TERRY MOLLNER, ED.D. is the Founder, Chair, and Executive Director of Trusteeship Institute, Inc. since 1973. He is also a Founder and Chair of StakeHolders Capital, Inc., as socially responsible asset management firm in Amherst, MA (www.stakeholderscapital.com) 

In the late 1970s Terry, as one of the founders of the Institute of Community Economics, Inc. with Robert Swan, led a group of fifteen social activists from around the country in monthly meetings for eighteen months that wrote one of the first set of social screens for investing. 1982, Terry was one of the pioneers of the socially responsible investment movement as a founder of the Calvert Social Investment Funds, the first family of such funds. To this day Terry sits on its board, and it now has over $6 billion under management in seventeen mutual funds. He is also one of the founders of the Calvert Foundation which raises capital primarily from the public by selling its Community Investment Notes where investors choose the interest rate from 0-2%. It has over $550 million invested around the world with the mission of “end poverty through investments” in microloan programs, low-income housing projects, social enterprises, and cooperatives 

After his visit to Mondragon Cooperatives in 1979, throughout the 1980s he introduced them to people throughout the United States with his slide show presentation, including at the Reagan White House. In discussions afterwards, an agreement that was made between Senator Russell Long (Louisiana), the Democratic chair at the time of the Senate Finance Committee, and Republicans who attended the presentation was one of the actions that led to the passage of the first Employee Stock Ownership Legislation.

Terry also organized and became the spokesperson for a group to buy Ben & Jerry’s in 2000 and eventually was one of the people who negotiated the sale to Unilever. The Ben & Jerry’s board, with Terry now on it since those negotiations, remained in existence with a contract that had it keep ownership of the “social mission and brand integrity,” the only socially responsible company to achieve such a contract when bought by a multinational.

Terry is currently dedicated to creating some of the organizations he believes will come into existence to give expression to this new post-capitalist-socialist era where we recognize that, as with all other living things, human beings mature. At full human maturity we freely choose to give priority to the common good and second priority to our self-interest. We do both fully; however, by prioritizing them in this way in our thinking, and giving priority to the direct experience of the oneness of nature at all times, we enhance both.

He believes that the universe is one indivisible whole; and, therefore, cooperation, not competition, is fundamental in reality. Our highest priority at all times is to do good, that is, to cooperate with all that exists for the maturation of nature and our human role in it. About this we do not have choice; this is nature.

Trusteeship Institute was founded in 1973 on the Mahatma Gandhi economic philosophy of “trusteeship.” Gandhi believed that at full human maturity, as has been the conclusion of nearly all mature human beings in nearly every land since early in human history, we freely choose to give priority to the common good. Therefore, at this point we experience ourselves as the “trustees” of all our wisdom and possessions, not the “owners” of them. We then naturally and effortlessly choose to manage them for the common good and only take for ourselves what we think is necessary and no more.  So, as you can see, since 1973 Terry has been living in this new era that the Occupy community is one of the more dramatic efforts to bring it into existence as a widespread movement. Terry has recently won a Kickstarter grant opportunity where he will be designing and publishing a booklet that will provide as aesthetic guide to some of the new organizations described in his PAPERS ON THE NEW ORGANIZATIONS OF THE COMMON GOOD ERA blog. You can view those papers there on this website.

Terry graduated from Creighton University in Omaha, NE in 1967 and received his Doctorate in Education from the University of Massachusetts School of Education in Amherst, MA in 1982. Some of his books and articles can be found on this website.