Hilary Abell, MBA

Hilary Abell is Co-founder and Chief Policy & Impact Officer at Project Equity, where she leads impact measurement and policy efforts to galvanize systemic support for employee ownership to reduce income and wealth inequality and increase racial and economic equity. Hilary has been an employee ownership practitioner, thought leader, and advocate since 2003, including eight years developing worker cooperatives with low-income immigrant women in the Bay Area before starting Project Equity. Hilary and her co-founder launched Project Equity in 2014, while Hilary was a student at Presidio; it focuses on transitioning successful businesses to employee ownership and on working throughout the business and economic development ecosystem to embed employee ownership into the way we create quality jobs and build good businesses.

Hilary has been a fellow with Echoing Green, Common Future, and the Institute for the Study of Employee Ownership and Profit Sharing at Rutgers University, and she and her co-founder received the 2022 Heinz Award for the Economy. Hilary’s publications include Worker Cooperatives: Pathways to Scale, The Cooperative Growth Ecosystem (with Melissa Hoover), Participatory Management, The Case for Employee Ownership and California Cooperatives.

Hilary enjoys helping worker-owners tell their stories and mentoring people of color and other changemakers who are helping to build the employee ownership movement and change how we think about work and business. Teaching about cooperatives, employee ownership and economic democracy at Presidio is a dream come true!

Education

MBA, Presidio Graduate School

BA, Princeton University

Courses

MBA673 – Cooperatives, Employee Ownership, and Workplace Democracy