Brian ’96 and Katie ’95 Boland on Building a Well-Being Economy The Bolands have dedicated their time and energy to building a more equitable economic system.

By Kelsey Goodwin
December 8, 2025

“If you’re a lifelong learner, you’re open to different viewpoints – learning from economists, historians, scientists or community members who are closest to the problems we are tackling.”

~ Katie Boland ’95 

When Brian ’96 and Katie ’95 Boland are surrounded by the hum of their backyard beehives, they find perspective.

“Beekeeping,” Katie says, “enables us to get away from screens and technology and just really get to be present.” With about 160,000 bees across two hives, the couple knows that listening and learning are what keep a colony thriving, a truth that also anchors their work.

The Bolands are the founders of Delta Fund, an umbrella organization that supports several initiatives that advance what the Bolands refer to as “a post-growth or well-being economy that enables racial equity and financial inclusion,” among other things.

“We can actually figure out ways that we can have an economy in America that works for us rather than the other way around,” Brian says. “We want an economy that doesn’t obsess over GDP but over outcomes that will enable our kids and their kids to have a community and a nation that enables them to thrive.”

“One of the big levers that enables that,” Brian continues, “is employee ownership and ownership of housing and how people can better participate in owning and governing their lives.” Through their work, communities across the country gain access to patient capital or low-cost, long-term investment that allows neighborhood trusts and cooperatives (and other innovative structures) to grow sustainably.

Unlock Ownership, which the Bolands created with another co-founder through the Delta Fund, has a mission to accelerate the development of equitable asset ownership, particularly home and employee ownership, in historically under-invested households.

“This is an initiative designed to unlock the $250 billion that sits in donor-advised funds with the pure purpose of creating opportunity for people around ownership and governance of their lives,” Brian explains.

Using philanthropic money, they invest in funds that support the ownership economy and, in some cases, return the capital so that it can be granted or invested again. The fund has already supported projects such as the Cooperative Fund of the Northeast, which finances worker-owned businesses, and Trust Neighborhoods, which builds mixed-income neighborhood trusts to lower housing costs.

Katie emphasizes that the mission is about more than money.

“We’re trying to change the mechanisms, not only to help people benefit, but also to just have transparency around what’s actually happening with their job, their housing, their family and their livelihood,” she says.

The couple’s partnership, both personal and professional, traces back to Lexington, where they met as students at W&L. Katie, a biology major, and Brian, a philosophy major, were friends throughout college before they started dating during her senior year. At W&L, Brian says he unlocked a lifelong love of questioning and critical thought.

“I started as a pre-med major,” he recalls, “but then I really fell in love with philosophy.”

He credits the late Harrison Pemberton, professor of philosophy emeritus, with shaping his intellectual trajectory.

“He was a fantastic professor, really oriented on deep discussion and deep thought,” Brian says. “He taught me not to accept things for what they seem to be, to really wrestle with ideas and challenge assumptions.”

That mindset would serve them both through nonlinear careers that spanned education, tech and global philanthropy and now working on the economy.

“The days of committing to a company and sticking with them for 40 years just doesn’t happen anymore,” Katie says. “If you’re lucky and open to following your values and your passion, sometimes it goes in all sorts of disparate directions.”

After teaching in public and private secondary education for many years, she transitioned to working on results-based funding initiatives to alleviate extreme poverty in Africa.

Meanwhile, Brian’s path led from the music business to digital advertising, then to 11 years at Facebook, where he rose to multiple vice president positions before leaving to focus on work that aligned with his values.

“I quit because it was harming society and harming people,” he says candidly. “We really started to wrestle with how we wanted to spend our time and what we wanted to work on next.” Brian is a whistleblower who testified before Congress about the harms from social media and his concerns about how Meta isn’t investing in understanding those harms.

When their efforts to advance a federal living-wage bill stalled, the Bolands began looking for other ways to strengthen economic equity, which led them to determine that our current economic model, while working as designed, is not enabling people — or the planet — to flourish and is extracting at rates that aren’t sustainable.

“All the data from 30-plus years showed how effective employee ownership is at closing the racial wealth gap,” Brian says. “It was a clear space that we wanted to work.” Delta Fund grew from that insight and from their shared belief that systems can be rebuilt.

“Whether you have a small amount of resources or a lot, you have the same amount of time as everyone else,” Katie says. “You can use your time well.” She encourages individuals to align their choices with their values, including where they shop, how they invest, where they bank and how they spend their time.

“You have power in the world,” she adds.

The Bolands have gone all-in on the economy that they see as the path forward. They have shifted all their time and money to a well-being economy. “An economy is simply the way we produce and provide for one another. Our current system isn’t enabling everyone’s needs to be met.”

“Amazing things have happened in our society because of individuals,” Brian says, “citizens who stepped up and decided to change the world.”

That faith in possibility, the couple says, drives their optimism and is rooted in their W&L education.

“For both Katie and myself, that openness to learning new things came through our broader liberal arts education,” Brian says. “It taught us to question assumptions, admit when we’re wrong and keep challenging our thinking. That’s such an important part of it.”

“If you’re a lifelong learner, you’re open to different viewpoints – learning from economists, historians, scientists or community members who are closest to the problems we are tackling,” Katie says.

The Bolands see their work as a long game as slow, deliberate and collective as the steady work of their bees.

“We talk a lot about biomimicry in the work that we do,” Katie says. “There are so many examples in nature of the power of moving in the same direction with others. You don’t have to know exactly what every other person is doing, but you’re all moving together. It’s powerful and comforting.”

“Individual empowerment and opportunity are so critical,” Brian says. “But so is community. Rebuilding that connectedness, through values-oriented people working together, is what gives you the energy to build the world you want.”

For the Bolands, that’s true to their vision of building a more equitable economy.

“Katie’s grandfather drove a tank in World War II,” Brian says. “That generation was called on in a really dark, hard time to do some hard things. This is our moment to do hard things. With where we’re headed — whether it’s climate, inequality, civic unrest — it’s time to take on some hard work. And I’m optimistic that we can change things, even when every day it feels like they’re going in the wrong direction. Human beings have come together to do hard things throughout history. We can do it again.”