Spirit In Business

Terry Mollner

Terry Mollner, Ed.D., is Founder, Chair, and Executive Director of Trusteeship Institute, Inc., a think tank and consulting firm founded in 1973 that focuses on the development of socially responsible businesses, employee-owned cooperatives, and spiritually based enterprises. Dr. Mollneris a founder and member of the board of trustees of the Calvert Family of Socially Responsible Mutual Funds, the Calvert Foundation, and Spirit in Business, Inc. Recently, he is establishing Trusteeship Capital, Inc., an investment and merchant banking firm that buys businesses and places at least 51% of the voting rights of the common shares under the control of Trusteeship Institute, Inc. which has a board of mature business elders who make sure the companies give priority to the common good. He is a member of the board of Ben & Jerry's Homemade, Inc., Cyberlore Studios, Inc., Hampshire County United Way, Inc., Hot Fudge Social Ventures, Inc. One of the earliest pioneers of modern socially responsible investing in the 1970s, he has helped it grow from nothing to being the fastest growing asset class of the professional investment community with over $2 trillion in investment in the USA, 15% of mutual fund assets, and a growing presence in investment communities around the world.

He also provided the leadership to create the Calvert Foundation that is pioneering "community investment" - investment to end poverty - as a new asset class in the professional investment community. In the 1980s, in hundreds of presentations from the White House to local communities, Dr. Mollner introduced many in the United States, Canada, England, and India to the healthy maturation of cooperative capitalism exemplified by the Mondragon Cooperatives in the Basque region of Spain. He has written numerous articles on this phenomenon.He is currently completing a book to bring attention to the importance of being aware of stages of maturity of thinking; how to elder one's self up these stages; and how to reorganize or create parallel social, political, and economic institutions in society to reflect the next stage possible for us.The working title is Enlightened Love Dancing and the Trusteeship Evolution: What Naturally Happens When the Seven Stages of Maturity of Thinking Become a Cascade of Habits. With his wife and other couples, he founded a community of friends 20 years ago to experiment in how to re-village our lives in a modern context. With more than 100 adults and children, it is still going strong; it has created very successful initiation rituals for its teenagers and a spiritual-based conflict resolution process for couples.
He has a B.A. in education, English, and Theater from Creighton Univesity in Omaha, Nebraska, his home town; was trained in improvisational theater at Second City in Chicago where he was an actor and model; and received a doctorate from the School of Education at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst where he was one of the founders of its University Without Walls Program. He currently lives in Northampton, MA.