Alison Lingane has dedicated her career to enabling business to be 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. She founded and manages the Employee Ownership Catalyst Fund, having raised over $10M to finance small business M&A, to help address the capital gap for employee ownership.
Alison started her career designing and leading micro-enterprise programs for urban youth. Then, inspired to widen her impact, she 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 companies.
Prior to launching Project Equity, Alison held executive roles at mission-driven businesses that are designed to have human impact at scale, including Benetech, GreatSchools, and InsideTrack. She brings those scaling lessons back full circle to her work at Project Equity, turning businesses into community change agents through employee ownership.
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 her co-founder Hilary Abell received the Heinz Award for the Economy. Alison holds a B.S., magna cum laude, from Harvard University and an MBA from UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business.
