.webp)
Transform Finance is a research, education, and implementation partner that supports all stakeholders to challenge legacy investment approaches, seed transformative investment models, and build movement power.
Alternative Enterprises use business structures that provide and ownership over business to non-investor stakeholders. There's a wide range of these kinds of models: different Employee Ownership models, companies held in Perpetual Purpose Trusts or with other Steward Ownership structures, those co-governed by multiple stakeholders, and those that use a wide variety of legal and technological structures to shift power away from investors towards workers and communities.
We're talking to investors, business, and field builders to learn about how these different models work, and how they're financed. We're developing a typology of Alternative Enterprises and then providing a toolkit for investors. Please reach out if you are a practitioner in Alternative Enterprise!
Community benefit is not a foreign concept for banks. Since 1977, the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) has required banks to demonstrate that they serve the communities where they take deposits. Banks also use community engagement strategies to gain customer insights and business development opportunities. But critics point out that banks’ capital, while a major force in shaping outcomes like displacement and the racial wealth gap, is often not coordinated with community objectives. Aligning a bank’s capital with community goals would help build power for grassroots movements and disadvantaged populations, but banks typically fall short of making this connection. So, how can they do it better?
The key is to practice Participatory Investment.
