About Us

About Us

The Predistribution Initiative is a nonpartisan, multistakeholder non-profit designed to co-create improved investment structures and practices that share more wealth and influence with workers and communities. Our ultimate goal is to address systemic risks like inequality, biodiversity loss, and climate change, which manifest as systematic risks in markets and investors’ portfolios.


We were founded in early 2019 by a team of professionals focused on ESG issues and impact investing. We realized that while the ESG and impact investing fields have made significant progress, the guidelines and frameworks that have emerged as industry standards focus primarily on portfolio companies and the investments of investors. Meanwhile, investment practices and structures themselves may be exacerbating the problems we seek to solve and creating systematic risks for large institutional investors, as well as systemic risks for society. Given increasing stakeholder concerns about these issues, we recognized that there were major blind spots that needed to be elevated and addressed.

Reforming capitalism and true responsible investment requires looking at the full equation:

Portfolio Company Impacts + Investor Impacts = Responsible Investment

As an example, one of the first issues we identified relates to fund manager compensation and economic inequality. In existing ESG frameworks, metrics exist for investors to assess corporate executive compensation in their portfolio companies, including the ratio between CEO pay and the average worker. However, the pay gap ratios between asset portfolio company management executives and the average worker in a portfolio company are often even greater.

To understand the full story of how a particular investment decision may affect society, asset owners and allocators would need to evaluate fund manager compensation in addition to corporate executive compensation.

Furthermore, there may be opportunities to develop new fund and investment structures (with risk-adjusted returns for mainstream investors) that share more wealth with workers and communities. The potential to develop these structures was of strong interest to our founding team members, and is an area of ongoing focus.

To learn more about overlooked issues related to investment structures, please read PDI’s ESG 2.0 paper on “Measuring and Managing Risk Beyond the Enterprise-Level

Our Vision and Theory of Change

Our vision is a world where the cultural meaning of success is aligned with the principles of predistribution, which means the sharing of influence over, and wealth derived from, the value creation process. This requires an evolution of our financial system through collaborative engagement of diverse stakeholders, including investors, companies, workers and communities.

In this world, investment success is aligned with the health of the natural and human systems upon which the financial system rests. The risks that workers, communities, and nature take, and the value that they create, are factored into investment decision-making and financial analysis.

The Predistribution Initiative leverages the momentum around system-level investing and Universal Ownership to align asset owner and allocators’ investing activities with their stewardship and risk management goals. Our work is focused on:

  • producing research on the roots of systemic and systematic risks for society and investors; 
  • facilitating diverse stakeholder engagement to co-create approaches to regenerative investment; and,
  • fostering accountability and transparency to push the industry forward.

Meet Our Team

Leadership Team

Advisory Committee / Board of Directors

Communications and Creative Partners