Employee Ownership Ideas Forum: Closing Remarks — Sarah Keh, Prudential

I'm really thrilled to have uh Sara K from credential Financial working her way up to the front to to provide closing remarks Sarah's been a really strong supporter of the work we do at the Aspen Institute certainly as well as the work at Rucker she's been a big supporter of our job quality work she's been credential has been a strong supporter of employee ownership all across the country so really grateful to have you here to close us out for the day thank you Sarah thanks Meen I will keep this short because I know everybody wants to head out um I just want to first of all thank you all so much for spending the day today thank you to the Aspen Institute rockers for really putting this amazing convening together for the second time this year as War mentioned presedential has been invested in both Aspen and Ruckers for quite some time in a number of issue areas and for those of you who don't know who credential is we are a Global Financial Services Company we're about to celebrate our 150th anniversary next year but we were founded and we're still headquartered in New York New Jersey and our founder back in the day he started our company because he saw that workingclass families couldn't didn't have the financial means to bury their loved ones and so our first product was burial insurance and so our company from the very beginning has always been looking at what's that societal Challenge and what's the connection to business growth and impact and how can we help solve so soal challenges with Business Solutions but also working in partnership with government entities and nonprofit organizations and from a philanthropic perspective you know over the last 40 years we've invested over $ 1.4 billion dollar in creating economic opportunities for working-class families and low-income communities and over the last couple years we've invested over $6 million specifically employee ownership programs and initiatives some of you are in this room we support practice organizations like project Equity ownership works but we're also supporting organizations like Morehouse College who's creating and setting up a black employee ownership program within their institution and supporting businesses in Atlanta to convert to um employee ownership models we're also supporting a study at Boston University in including all the research studies that we support at Ruckers that's looking at uh how public companies are disclosing whether or not they have an employee ownership model or program and seeing if there's a financial material performance factor for public companies so we're looking at it from a wide variety of angles to really support this field I think we learned today I don't I don't think I need to share what all the benefits are about employee ownership we all know that it's about creating an inclusive economy creating stability within your communities families um and individuals by maintaining jobs and Commerce in the community but from a very practical sense we need both the practice side and the policy side I think we learned today in terms of the importance of local state and federal policy to create the umbrella tent for all of the work that needs to happen and then clearly really capital and hopefully federal and state Appropriations will come down the pike to support all of these efforts um but you know as a company you know when we were the first company to go public after the September 11th attacks in 2001 and after we went public the first thing that the company did was provide stock option grants to all of its employees 50,000 employees both full-time and part-time so it's something that's deeply embedded in the company we feel like that that's a right that every employee should have and so how do we work with you all to create public private Partnerships and really to advance the field of employee over ownership overall whatever the model could look like it could be very complicated structures like esops to stock option plans but really thinking through on how do we make sure that the field is continuing to advance and that we're amplifying communicating this message as so many people talked about because so many people are still so unaware of this option and so I hope you will join us all tomorrow as well too and hearing from a number of other great speakers and talking about how do we continue to work together and Advance the field and thank you again to Aspen and Ruckers for uh sponsoring this forum thank you all