Employee Ownership Needs Institutional Capital Channels to Reach Scale

Margot Brandenburg framed employee ownership as directly connected to the Ford Foundation’s social justice mission: “a strong and healthy democracy and an equitable society.” Speaking as a senior program officer on Ford’s Mission Investments team, she emphasized that this is not only a grantmaking lens. Her team makes debt and equity investments as well as grants, and is therefore concerned with both mission outcomes and financial performance.

In introducing her, Maureen Conway located Brandenburg’s work at that intersection of capital and social impact. Conway described her as someone who has worked across philanthropy, finance, entrepreneurship, and social justice, including through Ford’s Mission Investments team, the Rockefeller Foundation’s Impact Investing Initiative, and My Strong Home, a benefit corporation focused on homeowner resilience and recovery in the Southeast and Gulf Coast. For the employee ownership field, Conway called Brandenburg a thought partner and champion who had helped people think more deeply about how ownership can create wealth, strengthen businesses, and build a more inclusive economy.

Brandenburg named three reasons employee ownership fits Ford’s mandate. The first is worker rights. Ford already has a large program focused on living wages, family-sustaining benefits, and mobility. Ownership, in her account, adds two elements that wage-and-benefits strategies do not fully capture: wealth-building and worker voice.

That framing also produced one of her sharper internal critiques of the field. Brandenburg said people in the employee ownership community talk often about workers, but she questioned why the room does not overlap more with unions and worker centers. The causes, in her view, are aligned, but the fields remain “siloed in conferences and in conversations.” She added that even inside Ford, she has to work hard to get colleagues in the foundation’s Future of Workers program to center ownership when they think about workers and worker demands.

The second connection was democracy. Brandenburg distinguished between the field’s familiar language of workplace democracy and Ford’s current concern with “big D democracy”: democratic institutions, rule of law, and the health of the political system itself. She pointed to research she attributed to DAWI finding that people who work for worker-owned companies or co-ops are more likely to be civically engaged. She also invoked the broader relationship between ownership and participation, noting that homeowners are more likely to vote than renters.

At the meta level, she said, economic inequality leads to “backsliding even in mature democracies.” People who care about democracy, in her formulation, need to care about ownership and about the outcomes the economy distributes. As she put it, “we can’t feed our children their democratic rights for dinner.”

Brandenburg’s third reason for Ford’s interest was explicitly financial. Mission investing still has to produce income and returns that support Ford’s grantmaking. For a foundation investing from its corpus, employee ownership has to be more than morally attractive; it has to make sense as an investment proposition.

She cited research by leading academics, including Doug Kruse and Richard Freeman, examining data from tens of thousands of manufacturing companies. As Brandenburg summarized it, the research found that ESOP adoption increases workplace labor productivity by roughly 5% to 7%, even after controlling for other firm characteristics. She cautioned that the academics in the room might have a more nuanced version of the finding, but her investor interpretation was direct: a 5% to 7% productivity gain is “material alpha.”

That point mattered because Brandenburg was not presenting employee ownership only as a culture change or a worker-benefit strategy. She acknowledged those benefits, referring to stories from workers and companies that had described cultural and productivity gains. But her emphasis was that a measurable productivity effect changes how institutional investors can understand the category. Employee ownership becomes a candidate for capital allocation, not only philanthropic support.

For Ford, that distinction is structurally important. Brandenburg said the foundation generally does not invest directly into companies. It is too large, with too much capital to deploy, and depends on a universe of fund managers and intermediaries to take its capital and invest it into companies. The question, then, is not simply whether employee ownership is desirable. It is whether the field has the investment channels that can let large asset owners participate.

Brandenburg pointed to a practical scaling requirement: large asset owners need investable channels. She described the panel that followed her remarks, focused on moving institutional capital into employee ownership, as important because the “ecosystem and piping” are what would let Ford, Catholic pension funds, and other pools of capital be “part of the solution.”

The challenge, as she framed it, is infrastructure around institutional capital: the fund managers, intermediaries, and conduits that can take capital from large asset owners and move it into companies. Ford’s interest in employee ownership therefore depends not only on evidence of worker, civic, or business benefits, but also on whether the field can receive and deploy capital at institutional scale.

Brandenburg also situated that work inside a field she said had gained energy over Ford’s years of sponsoring the Employee Ownership Ideas Forum. She described the 2026 gathering as feeling, more than in prior years, like a “beloved community” or “crew” — something larger than individual organizations or projects. But the operative point of her keynote was about linking communities and systems that are already adjacent: worker-rights organizations and employee-ownership advocates; democracy advocates and ownership advocates; large asset owners and the intermediaries that can move capital into employee-owned firms.