According to Local Dollars, Local Sense by Michael Shuman:
If you don’t want poverty in your community, your businesses must pay living wages with decent benefits. And if you don’t want polluted air, water, and land, your businesses must behave in environmentally sustainable ways.
For this reason, we are developing the Millionaire Healthy Living Business Development Company (BDC) that will prioritize spreading and replicating local business models with outstanding labor and environmental practices in the Metro New York area. As explained in Investing Answers:
BDCs are similar to venture capital (VC) or private equity (PE) funds since they provide investors with a way to invest in small companies and participate in the sale of those investments. However, VC and PE funds are often closed to all but wealthy investors. BDCs, on the other hand, allow anyone who purchases a share to participate in this market.
One business model that we are looking at closely is a privately held, majority employee-owned American supermarket chain based in Boise,Idaho called WinCo Foods. At one store in Corvallis, Oregon, the combined retirement savings of 130 employees roughly comes to an astounding $100 million. And according to a Forbes article:
And that figure is growing rapidly, such that in a few years the average wealth of these employees could easily exceed $1 million. Quite a few individual workers already have account balances above that level….
WinCo has more than 400 front line employees with more than $1 million in their ESOP accounts and hundreds of retirees similarly well set. Each year, it sets aside an amount equal to about 20% of each employee’s pay, in the form of stock, and the value of the underlying shares has risen rapidly, too.
Most Americans in WinCo employee Cathy Burch, 42, situation have either no savings at all or an account such as a 401k containing less than $50,000, but Cathy owns almost a $1 million in stock. Cathy is seen here with her husband Kevin.
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