FROM ANNIKA LITTLE, MANAGING DIRECTOR, ASSET FUNDERS NETWORK
MAY 2026
For years, philanthropy and impact investors have rightly focused on strengthening families’ financial security and stability. Through financial coaching, emergency savings, credit building, and income supports, funders have expanded households’ capacity to weather economic shocks and meet everyday needs. These interventions matter. They keep families from falling off a financial edge and allow them to plan for the future.
But stability alone isn’t the destination. And the way we often measure progress through income gains doesn’t fully capture what real economic mobility requires.
Income and Wealth: A Both/And Framework
Economic mobility is often defined as movement up the income ladder: a raise, a better job, or more earnings. Yet income alone does not always create mobility or wealth. A family might bring home more money but remain just one unexpected expense away from hardship, particularly when that income growth is offset by mounting debt or escalating costs of housing, childcare, and healthcare.
It’s a difficult balancing act when 49 percent of U.S. households have expenses that equal or exceed their income and 54 percent lack the savings needed to weather a simultaneous drop in income and spike in expenses. Additional analysis from the Aspen Institute reveals that the bottom half of American households control just 3% of the nation’s wealth. These gaps reflect not only unequal wages, but unequal access to ownership, and the compounding power that comes with it.
Philanthropy’s sustained investment in financial stability has laid essential groundwork. The critical next step is pairing stability with ownership to advance long-term wealth and intergenerational opportunity.
Financial stability provides the foundation for any kind of wealth building. Families grappling with volatile income, income shocks, or persistent debt cannot easily think about buying a home or investing in a business. Stabilizing income, debt, and benefits access gives families the breathing room to plan for their futures.
But stability without ownership can become a treadmill: it helps families avoid financial crises but not build real security. By integrating ownership pathways such as homeownership, retirement savings, or employee ownership transitions, funders can help families move from surviving to thriving. Stability creates the conditions. Ownership changes the trajectory.
What Is the Ownership Economy and Who’s Building It?
The ownership economy is an emerging movement aimed at democratizing access to wealth-generating assets: homes, businesses, investment and retirement accounts, employee equity, and community-owned real estate. Rather than focusing solely on participation in the financial system, it emphasizes who owns the means of wealth creation.
As AFN member Gary Community Ventures outlines in its Ownership Investing Report, this approach broadens and accelerates household access to appreciating assets while creating lasting value for investors and communities alike. To meaningfully improve financial well-being at scale, the report identifies a range of ownership investing strategies—and investable opportunities—to increase income, decrease unproductive debt, and facilitate wealth-building at scale.
Another AFN member, The Prudential Foundation, is an early ownership economy pioneer, directing investments into ownership strategies that strengthen communities and improve economic mobility. Paula D’Ambrosa, Director, Prudential Financial, put it plainly at last year’s 2025 Aspen Ideas Economy Festival: Ownership is not just a financial concept, it’s about agency, resilience, and belonging.
Philanthropy is now expanding this work in transformative ways. Foundations, donor-advised funds, and mission-aligned investors are deploying patient, risk-tolerant, catalytic capital to test and scale models that broaden ownership like employee buyouts that transfer stakes to workers when business owners retire, community land trusts that keep housing permanently affordable while allowing families to build equity, and community ownership of commercial real estate that ensures neighborhoods share in the value they help create.
Innovators are also tackling barriers in other wealth-building systems. New retirement savings models are emerging that don’t force people to choose between paying down student debt and saving for their futures, allowing employers to match student loan payments with retirement contributions. And financial technology platforms are democratizing access to stock and private market investments, giving low- and middle-income households the opportunity to participate in the appreciating capital markets that have long powered wealth accumulation for higher earners. Beyond the innovations, the opportunity now for philanthropy is moving from isolated ownership solutions to intentionally stacking interventions that enable more families to build durable, multi-dimensional wealth.
Investing in the ownership economy creates systemic change. When philanthropy backs ownership strategies, it reshapes who gets to build wealth and influence the design of the economy itself.
Why Funders Should Embrace Ownership
Philanthropic capital doesn’t just fill funding gaps, it builds the connective infrastructure, legitimacy, and local capacity that help ownership innovations replicate and scale. The field is beginning to align around shared definitions, metrics, and priorities that can accelerate inclusive wealth building across communities. If your work centers on economic mobility, financial health, or household stability, ownership should be a core part of your strategy for three key reasons:
- Stability and ownership complete each other.
We’ve made significant progress helping families gain and maintain financial footing. Now it’s time to extend that progress by coupling stability work with ownership strategies that help families build lasting wealth. Stability creates the runway; ownership provides sustained lift. - The return on investment is both economic and social.
Findings from Gary Community Ventures demonstrate that ownership investing can deliver durable financial returns while also producing powerful social outcomes—creating opportunity and wealth where little or none previously existed. When funders support employee ownership transitions, inclusive real estate projects, or community equity funds, they’re not only growing assets; they’re expanding who gets to benefit from the economy itself. - Philanthropy is the field-builder.
Philanthropic capital is indispensable for testing and proving concepts as well as building the ecosystems of technical assistance, policy enablement, and shared infrastructure that support ownership models to reach scale. Early philanthropic investment provides proof of concept, unlocks markets, and paves the way for larger pools of impact and institutional capital to follow.
A Challenge to Our Network
At Asset Funders Network, we’ve long emphasized that financial health and asset building are inseparable. Our members, including leaders like Gary Community Ventures and The Prudential Foundation, demonstrate what’s possible when philanthropy uses the full spectrum of capital: grants, mission-related investments, venture creation, and policy advocacy all in service of wealth equity.
The question for the rest of us is whether we’re ready to broaden our definition of progress. Are we measuring success only by whether families can stay afloat or also by whether they can own something enduring, generative, and transferable?
Expanding ownership requires investing in new ideas, in the innovators building them, and in the policy and financial structures that sustain them, both nationally and at the state and community level.
Ownership is having a moment, but whether it becomes a movement depends on what we choose to fund next. The on-ramps are being built. Let’s make sure more families can access them.
AFN Members interested in learning more about measuring ownership impact should join us June 11, 2026, for a special briefing by Aspen FSP on a New Benchmark for Measuring Wealth‑Building. And for all grantmakers interested in learning more about ownership economy strategies, join your peers at AFN’s 2026 National Grantmaker Conference, October 6-8, in Philadelphia. Register here.
Annika Little is the Managing Director of the Asset Funders Network.
