Hilary Abell has been an employee ownership practitioner, thought leader, and advocate for twenty years and co-founded Project Equity in 2014. Project Equity focuses on transitioning small- and medium-sized enterprises to broad-based employee ownership (EO) and on developing strategies to scale EO to benefit Black and brown workers and low-income workers across the U.S. Based in the San Francisco Bay Area, Project Equity works with partners and businesses on national campaigns and in numerous regions, including Northern California, Southern California, the Twin Cities, Washington state, Miami, Atlanta, Arizona, and Birmingham. The organization is known for its awareness raising, innovation, and thought leadership; its effective business outreach; and its holistic, long-term services to transitioning companies, as well as the policy work Hilary has been leading in recent years, including helping to shape and pass pro-employee ownership laws in California, Washington state and Washington DC.

Hilary’s passion for employee ownership comes from her personal experience as an employee-owner and her direct knowledge of the impact employee ownership creates for low- and moderate-income workers. Prior to Project Equity, Hilary worked at Equal Exchange (a worker coop) and various international development organizations, and, from 2003-2011, led WAGES, a nonprofit that developed growth-oriented worker coops with low-income immigrant women, generating 40-80% increases in family incomes. 

Hilary received the 2022 Heinz Award for the Economy, alongside PE co-founder Alison Lingane. Hilary has also been honored with an Echoing Green Black Male Achievement Fellowship, a Common Future Local Economy Fellowship, and an Executive Fellowship with the Institute for the Study of Employee Ownership and Profit Sharing at Rutgers University. 

Hilary is the author of “Worker Cooperatives: Pathways to Scale” (The Democracy Collaborative, 2014), a lead author, with Melissa Hoover, of "The Cooperative Growth Ecosystem: Inclusive Economic Development in Action" (Citi Community Development, 2016), author of “Participatory Management: an Overview and Case Study of High-Involvement Cultures at Work” (Project Equity, 2018) and “The Case for Employee Ownership” (Project Equity, 2020), and co-author, with Kim Coontz and Ricardo Nuñez, of “California Cooperatives: Today’s Landscape of Worker, Housing and Childcare Cooperatives” (Project Equity, 2021) and, with Terron Ferguson and Alison Lingane, of “Strategies to Advance Black Employee Ownership” (Project Equity, 2023). 

Hilary has her BA from Princeton University and her MBA from Presidio Graduate School.