An Employee Community Ownership Trust in Oakland, California
An Employee & Community Ownership Trust in Oakland, California
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)
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