Promoting wealth-building through employee ownership: Ownership Works

Imagine a world where employee ownership is a new normal and is as ubiquitous of an employee benefit as a 401k. Ownership Works aims to make that world a reality by helping give employees an opportunity to become owners and have a stake in the long-term success of their employers. Ownership Works is a nonprofit that seeks to build broad-based employee ownership to create meaningful wealth-building opportunities for employees, particularly those from low- and moderate-income households. In the few years since its founding in 2021, Ownership Works has distributed $395 million to over 110,000 workers at 88 companies.

Ownership Works' team had set an ambitious goal of creating $20 billion in wealth for workers by 2030 and engaged the Monitor Institute by Deloitte (MIbD) in a pro bono project to help build a strategic plan to start a wider movement of employee ownership that could help them achieve their goals.

The Deloitte team and leaders from Ownership Works strategized ways to broaden the conversation on employee ownership and laid out a plan to target a wider set of stakeholders ranging from financial institutions to pension funds. The team then helped Ownership Works develop a logic model and framework for metrics and evaluation to support these new strategic plans for their movement-building efforts. The team mapped all of this out in a high-level implementation roadmap outlining how Ownership Works could deliver on their strategy, taking into account strategic priorities, necessary capabilities, and organizational structure to facilitate successful implementation. This groundwork will help provide a strong foundation for their newly formed movement building team and is helping the organization pave the way to growing broad-based employee ownership.