We believe aligning investors and government will revive the American Dream.
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The Opportunity
A Generational Window of Opportunity to Harness Capital Markets
Policymakers on both sides of the aisle are increasingly coming together to develop solutions designed to attract private capital in ways that advance the national interest. A bipartisan consensus has emerged on the need for public policy to encourage private investment to advance objectives such as reshoring U.S. manufacturing, reinvesting in overlooked places, and advancing job quality and retirement security for American workers.
A Disconnect Between Policymakers and Investors Blocks Progress
Too often, government and capital markets aren’t on the same page. This disconnect can result in policies intended to mobilize investors that get either underused or abused. Better understanding and trust between investors and policymakers is especially important at a time when there is significant demand for policies that improve access to capital for American businesses.
Lafayette Square Institute Aims to Bridge the Gap Between Policymakers and Investors
The Lafayette Square Institute is uniquely positioned to meet this moment. Our affiliation with Lafayette Square Holding Company, LLC, a national investment platform, enables us to access real-time insights from investment professionals. We leverage the analytical capabilities offered by Potomac x Lafayette Square, a data platform that analyzes socioeconomic challenges affecting communities across the United States, to enhance our ability to promote the interests of American workers and families.
We Identify Policy Opportunities that Move Markets
We focus our work on issues where we can leverage our unique investor insights and place-based data to deliver policy recommendations to increase economic opportunity and drive positive change for underserved people and in overlooked places.
Employee Ownership
Employee ownership has an extensive track record of creating significant wealth for workers and local communities in addition to improving the financial bottom line.
The Employee Stock Ownership Plan (ESOP) structure is a distinctly American tradition with a successful history of broadening property ownership across the U.S. workforce. According to empirical research, ESOP companies generate 2.5 times more retirement wealth for workers, grow faster, enjoy higher productivity, are more resilient during economic downturns, and provide superior pay and benefits compared to conventionally owned companies.
While tax incentives for selling owners have played an important role in generating modest levels of employee ownership in the U.S. economy, employee ownership remains peripheral.
A key barrier preventing further adoption and scale is capital. What would it take to rapidly scale up the number of companies owned by their employees and the number of workers benefiting from the financial security that often comes with ownership? We believe investors are a crucial part of the answer if public policy can steer them to provide the financing that will accelerate the growth of employee ownership in the United States.
Real Estate
Over the past 50 years, inequality has grown while economic mobility has dramatically decreased in much of the United States. There are progressively fewer middle-income neighborhoods that provide access to opportunity. Three primary factors contribute to this problem:
Lack of affordable housing: The U.S. is nearly 4 million homes short of meeting the national need – this number has more than doubled since 2012.1
Neighborhood Amenities: Low to moderate-income (LMI) communities lack adequate commercial and retail amenities. A $40 billion retail supply gap exists in lower-income areas across the country.2
Jobs: Employers are missing out on segments of the labor force. In many cities, low-income residents live far from available jobs and employers have difficulty finding people to fill open positions.3
What would it take to rapidly preserve and expand affordable housing supply in ways that create thriving neighborhoods? Motivated by the right policies, billions of dollars in the real estate capital markets can enable affordability, neighborhood stability, and resident economic mobility across the country.
Job Quality & Worker Benefits
64 percent of American workers are living paycheck-to-paycheck. Traditional benefits do not meet the needs of working-class people. Low-income workers are 3x less likely to participate in employer retirement and healthcare plans than higher-income employees.
Policymakers on both sides of the aisle are increasingly focused on job quality and the benefits gap. Our affiliation with Worker Solutions, a custom-built platform that delivers nontraditional benefits to employers and tracks their impact on employee wellbeing, gives us access to practical data around benefits uptake and performance.
We believe most of the 250,000 owners of the medium-size businesses that employ 50 million workers in America want to do right by their workers. What if public policy was more effective at helping them do so with support grounded in awareness of what it really takes to run a business?
Team
Jack Moriarty
Jack Moriarty
Jack Moriarty comes to the Lafayette Square Institute after founding Ownership America, a public policy organization committed to turning Americans into owners. He is a recognized national leader in the employee ownership movement and has led policy initiatives and at the federal and state levels. Jack was a lead architect of the bipartisan Employee Equity Investment Act legislation introduced in 2023 with the aim of catalyzing private investment to create wealth for American workers and communities. He has advised members of Congress in both parties and the White House on opportunities to accelerate the growth of employee ownership as a wealth-building and industrial strategy and has led successful bipartisan state legislative efforts in Massachusetts, Washington State, California, and New Jersey.
Jack has held a number of strategy and operations roles at healthcare delivery and technology companies including Iora Health, Buoy Health, and Allscripts. He also completed a term of service with AmeriCorps Cape Cod where he focused on environmental infrastructure management and natural resource conservation. In 2022, Jack was named to the Massachusetts Baby Bonds Task Force by Treasurer Deb Goldberg.
He currently serves as the inaugural Assistant Director for Policy Analysis at the Rutgers Institute for the Study of Employee Ownership and Profit Sharing and the Experts' Board of the Institute for Economic Democracy, an NGO based in Slovenia focused on promoting employee ownership structures across the European Union.
Jack received his MBA from the Cornell Johnson Graduate School of Management where he was a Roy H. Park Leadership Fellow and named a 2020 "MBA to Watch" by Poets & Quants. He received BA & MA in Political Science from Boston University.'
David Williams
David Williams
David A. Williams is a Director of Real Estate, Impact and Partnerships at Lafayette Square. Previously he served as the Director of Policy Outreach at Opportunity Insights, a research and public policy lab based at Harvard University dedicated to using big data to improve upward mobility in America. He supported research and evidence-based policy change by creating and leading partnerships with communities across the country, including a regional economic opportunity initiative in Charlotte, North Carolina, and Creating Moves to Opportunity, a national housing mobility initiative.
David served as a senior advisor to the Mayor of Detroit where he was a member of the Mayor's economic development team, managing large-scale real estate and community revitalization projects, neighborhood planning initiatives, and policies related to economic mobility, land use, and equitable development. He has also served as an affordable housing and community development attorney and a non-profit management consultant.
David received an AB from Harvard College and a JD from Harvard Law School where he served as President of the Harvard Legal Aid Bureau, focusing on anti-foreclosure and anti-eviction law and policy.
David serves on the board of directors of Up for Growth and StriveTogether. He also serves as a non-resident fellow at the Urban Institute and an advisor to High Opportunity Neighborhood Partners, a real estate firm dedicated to breaking the intergenerational cycle of poverty by providing homes to low-income families in high opportunity neighborhoods.
Katie Deal
Katie Deal
Katie Deal is a Graduate Fellow at the Lafayette Square Institute. A joint degree candidate, Katie is pursuing an MPA at Princeton University’s School of Public and International Affairs with a certificate in Science, Technology, and Environmental Policy (STEP); and the Stanford Graduate School of Business, where she is a Knight-Hennessy Scholar.Prior to joining LSI, Katie led public policy research for the Investments Division (U.S. Equities) at T. Rowe Price. She served as an early-stage investor with the Stanford GSB Impact Fund’s Urban Development portfolio, and worked with Nextdoor on AI-enabled crisis response tools for users affected by climate-driven natural disasters. Katie has also supported the UN Department for Economic and Social Affairs (DESA) in policy research promoting blended finance instruments to catalyze private investment in climate adaptation and resilience.Katie received a BA from the University of Virginia, where she was a Jefferson and Echols Scholar.
Contributing Experts
Don Baylor
Don Baylor
Don Baylor, Jr. is the Head of Worker Solutions at Lafayette Square. Prior to joining Lafayette, Don served as a Senior Program Officer at The Annie E. Casey Foundation, where he oversaw the Foundation's investments to reduce household debt for low and moderate-income families in the South.
Previously, he held roles as Senior Associate with the Urban Institute in Washington, DC where he focused on expanding economic opportunity through JPMorgan Chase, Citi, McArthur and Gates Foundation projects and as Director of OpportunityTexas at Every Texan where he contributed to writing and passing legislation relating to payday lending, financial empowerment, and college savings accounts. In addition, Don was a founding board member for the Asset Funders Network, RAISE Texas, Texas Match the Promise Foundation and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau's Consumer Advisory Board.
Prior to that, he served as legislative and political Director at New York ACORN where he organized campaigns and advanced state and local legislation to curb predatory lending, broaden financial inclusion and expand access to affordable housing. Don began his career as a Senior Consultant at KPMG's State and Local Government Practice, where he performed management and performance audits for school districts, state agencies, and municipal governments.
Originally from Austin,Texas, Don holds a B.A. from Georgetown University and M.A. from University of Wisconsin-Madison. He currently serves on the Board of Directors of HousingWorks Austin, Forklift Danceworks, SaverLife, and the Texas Match the Promise Foundation.
Anne Havard
Anne Havard
Anne Havard is a Vice President at Lafayette Square. Prior to joining Lafayette, Anne was the Senior Policy Advisor at the Tennessee Department of Human Services, where she led public benefits reform efforts, spearheaded the distribution of pandemic recovery grants to the state's nonprofit sector, and managed strategic partnerships. She also served as a policy advisor in two mayoral administrations in Nashville, TN, where she led initiatives to increase financial empowerment and economic mobility in the city's low-income communities.
Anne began her career in the nonprofit sector, working in nonprofit management and homeless services. Anne has served on the boards of the Center for Nonprofit Management in Nashville and Volunteer Tennessee. She is also a graduate of Nashville Emerging Leaders and the National League of Cities Equitable Economic Development Fellowship.
Originally from Atlanta, GA, Anne holds a Bachelor of Science in Cognitive Studies and Religious Studies from Vanderbilt University.
Joshua Spolsdoff
Joshua Spolsdoff
Joshua Spolsdoff serves as Director of Economic Research at Lafayette Square. Prior to joining Lafayette, Josh was a Senior Economist at the University of Utah's Kem C. Gardner Policy Institute, where he led research for local businesses, non-profits, and the State of Utah. He specialized in regional economies, economic impact analyses, and public finance. Previously, Josh was a consultant for Dell EMC, performing a diverse range of project management and senior analytic roles for Fortune 500 companies and the federal government.
Originally from Los Angeles, California, Josh holds a B.S. in Economics and an M.S. in Economics, both awarded by the University of Utah.
Board
Joe Johnson
Joe Johnson
Joseph Johnson is a Managing Director and Head of Liabilities at Lafayette Square. Prior to joining Lafayette, Joseph served as a Senior Vice President in the Capital Markets Group at Goldman Sachs & Co. Joseph has over 20 years of experience in capital markets, responsible for financial institutions coverage and ABS securitization. Joseph started his career in investment banking at the Bank of America/Merrill Lynch, and he has also worked for Standard & Poor's Ratings in the Structured Finance Group.
Joseph serves as the Chairman of the Board for the Upper Manhattan Empowerment Zone and serves on the Board of Directors for Columbia Children's Hospital and the Classical Theatre of Harlem in New York.
Originally from Columbus, Georgia, Joseph holds a BA in Economics and a Ph.D. (ABD) in Economics from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.
Damien Dwin
Damien Dwin
Damien Dwin is the Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Lafayette Square. Previously, Damien served as Co-Founder and Co-CEO of Brightwood Capital Advisors from its founding in 2010 to October 2020. Damien began his career as a trader with Goldman Sachs, New York & London, there earning the Michael P. Mortara Award for Innovation. At Credit Suisse, he was the Co-Founder and Head of the North American Special Opportunities business until 2010. Damien also served on the Vice President Selection Committee and led the Fixed Income Division Credit Training Program. He is an active thought leader on place-based investing, mass incarceration, and the use of capitalism for good. He has written for Financial Times, Entrepreneur, and Inc.com. Damien currently serves as Chair of the Board of Trustees for Vera Institute of Justice. He also serves on the non-profit boards of Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, Childrens Hospital of Philadelphia, Studio Museum in Harlem, National Trust for Historic Preservation, Woodberry Forest School, and Boys Club of New York. He is also a Council Member of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture. Damien received a B.S./B.A. from Georgetown University where he served two terms on the Board of Regents.
Cat McLaughlin
Cat McLaughlin
Caitlin McLaughlin is the Chief People Officer at Lafayette Square. Prior to joining Lafayette Caitlin served as Executive Vice President and Talent Strategy Executive for the PNC Financial Services Group with overall responsibility for PNC's enterprise talent strategy.
Previously, Caitlin served as Managing Director focused on global campus recruiting and program management at Citigroup and held a number of roles within the organization and its predecessor companies, Salomon Smith Barney and Salomon Brothers.
Caitlin is a member of the executive committee of Vibrant Pittsburgh, The Forte Foundation and Carlow University. She is also a member of the board of directors of Partner4Work. She chairs the Talent Attraction and Retention Committee for the Allegheny Conference for Community Development. She holds a B.A. in Political Communications from the University of Pittsburgh.
