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by the Purpose Foundation, December 2024
When we started our work in 2016, we asked ourselves: Steward-ownership and its principles are so inspiring and full of potential for companies and their stakeholders – why is not everybody talking about this promising concept, and why on earth are there not more examples of steward-owned companies in the world? We found out that the answer to this question was – and still is – a three-dimensional one.
First: The concept was pretty unknown, and we discovered a huge lack of information and knowledge about steward-ownership. Back then, the idea and concept didn’t even have a name. Second: Even if entrepreneurs were longing for establishing long-term purpose-orientation in their ownership structure, they were facing the fact that there was almost no legal basis for this understanding of ownership anywhere in the world. If you were willing to transform into such a structure, you had to – and usually still have to – opt for legal hacks, which can be very expensive and time-consuming. And third: Even if you’d overcome these difficulties, you were still facing a lack of steward-ownership aligned financing, as investing in steward-owned businesses only works with tools where control over the company remains with the steward-owners. And this contradicts many of the learnt paradigms out there about how investments usually function.
Since we have identified these three challenges, all our work has been dedicated to lowering the three hurdles – and paving the way for steward-ownership and more pursteward-owned companies in the world, enabling all relevant actors and stakeholders to work with this specific and promising ownership structure. Thanks to our work, it has already become a lot easier to implement steward-ownership and find aligned financing. We’ve reached millions of people, helped hundreds of companies to become steward-owned, we’ve written guides on “how to become steward-owned”, we have started diving deep into the topic of financing, sharing and exchanging knowledge and thoughts with legal experts, investors, and our international partners – and a lot more.
But, of course, the hills have not yet been completely dismantled. In fact, they are, depending on the region or country, usually still quite high. This is why we keep going, creating and sharing knowledge, inspiring relevant stakeholders with our stories and content, supporting companies with our material and guides, facilitating better political and legal frameworks, doing field-building for steward-ownership aligned financing (see the Learning Journey on this page). After all, our main goal at the Purpose Foundation is to make steward-ownership accessible for everyone around the world – and realise its full potential.
We build, support and hold the emerging steward-ownership movement by inspiring and enabling all relevant actors on their path to steward-ownership – to lower the hurdles and make steward-ownership accessible for everyone. And realise its potential for an economy fit for the 21st century.