Our Theory of Change: Building a Wellbeing Economy

The problem was never a dozen problems

For years, we worked on a dozen problems at once. Poverty alleviation over here. Racial justice over there. Climate degradation impacting the most vulnerable communities around the world. Economic opportunity, housing, ownership, financial inclusion, planet: each in its own column, each with its own metrics, its own grantees, its own partners, its own line in the budget, its own books to read, speakers to listen to, and TED talks to watch. We have come to believe that framing was holding us back and continues to hold back impact investing and philanthropy broadly. 

Climate, inequality, gender, education, health, democracy, and the racial wealth divide are not separate problems. They are branches of the same relentless, fast-growing vine. And the root system that keeps pumping out new ones, faster than any of us can cut them, is an economy built to serve shareholders and investors first and everyone and everything else second.

The same design turned up everywhere we looked.

If the primary obligation of the system is to maximize returns to capital, then a stable climate becomes a cost to externalize, wages become a cost to minimize, unpaid care work becomes economically invisible, and even the things we obviously treasure (hospitals, schools, homes) get steadily converted into assets to be optimized. 

This is why so much well-funded, well-intentioned philanthropy and impact investing hits a ceiling and fails to address the problem at the root. Those who try to build a different world keep asking a system to produce outcomes it was never built to produce, and wonder why the data shows that the very issues they care about are getting worse. Modern philanthropy has built an engine that revolves around RFPs, proposals, and measurable deliverables in the form of ROI in financial terms, focusing almost exclusively on treating symptoms and reducing their impact.  Impact investing runs into the same ceiling from the other direction: its defining promise is impact with market-rate returns, often expressed as “doing good while doing well,” yet it lives within the same incentives, advisors, and structures that externalize all costs onto society and extract maximum value from people and planet. A model that still requires capital to win cannot finance the changes that require giving up capital.

There is a contradiction underneath all of it, and we feel it too. Both models depend on wealthy people giving up some of the power their concentrated wealth confers, while an entire profession exists to preserve and grow it.

Here is the good news: a vine like this isn't out of our control. It was planted — an economy is a set of choices, not a law of nature — and what was planted can be pulled. We can make a different one:

“The ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently.” - David Graeber

We have come to believe that, to address the myriad challenges we face around the globe, we must confront these problems at their root and fundamentally change the global economy. Our commitment, stated plainly:

We deploy everything we have (our voice, our relationships and our capital) to shift the economy at its root: from one that serves shareholders first to one designed for the shared well-being of people and planet.

How change happens

Systems like this one do not change because they are criticized. They change when three things happen together: people can finally see the design, a working alternative exists somewhere in the real world, and joining that alternative becomes easier than defending the status quo. Everything we do tries to make one of those three moves.

Name it. People cannot leave a system they cannot see, and this system survives partly by staying invisible: behind financial complexity, professional norms, and language designed to obscure. And partly by convincing people that it is the natural order of things, almost a scientifically proven system that exists with the same certainty and the same laws as gravity. 

Our writing, investigations, and public advocacy attempt to make the design visible, including the counterfeit versions of change the system produces to protect itself. 

Prove it. Without working examples, the argument stays theoretical. We fund and build the alternative at real scale, in real places, with our own capital and alongside others: ownership in workers' and families' hands, a secured floor of basic security, and economic decisions made by the people they affect. In short, we help create and grow systems that change who owns, who benefits, and who decides across the breadth of companies and organizations that affect all of our lives. 

Make it followable. Many people want to align their money and their values but don’t know how to get started and lack the tools and support to do so. We build ways for people to get started: multidonor vehicles, coalitions, tools, model policies, and honest maps of the alternatives, so that ideas can become action. 

Where this comes from

This did not come from a book. It came from people living inside the design, in very different places, describing the same thing.

Brian spent his career inside the machine. When Facebook said its mission was to "give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together," he took it at its word. As a senior executive there, he worked on products meant to serve communities and the nonprofits that support them, and he spent a lot of time listening to what those groups actually needed. Then he watched the company decline to fund the tools that would have helped them, and keep the gains for shareholders rather than return anything to the people whose use had built the products in the first place. He couldn't square what he saw with what he believed, and left. He has testified publicly about what he saw since. Brian can describe how those decisions get made because he was in the room for some of them and watched them fail the people they claimed to serve.

Katie has seen this from the other side in her philanthropy. Give a household real assets and real say over them and the outcomes move together: income, food, schooling, the ability to absorb a bad season. First-time entrepreneurs in East Africa show this as well. Nobody living in poverty experiences them as the separate problems the way that philanthropy funds them. It turns out that our philanthropic system is just a mirror of our broken financial system.

Wages have to be won again every year from the people they cost, in the same rooms and against the same lobbies, which means they can always be taken back. Ownership works differently. Change who holds the asset and you change who holds the power. That is what workers in the Fight for $15 were up against, and it is where owning, benefiting, and deciding comes from.

Millions of families already qualify for support that would stop the cascade poverty sets off, and never receive it. The entitlement exists and the delivery fails, because the system asks people to prove repeatedly that they deserve what they are already owed.

Large institutions ask community organizations what they need, run the process, publish the findings, and put the money somewhere else. Being heard is common. Deciding is the part that rarely gets handed over.

The people closest to a problem understand it best. The work is to get behind them.

The four levers

The three moves — name it, prove it, make it followable — are how we spend what we have: our time, our capital, our voice. The four levers are where we spend it. They come from the Wellbeing Economy Alliance, which maps the parts of an economy that decide whether it works for people or for shareholders. We organize around them: Purpose, Predistribution, Prevention, and People-Powered. Each of our major initiatives is one of them, made concrete. And because every real alternative attracts a fake, each lever comes with a well-funded look-alike that enables the old system to stay alive.

1. Purpose: change what the economy is for

Every economy already has a purpose, and our current one measures it obsessively: quarterly earnings, share price, GDP. The trouble is that the goal is narrow, and everything it doesn't count, like a stable climate, an unpaid caregiver, a healthy town, stays invisible to it. Changing purpose means putting human and ecological wellbeing where profit currently sits so that the whole system is accountable for producing the result. Until what counts as success changes, capital keeps flowing where it always has.

This has been tried at a national scale, from which we have learned two things. It works as policy, and it doesn't stay won on its own. New Zealand built a budget around wellbeing instead of growth, and a later government scrapped it. A policy win doesn't, by itself, change what a society counts as success, and what you don't change there gets reversed the moment power shifts. So the work is slower and deeper than any single budget. We must make wellbeing legible, expected, and measured, until it's harder to reverse than to keep. That's our part: the writing and investigations that name the current design and show the alternative (our essay "The Economy Is the Root System" among them), and the researchers and Beyond-GDP metrics that give a wellbeing economy something concrete to measure.

The counterfeit: purpose as marketing. ESG funds, stakeholder pledges, and impact language that leaves every incentive still pointed at shareholder returns. 

2. Predistribution: build wealth and power in, from the start

We didn't start here. After Brian left Facebook, he went looking for why so many people in this country were so angry, and the trail led straight to the wealth gap and how much of it runs along racial lines. For a while the answer looked like wages. He worked on the Fight for $15, was detained at a protest in San Francisco, and carried what the workers told him into the offices of senators who hadn't backed the raise. One after another they opted not to support it, the restaurant lobby and others leaning on them the whole way, and it went nowhere. The lesson stuck: a floor you have to win over and over from the people it costs is a floor that can always be taken back. Ownership works differently. Change who owns the asset and you change who holds the power in the first place. 

Rather than relying on thin redistributive fixes after the fact, a wellbeing economy predistributes wealth, power, time, and income, so the heavy lifting is done by the structure of the economy itself. This is where most of our capital lives. Unlock Ownership is our flagship expression: a multidonor fund channeling catalytic capital into employee ownership, home ownership, and tenant-equity models, focused on the households the current system has left out. Our broader partners and investments extend the same logic: worker cooperatives, community land trusts, resident-owned housing, community-controlled financial institutions, and non-extractive finance. 

The counterfeit: equity-washing. Private equity firms granting workers slivers of equity while extracting the real value, and calling it shared ownership. Our investigative work on these schemes is predistribution defended.

3. Prevention: secure well being before harm happens

A wellbeing economy stops harm before it starts where everyone has enough, a secured floor of basic comfort and safety, by default. Millions of families are already entitled to support that would prevent the cascade that poverty sets off (eviction, hunger, medical debt, lost schooling) yet never receive it, because the benefits system is a maze. Bringing MyFriendBen to Washington State is one prevention play: a screener connecting families to the benefits and tax credits they qualify for in about six minutes, with dignity.

The counterfeit: prevention as self-help. Financial-literacy classes, budgeting apps, resilience training, all built on the idea that families end up in crisis because they don't know any better. But people aren't broke for lack of a budgeting class. They're broke because their paycheck doesn't cover the month. It looks like getting ahead of the problem, but it just teaches people to manage a system designed to fail them.

4. People-Powered: put economic decisions in people's hands

In a wellbeing economy, economic decisions are made by the people they affect. Today they're made as far from those people as possible: what a company does with its profits, what a landlord charges, what a public budget funds, all settled by people who never have to live with the result. This is the "decide" in owning, benefiting, and deciding. 

We are working to bring a citizens' assembly to Washington State: a representative group of everyday residents convened to make real decisions on economic questions usually settled for them. The principle also shapes how we spend our own money, not just what we advocate for. Unlock Ownership hands its grant and investment decisions to a committee of the practitioners and leaders closest to the problem, rather than a distant board composed of funders.

The counterfeit: participation without power. The advisory seat with no vote, the listening tour that changes nothing, the civic-literacy program that says people only need to be taught how to take part, while the decisions get made somewhere else. Every version treats the people as the problem to fix. We measure participation by who decides, not who attends.

Washington as a proving ground

This is where the strategy gets specific. We are concentrating our newest work in a single state so the levers can be seen working together, not scattered across the country as isolated pilots. A benefits floor that actually reaches people, economic decisions handed back to residents, and a coalition already building toward a wellbeing economy here, all of it in one place, at one time. We want to prove it at the scale of a single U.S. state: small enough to watch the pieces reinforce each other, concrete enough that others can copy what works.

Ourselves first

We don't ask anyone to do something we haven't done ourselves. We divested entirely from public equities and rebuilt our portfolio around the alternative: community lenders, employee-ownership transitions, non-extractive investments. We don't count that as giving anything up. We measure our returns against everything we care about, not just the money we could pull out for ourselves: ownership, stability, community, a living planet. 

We fund the organizations closest to the work and follow the practitioners who've been at this longer than we have, and let our choices do the arguing.

How we measure ourselves differently

If the root is what matters, our scorecard has to change too. The philanthropy we described at the start runs on activity: proposals funded, programs launched, deliverables counted. We hold ourselves to different questions.

Did we put ownership of real assets in the hands of workers and families the system shut out? Did we secure the floor for more people, and close the gap between the benefits they're owed and the ones they actually get? Did we move real economic decisions to the people who live with them? Did we make the counterfeits harder to sell? And did we pull the wider field — the metrics, the narrative, the other people deploying capital — closer to treating wellbeing as the point?

The whole argument, once more

The problem was never a dozen problems. It was one: an economy that makes shareholders the assumed winner of every transaction. While that holds, none of the things we care about will really be solved. You don't reform a root like this; you replace it. We've watched this system fail from the inside, and watched the alternative take root. We don't need a different miracle for each crisis. We need to pull up one root and plant another. A well-being economy is just that: an economy where everyone can be well.