Meet our co-founders
Since its founding in 2014, Project Equity has become a national leader in the movement to harness employee ownership to maintain thriving local business communities, create quality jobs and address income and wealth inequality. Alison Lingane and Hilary Abell founded Project Equity more than 10 years ago, and in October of 2022, they welcomed their long-time colleague Evan Edwards into the CEO role.
Hilary Abell
Co-founder
Chief of the Employee Ownership Division, U.S. Department of Labor
Hilary was “bit by the cooperative bug” when she was a worker-owner at Equal Exchange in the 1990s and forever changed by witnessing how Latin American farmers used coops to transform their communities. After a decade of international community empowerment work, Hilary has been advancing cooperative development and employee ownership in the U.S. since 2003. As Executive Director of WAGES (now Prospera), she led the organization in creating a network of five worker-owned green cleaning businesses that sustained 100 healthy, dignified jobs for low-income women. Worker-owners increased their family incomes by 40-80%, built assets through robust profit sharing, and gained business skills and social capital.
In co-founding Project Equity, Hilary hoped to make these profound benefits of employee ownership a reality for millions more workers all over the country. For her work with Project Equity, Hilary was awarded Presidio Graduate School’s Big Idea Prize (2013), an Echoing Green Fellowship (2014), a 2016 Local Economy Fellowship, and a 2020 Executive Fellowship with the Institute for the Study of Employee Ownership and Profit Sharing at Rutgers University.
“Project Equity is creating profound impact for workers in the companies we have the honor to support in transitioning to employee ownership. Informed by this deep impact work, we are also pushing on what we call ‘levers of scale’: capital, public policy, and public and private sector partnerships. It’s wonderful to see Project Equity going strong as a co-founder leaves to deepen her contributions in one of these critical areas.”
-Hilary Abell
Hilary is a passionate advocate, practitioner and thought leader and has authored or co-authored several publications, most recently The Case for Employee Ownership (2020) and California Cooperatives (2021). In 2022, Hilary and Alison received the Heinz Award for the Economy, established to honor the memory of U.S. Senator John Heinz and to celebrate the vision and spirit that produce achievements of lasting good.
She now serves as the Chief of the Employee Ownership Division at the U.S. Department of Labor.
She has her B.A. from Princeton University and her MBA in Sustainable Management from Presidio and, in her spare time, loves to explore redwood forests, California’s coastline, and good books and movies.
Alison Lingane
Co-founder & Senior Advisor, Catalyst Fund
Alison Lingane is a serial social entrepreneur who has dedicated her career to leveraging business as a force for good. She began her career designing and leading micro-enterprise programs for urban youth. Then, inspired to widen her impact, Alison pursued an MBA and co-founded the Global Social Venture Competition, which for three decades was the largest international business plan competition for double or triple bottom line businesses.
Prior to launching Project Equity, Alison held executive roles at mission-driven businesses that are designed to have human impact at scale, including Benetech (where she built and launched their first product, a digital book service for individuals with visual or reading disabilities), GreatSchools (the 6th largest parenting website, a nonprofit using information to drive school improvement), and InsideTrack (a venture-backed scaled services company that has delivered 1:1 coaching to millions of college students, resulting in increased college completion rates). She brings those scaling lessons back full circle to her work at Project Equity, turning businesses into community change agents through employee ownership.
Her passion for education also led her to co-found a thriving PreK-8th grade dual immersion school in Oakland, Escuela Bilingüe Internacional, that serves over 350 students. Alison has been recognized by fellowship invitations from Echoing Green, The Aspen Institute, Rutgers University and Ashoka, where Project Equity’s work was featured in the book America’s Path Forward. In 2022, Alison and Hilary received the Heinz Award for the Economy, established to honor the memory of U.S. Senator John Heinz and to celebrate the vision and spirit that produce achievements of lasting good. Alison holds a B.S. from Harvard University and an M.B.A. from UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business. In her free time, she can be found running trails in the East Bay Hills, hiking in the mountains and spending quality time with friends and family.
“I am so proud of everything we have accomplished together at Project Equity. Our team of more than thirty incredibly dedicated individuals all have a true desire to see employee ownership become normal and self-generating, so that workers—especially frontline workers and workers of color—can have access to what can be a life-changing job: one that incorporates ownership. Under Evan’s leadership as CEO, the impact of Project Equity’s work, and the reach of employee ownership has only continued and will continue to grow. I will be thrilled to watch its continued success as a field collaborator.”
-Alison Lingane
Alison’s next chapter will focus on expanding investment capital for employee ownership. She continues to serve as a Senior Advisor to Project Equity’s Employee Ownership Catalyst Fund into 2025. Her transition out of the organization will allow her to focus on expanding investment capital to support the entire employee ownership field.