Why we made this
Innovative finance, alternative governance, steward ownership, regenerative investing: ideas that barely existed a decade ago are now the subject of enthusiastic, sell-out events. Some might think ideas like these are isolated experiments. To us, seen together, they feel like something else, something very alive: an emerging field of practice designing individual businesses as the building blocks of the new economy.
We're part of this field ourselves. Each of us has 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 lay the foundations for some of the UK's early steward-ownership infrastructure, including The Third Seat, a new custodian for golden shares.
In the last couple of years, the phone hasn't stopped ringing. Something significant is shifting: a field beginning to recognise itself, buzzing with energy but still fragmented, still taking shape. Who else is here? What are they doing? What might we create together? It's full of different, interconnected worldviews, disciplines and practices. 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 collaborate.
You’re welcome!
Who This Guide Is For
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 venture-capital funding and hierarchical, growth-at-speed thinking 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, building the tools, methodologies and business-support programmes that make all this possible.
Join us.
Our Process
Over the past several months we formally interviewed more than 40 founders, funders, lawyers and field-builders working on these questions, and had informal conversations with many more. We asked people what they'd done, what had broken, and what they wished someone had told them earlier.
We looked for patterns across those conversations. It's those patterns, alongside our own deep experience and synthesis of what we heard that shaped what the guide has become.
We did speak with several people further along this road in Europe and the US, but the guide, and especially the map, is deliberately a UK-focused snapshot of a field that exists globally: this is 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 is likely already in motion now.
About YOAK
This 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 design the governance, ownership and capital of their organisations on purpose. Jane ní Dhulchaointigh joined as creative associate and editor. She's a former founder herself and, for the past two years, the Mission Guardian for Earth at Library of Things.
At its heart, this is incredibly simple, and as old as the hills. It's just bloody common sense. We intentionally design products, services and strategies. Why wouldn't we also intentionally design the organisations that bring them to life?
— Patrick Andrews, YOAK
More and more founders and funders are asking: what does it mean for a business to be successful when other priorities beyond profit have become important? They want to design for systemic changes that look after the health and wellbeing of people and planet, alongside growing a healthy organisation.
— Erica Neve, YOAK
Designing for aliveness is a huge opportunity, not just protecting a business's mission, but optimising for its potential to flourish.
— Jane ní Dhulchaointigh, YOAK
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. The microsite and interactive ecosystem map are designed by Atto Partners, a systems-change-focused design studio.
