February feels like a moment of both reflection and acceleration — and this month’s newsletter captures that energy.
We’re building on strong momentum from January’s State of the EO Fund Marketplace deep dive. The recording is now available, and the headline says a lot: 73% year-over-year growth in EO funds. What was once a promising alternative is rapidly becoming a scalable investment strategy.
We’re also marking a team transition as Katherine Katcher steps out of her Director role; she shares a short reflection below. We’re deeply grateful for her contributions and excited to see her continue advancing this work in new ways.
At the same time, our team is growing. We’re thrilled to welcome Sam Bonsey as a formal advisor, and next month we’ll announce a new team member joining the Lab. We’re also hiring for two key roles as we expand our capacity for capital mobilization and field building.
With Fund Spotlights, capital initiatives and our upcoming Roadshow ramping up this spring, there’s real momentum building. We hope something in this edition sparks a connection, a conversation or a next step.
Join us on March 26 for the next EO Fund Spotlight: Independent sponsors, searchers & new pathways for employee ownership capital
As the field of employee ownership investing grows, independent sponsors and searchers are emerging as a scalable and increasingly important channel for EO investment. Entrepreneurship Through Acquisition (ETA) — spanning traditional search funds and independent sponsor models — has grown rapidly as a pathway for acquiring and operating small and mid-sized businesses, while a growing number of closed-end EO funds are exploring partnerships with searchers as a source of aligned deal flow. This EO Fund Spotlight will examine why independent sponsors represent a compelling and under-tapped pipeline for EO transactions and how EO funds are structuring capital partnerships in this space.
This year, we're taking the EO Capital Roadmap on the road and bringing investors, fund managers, philanthropy and ecosystem leaders together in cities across the country to translate strategy into action.
The 2026 Roadmap Roadshow is a series of in-person convenings and virtual events designed to strengthen regional coordination, surface capital that's ready to deploy and accelerate execution on the ground. Each stop is tailored to its local context while advancing the national effort to mobilize $1.5 billion into employee ownership in the next few years.
Confirmed stops so far include New York City (March 17, invitation-only institutional investor roundtable) and Atlanta (aligned with the Mission Investors Exchange conference in late April). Philadelphia is also confirmed, aligned with the Asset Funders Network Conference in October.
We're exploring additional stops in Chicago, Detroit, Seattle, the SF Bay Area, Tulsa and Washington D.C.
Interested in attending, co-hosting or bringing the Roadshow to your city? We'd love to connect.
In case you missed it: State of the EO Fund Marketplace
On January 27, we held a virtual deep dive into our State of the Employee Ownership Fund Marketplace report . This comprehensive snapshot provides an in-depth look at the rapidly growing employee ownership (EO) investment landscape, analyzing 29 specialized funds with an estimated $865 million in combined assets under management.
In this webinar, we examined the range of EO–focused funds in the market, how their models operate, and the financial and social returns they are generating—highlighting how this approach delivers competitive, and in many cases market-rate, performance while fundamentally reorienting capital toward wealth creation for workers. Unlike traditional private credit and private equity, these funds embed values directly into investment design, producing durable, shared prosperity for workers, businesses and communities, alongside strong investor outcomes.
We looked at what drove the astounding 73% year over year growth (from $500M in AUM in 2024 to $865M in 2025), and shared our outlook on how these funds—and the broader employee ownership investing field—are poised to grow in 2026.
A Reflection on ownership, impact and what's ahead
This month, we’re sharing a personal reflection from our outgoing Director of Capital Mobilization & Action Lab, Katherine Katcher, who has played a pivotal role in building the Lab’s field-building, investor-activation and innovation work. We are grateful for Katherine’s leadership in helping shape the EO Capital Roadmap, grow the EO Investors Circle and strengthen the infrastructure needed to scale employee ownership investing.
As she transitions into her next chapter, Katherine reflects on what inspires her about the work of ownership investing, what she’s proud we built together in 2025 and why she is so hopeful about the future of the ownership movement.
We're thrilled to welcome Sam Bonsey as a new advisor to Ownership Capital Lab. Sam is the Co-Founder of The ImPact — the global network of families committed to making more impact investments more effectively — where he served as Executive Director from 2020 to 2025. Through The ImPact, Sam has been a key supporter of Ownership Capital Lab since our earliest days, and we're grateful to now deepen that relationship in a formal advisory capacity.
Sam brings deep expertise in building and supporting high-impact organizations and networks across the impact finance landscape. In 2026, he became board chairman of Co_ Systemic, a pathbreaking orchestrator of systemic investing initiatives. His experience at the intersection of family philanthropy, impact investing and systems investing makes him an invaluable thought partner as we work to scale employee ownership investing.
We're so glad to have him in our corner.
Ownership Capital Lab is hiring!
Sr. Manager, Innovation Lab (Full-Time) We’re seeking a Sr. Manager, Innovation Lab to lead core investment and product development work across a small portfolio of EO financing vehicles that the Innovation Lab is actively moving from concept to validation, pilot and launch. This role sits at the intersection of investing, product design and market-building, with a strong orientation toward mainstream capital markets.
Development & Philanthropic Partnerships Lead (Part-Time) We’re seeking a proactive, creative, relational and self-propelled Development & Philanthropic Partnerships Lead to lead donor cultivation, philanthropic partnerships, grants and high-touch engagement initiatives. This role is grounded in our philosophy that fundraising is not transactional or competitive—it is the work of inviting people into shared leadership, building relational commitment and helping donors see themselves as what they are: essential co-creators in a bold movement for economic transformation. The role starts part-time and will be scoped appropriately, with potential to grow into full-time.
We’re grateful for the media coverage we’ve received that’s bringing employee ownership investing to new audiences this month!
Impact Entrepreneur: Noelle St.Clair Lentz's feature explores why employee ownership investing is at an inflection point: what's driving the remarkable growth in the field, what still needs to happen for it to reach scale and why the moment in front of us is genuinely unprecedented.
Edge for Tomorrow Podcast: In this episode, Tracey Windsor speaks with Alison Lingane, Founder and CEO of Ownership Capital Lab, digging into why half of all small businesses need an employee ownership exit strategy — and what it means for workers, communities and investors when they get one.
Donor-Advised Funds (DAFs) have become one of the most powerful tools in philanthropy. With more than $326.5 billion in assets—up nearly 30% from the prior year—they are now the fastest-growing segment of charitable giving and a dominant structure in modern philanthropy. DAFs represent a massive pool of capital that, with the right activation, could help transform who owns businesses in the United States.
That’s exactly what we’re working on in 2026. Our team is developing targeted ways to engage DAF holders, including identifying designing pathways that make it easy to direct DAF assets towards investments that build worker wealth. With millions of businesses set to change hands in the coming decade, the stakes couldn’t be higher.
Luckily, if you have a DAF, there's no end-of-year deadline to worry about — you can give anytime. And contributions from your DAF help mobilize capital, strengthen the pipeline of investable employee ownership funds, and turn interest into real ownership opportunities for workers and communities.
We'd love to tell you more about this work and how your DAF can be part of it.
We continue to be inspired by the growing momentum of the employee ownership investing movement. Each event, conversation and connection reinforces our belief that employee ownership is a transformative approach to economic empowerment.
Over the next few months, we're looking forward to connecting with fellow changemakers:
Ownership Capital Lab is a dedicated field builder and financial backbone for scaling employee ownership investing, with a focus on converting capital into durable, broad-based ownership outcomes for working people. Anchored by the Employee Ownership Capital Roadmap—a North Star for mobilizing $1.5 billion in the next few years, $10B by 2040 and $100B+ beyond—we connect investors, funds and opportunities through market-making, education, infrastructure and capital mobilization to enable a step-change in ownership at scale: first tens of thousands, then hundreds of thousands, and ultimately millions of new worker-owners. We design new financial products to help carry employee ownership into the mainstream and build the critical market infrastructure needed to scale, including digital platforms, growth supports for EO funds and data benchmarking. Our aim is to transform ownership in America—so workers, businesses and communities thrive together. Ownership Capital Lab is fiscally sponsored by The ImPact.
Ownership Capital Lab, c/o The ImPact, 1178 Broadway, 3rd Floor #4066, New York, NY 10001
