About

We're part of this field ourselves. Between us, we've spent more than two decades in and around purpose-led business. We've advised Riverford Organic Farmers through its employee-ownership transition, shaped Riversimple's multi-stakeholder governance model, and helped build some of the UK's early steward-ownership infrastructure, including The Third Seat, a new custodian for golden shares. One of us has also been living this from the inside. For the past two years, she's been a Mission Guardian, the legal holder of the golden share, at Library of Things, one of the UK's first steward-owned businesses.

In the last couple of years, the phone hasn't stopped ringing. And we've realised something that feels significant: we're not working alone. We're part of a field that is beginning to recognise itself. It's buzzing with energy, but it's still fragmented and still taking shape. It wants to see itself, to understand itself. Who else is here, what are they doing, and what might we be able to do together? What might this field be called? There's a richness and pragmatism to it. It's a field full of very different yet interconnected worldviews, disciplines, practices, niches, inspiring people and awesome organisations, all building it. That's why we're making this Field Guide, with you, and for you.

It’s an invitation for you to see your own work as part of it, to meet each other and the whole.

You’re welcome!

This guide is written for you if you’re already working in the field, or if you’re interested in exploring it with us:

Founders building or restructuring a business who sense that the default template of venture-capital-style funding, standard shareholder governance, hierarchical decision-making and growth at speed isn't the only option, or the right one for what you're trying to build.

Funders and investors, from family offices to foundations to impact funds, looking for ways to deploy capital that don't force purpose-led businesses into structures built for a different kind of company.

Ecosystem enablers: advisers and capacity-builders working alongside both, quietly building the tools, methodologies and business-support programmes that make all this possible.

Welcome.

This field guide and ecosystem map is built from the field, not just about it.

Over the past several months we formally interviewed more than 30 founders, funders, lawyers and field-builders working on these questions in practice, and had informal conversations with many more. We asked people what they'd actually built, what had broken, what they wished someone had told them earlier, what they were still figuring out, what’s missing, what’s needed and what should happen next?

We looked for patterns across those conversations: recurring tensions, recurring workarounds, and recurring moments where a structure and a stated purpose stopped matching. It's those patterns, more than any single person's view, that shaped what this guide has become.

We did speak with several trailblazers in Europe and the US, but the guide, and especially the map, is deliberately a UK-focused snapshot of a field that exists globally. That's because we're focused on strengthening the field here in the UK, where we live and work. It's been gathered at a particular moment, mid-2026, and we don't claim it to be a definitive or permanent account. Some of what's here will already be in motion by the time you read it. We see that as a sign the field is alive, not a flaw in the guide.

This guide was made by three people who found each other through shared questions.

Patrick Andrews and Erica Neve co-founded YOAK to help founders and funders intentionally design the ownership, governance and capital of their organisations. Jane ní Dhulchaointigh joined as creative associate and editor. She's a former founder herself and, for the past two years, a practising Mission Guardian at Library of Things.

This guide and its ecosystem map wouldn't exist without the field itself or without support from JRF's Transforming Wealth Lab, a five-year field-building programme led by our contributor Emma Shaw. We're glad to say that plainly: transparency about how this work gets funded is part of what we're asking the rest of the field to practice too. The microsite and interactive ecosystem map are designed by Atto Partners, a digital systems and brand design studio focused on systems-change work. We want this guide to be something you can explore, learn from, and return to: a place where you feel you belong.