Alison Lingane has dedicated her career to creating pathways to opportunity for individuals and communities by using business as a force for good. She is the co-founder of Project Equity, 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. Her passion for creating quality jobs and an economy that works for everyone was fueled in her early career by her role designing and leading micro-enterprise programs for urban youth. Alison spent 15 years in senior leadership roles in mission-driven companies that are designed to create 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 that uses information to drive school improvement), and InsideTrack (a venture-backed scaled services company that has delivered 1:1 coaching to over 1 million college students to increase college completion rates). Alison now brings those scaling lessons back to her work at Project Equity, turning businesses into community change agents through democratic employee ownership transitions. Alison has her B.A. from Harvard University and her MBA from the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley, and is a 2014 Echoing Green Black Male Achievement Fellow, a 2018-19 Aspen Job Quality Fellow and a 2019 Ashoka Fellow.
Sessions
How to preserve long-standing businesses through employee ownership