Hilary Abell

Hilary Abell is Chief of the Employee Ownership Division at the U.S. Department of Labor and co-founder of Project Equity. She is a longtime employee ownership and cooperative development leader whose work has focused on worker ownership, public policy, and expanding business ownership as a tool for economic mobility.

States Test Financing and Training Models to Expand Employee Ownership

At the Aspen Institute’s 2026 Employee Ownership Ideas Forum, Iowa state Rep. Shannon Lundgren, New Jersey state Sen. Andrew Zwicker and the Department of Labor’s Hilary Abell argued that states are becoming the main testing ground for expanding employee ownership. Their case was practical rather than theoretical: states can help owners and workers navigate outreach, feasibility studies, financing and post-transition education, while Washington funds, convenes and learns from those experiments without imposing a single model.

The Aspen InstituteJun 9, 202616 min read