JPMorgan Chase & Co.’s Gwyneth Galbraith Speaks at the 2025 Employee Ownership Ideas Forum

In this clip, JPMorgan Chase & Co.’s Gwyneth Galbraith speaks at the 2025 Employee Ownership Ideas Forum. 

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The 2025 Employee Ownership Ideas Forum took place on April 9-10, 2025, virtually and in Washington DC. The Forum is proudly co-hosted by the Aspen Institute Economic Opportunities Program and the Institute for the Study of Employee Ownership and Profit Sharing at Rutgers University.

This year’s theme, “From Workers to Owners,” highlights how the experience of ownership changes the reality of work for workers. The forum highlights companies in a range of business sectors and explores how employee ownership fits their business strategy and approach to business leadership. We also discuss the particular role employee ownership can play in supporting business success, and we consider the role institutional investors can play in improving capital access for employee ownership conversions and expansions.

For more information about the Employee Ownership Ideas Forum, including our speakers, agenda, and additional resources, visit our website: https://www.aspeninstitute.org/events/employee-ownership-ideas-forum-2025/

Episode Transcript

(00:04):
It's now my great pleasure to introduce Gwyneth Galbraith So
Gwyneth is a Vice President of Global Philanthropy at JP Morgan
Chase, where she helps lead strategic initiatives to
accelerate business growth for underserved entrepreneurs.
Gwyneth has a long history and community economic development

(00:24):
and financial inclusion and education, and importantly hails
from Berkeley, CA, a hotbed of employee ownership.
Thank you so much for being hereand for closing us out today.
Really appreciate. It So everyone, I have the

(00:45):
somewhat unenviable task of following all of this.
And so I'm just going to be veryquick and say a big thank you to
Aspen, to Rutgers, to all the speakers and all the people here
who are doing so much in so manydifferent ways to move this
forward. I'm going to repeat a little bit
of what I said last year when I came here.

(01:08):
This is sort of a full circle moment for me.
I spent a lot of my time before I joined JP Morgan Chase working
at a small business lender. One of the first loans, one of
the first I had, I was a grant writer.
I wrote client stories. One of the first client stories
was Emma's Echo Clean, which we made a loan to a worker

(01:28):
cooperative at wages, which is now Prospera.
Hillary was on the board of thatsmall business lender.
And here we are today. Hillary, you're sitting there,
I'm here. It just, it feels like such a
both an amazing kind of full circle for me, but also just to
see how much progress has been made and also how many barriers
still exist. I feel really lucky to now be in

(01:49):
this position at JP Morgan Chaseto be able to to support some of
this amazing work. And it's so much fun to be in
the room and hear all of this. JD Morgan Chase wants to help
create a more inclusive and stronger economy through
business and community investments and employee
ownership is an important piece of that.

(02:09):
On the business side, I am very lucky to partner with my
colleague Regina Carl's, who leads our ESOP advisory group.
Our ESOP portfolio is now $6.5 billion in growing.
And I remember when I stood up here last year, the number that
Regina gave me to say was 5 billion.
So we are making progress and, and growing and really, really

(02:30):
excited about that work. And that's the business
investment side. And on the community investment
side, I sit in corporate responsibility where we have the
great fortune to be able to workwith community partners to
support this work. You've many of you have heard me
say this, I'm going to say it again.
For for us, employee ownership is part of a larger strategy

(02:50):
around succession planning and business ownership
opportunities. We all know about the silver
tsunami and all the ownership transitions that are getting
teed up. And many of those will will not
go anywhere. And there's a huge threat to
communities, jobs, economic activity, and then this huge
opportunity to think about alternative ownership
opportunities like like employeeownership.

(03:14):
And I really appreciated Philip from Anich isn't here anymore,
but in his five, you know, the five big ideas he specifically
talked about, you know, looking at this from the seller's point
interview. And that's how we're approaching
this, not least of all because JP Morgan Chase has a lot of
clients that are sellers. So we can be really part of this
seller driven approach. We're really proud.

(03:36):
Well, I'm proud to get to sponsor this, this forum.
And I'm really lucky to be here because I learned so much.
I have so many notes. I wanted to share a few of my
things I've learned and few memorable moments.
I've I've sort of scribbled themdown and they have half of them
have been stolen because they clearly are everybody's
memorable moment. So sorry, I'm going to repeat a

(03:57):
few, but nobody's mentioned. The first thing that I learned.
We started off yesterday. I did not know that the first
legislation around employee ownership was to to help the COD
industry signed under George Washington.
That was a fascinating piece of history that I am going to pull

(04:18):
into my employee ownership pitchwherever I can.
As several people have mentioned, where else do you get
Bernie Sanders representative quoting Reagan and Bill Cassidy
talking about Karl Marx? But I think what that really
shows is that there actually is common ground.
We do we we can find shared values even in these these

(04:41):
difficult and uncertain times. And that's that's very powerful
for this work. Alex Brill talked to us
yesterday morning about thinkingabout rearranging the pie and
growing the pie. And for me that was such an
interesting. I hadn't really thought about
the rearranging the pie, but it's really employee ownership
is a chance to do both. Rearranging the pie, who's at

(05:02):
the table, pick your metaphor, and then growing it from there.
And so trying to do the opportunity to do both.
Another line that has been stolen already, because lots of
people mentioned the idea that we need more capitalists and the
way you get more capitalists is by making more owners.

(05:23):
I learned about incarcerated worker co-ops, which I had
something I'd never thought about or heard about and is
absolutely fascinating. And then hearing about the
healthcare co-ops. I'm going from here.
I'm spending the weekend with my87 year old mother who is on the
verge of needing a little bit more care.
And I think somebody else mentioned this is something that

(05:44):
hits home for all of us. It is an area where we don't
appreciate the skills and the talents and worker co-ops are
one way of really moving in thatdirection.
I learned a new word and I don'tknow if Sean Matthews is still
here. Esoppable and non esoppable.
Another good way of sort of getting at the thing that I

(06:08):
should say about our approach, JP Morgan's approach to this
work is we are very much an all of above.
We we are agnostic. I think employee ownership in
all forms needs to be advanced in every way and we want to be a
part of doing that. Which leads me to another quote
for those of you who were part of the Piton lunch conversation,
we had not one but two people saying that they are in love

(06:29):
with EO TS. So I think that's another,
another interesting way of I capturing the passion of this
movement. But the thing that I want to end
on is another quote from yesterday on panel.
Greg Graves talked about how thesuccessive employee ownership is
predictable. And he was talking specifically
about Esop's and the data and all of that.
But I would like to, I would like to suggest that the

(06:52):
successive employee ownership across the board is predictable.
It needs to be predictable because of all the work that
you're doing. And now as the prior speaker
said, we now we need to make sure that we're not the only
ones who know this and are talking about it, but are really
sharing it and spreading the word.
I know I am very inspired, Regina and I have lots of follow

(07:14):
up conversations about, you know, who needs to know more
about this work at JP Morgan Chase.
I know you're all going to be taking things back to your work.
This was such an exciting 2 daysand just thank you all very much
for the work that that you do.