An Employee Community Ownership Trust in Oakland, California

An Employee & Community Ownership Trust in Oakland, California

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If you’ve walked around Oakland, California in the past few years there’s a good chance you’ve seen or smelled the fresh-baked pastries of Firebrand Artisan Breads. Their sweet potato challah and buttermilk biscuits are favorites of the Purpose team. 

Matt Kreutz founded Firebrand in 2008 as a small operation run out of a West Oakland warehouse. He now employs close to 100 people running a full café and kitchen, but says “the spirit and hustle of our origins live on.” Firebrand’s mission is provide quality employment to formerly incarcerated & houseless people to help break the cycle of recidivism. Over the past couple years, we’ve worked with Matt to develop an Employee & Community Ownership Trust (ECOT) model designed to protect this mission over the long-term.

In this series, we’ll dive into how Firebrand has transitioned long-term control over to community members, created a profit-sharing and employee inclusion program, and tied investors’ upside to employee benefit: 

  • Case study on Purpose’s work with Firebrand (PDF download)

  • Q&A with Matt Kreutz

  • Coming Soon

    • Worker Ownership 2.0 -- ECOT vs. ESOP

    • Transitioning the ‘Silver Tsunami’ of retiring Baby Boomer businesses to ECOTs

    • Public policies for community ownership of Main Street businesses

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