For 50 years, CFNE has supported community ownership through the provision of over $100 million in flexible financing and customized technical assistance to cooperatives in New England and New York.
As Executive Director, Micha is responsible for executive leadership, program development, capitalization, and operations. Micha first joined the co-op movement as an Oberlin Student Cooperative Association member. He has a background in nonprofit financial management and community organizing.
Kate Khatib, Co-Executive Director, Seed Commons
Kate is an Arab-American organizer and movement strategist based in Baltimore, Maryland. Two decades ago, she co-founded Red Emma’s, a worker-owned restaurant and bookstore in Baltimore that helped to catalyze a city-wide ecosystem of worker-owned businesses and cooperative enterprises. In 2015, she helped to found the Seed Commons cooperative and its Baltimore peer, the Baltimore Roundtable for Economic Democracy, and in 2018, became co-director of Seed Commons, a national network of non-extractive loan funds that supports cooperative businesses and community-based enterprises in underserved areas.
Host: Alison Lingane, Founder, Ownership Capital Lab
Alison is Founder and CEO of the Ownership Capital Lab, which focuses on capital as a growth and scale lever for impact-first employee ownership. The Lab identifies, pilots, and supports the uptake of strategies for financing employee ownership at greater scale.
Host: Katherine Katcher, Director, Partnerships & Capital Mobilization Initiatives, Ownership Capital Lab
Katherine builds programs and partnerships, drives research, and creates educational programming to move capital into employee ownership, to scale the model nationally.
Why attend:
Join our expert group of panelists to learn about:
- Models of investment that prioritize non-extractive approaches to wealth-building;
- Each of these funds’ unique models to create deep impact, from loan funds to worker-owned acquisition models;
- How these funds are providing much-needed long-term support, beyond capital, to strengthen their investments, including ongoing business support, governance oversight, network building, and employee-ownership training;
- How to follow up with each fund if you want to learn more about supporting them to realize the deep impact of employee ownership.
DISCLAIMER: This session is provided for educational purposes only and does not constitute nor should be construed as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice. Nothing contained in the session or related materials constitutes a solicitation, recommendation, or offer to buy, or a solicitation of an offer to sell, any securities. Neither Ownership Capital Lab nor Francesco Collaborative has reviewed any of the information for investment purposes, nor can guarantee the accuracy of any information about any fund manager, and does not endorse or recommend any specific manager. Always conduct your own due diligence, or consult a licensed financial advisor or broker before making any and all investment decisions.