I'm writing on behalf of my fellow owners of Linksbridge SPC.
And in case you're wondering who those owners might be, the answer is simple: everyone you interact with here at Linksbridge.
In 2023, while we celebrated our 15th anniversary, Linksbridge took the final steps to implement an important transition, one that we've been working on for several years: we formally put our business into the hands of the Linksbridge Employee Ownership Trust. The trust belongs to our entire team. Its purpose is clear: to ensure the continuity of our mission by keeping our company in the hands of those responsible for its success.
Our mission itself is unchanged. As always, Linksbridge exists to multiply the global health impact of counterparts like you. The report below presents an overview of how we're faring, emphasizing key areas where our employee-owners have invested their time, their attention, and their financial resources.
We thank you for your trust, friendship, and commitment to a better world.
Warmly,
Heather Ferguson
Executive Director
Linksbridge SPC
Truly public goods
In 2023, we made significant additions to our repertoire of global public goods.
Global Health Markets Hub: Known as GHMH, our new platform makes essential data from the Global Vaccine Market Model more interactive, easier to navigate, and more convenient.
To experience the platform, submit a request for credentials or log in at workspace.linksbridge.com. Inside, you'll find fully interactive dashboards packed with GVMM data, including demand, supply, price, and vaccine market value datasets.
Market Ecosystem Thought Leadership (META): Funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the META initiative aims to strengthen the global health market shaping ecosystem at a pivotal moment in its evolution. In 2023, Linksbridge began co-developing public assets that offer an unprecedented overview of the state of this field of practice, its scope, and its essential principles:
The Global Health Market Shaping Lookback presents a 10-year review that examines progress, takes stock of the current situation, and assesses enabling and inhibiting factors of the field.
Foundations of Market Shaping explores the characteristics of healthy markets, widely accepted market shaping best practices, and methods for planning and executing interventions.
An employee-owned Linksbridge
A few years after our birth in Seattle in 2008, Linksbridge became the first business in our category to earn Washington State designation as a Social Purpose Corporation (SPC).
Throughout that time, we've proudly offered an alternative to profit-driven advisory and consulting firms.
Sustaining our impact: Our transition to employee ownership ensures we'll continue to abide by our core principles on a lasting basis. Linksbridge is not for sale. And the Linksbridge Employee Ownership Trust (EOT) is founded on terms that prohibit its sale.
Instead, our EOT exists to own and manage Linksbridge toward these ends:
Ensuring our sustainability.
Enabling Linksbridge SPC to create positive social impact through the work we do.
Providing that after-tax profits support the goals above as well as benefit employee-owners through retention bonuses.
Everyone at Linksbridge becomes an EOT beneficiary after six months of employment.
Team compensation
Motivated teams make a bigger impact. We view competitive pay and attractive benefits as supporting—not diverting from—our mission.
Salaries: Since our founding, Linksbridge has prioritized pay equity and pay transparency as essential to our economic, gender, and racial justice goals. We aim for fairness, not exorbitance: the ratio between our highest and lowest salary levels is less than 3:1.
Our 2023 pay levels:
$77,175 for junior team members
$90,975 at first promotion
$110,250 for associates
$137,825 for senior associates
$165,375 for directors
$192,950 for principals
$220,500 for our executive director and partners
Benefits: All team members working at least 50% FTE earn standard but important benefits like employer-sponsored health insurance, 401(k) retirement plans with employer match, 11 paid holidays, and four weeks of paid vacation.
Additionally, a two-month sabbatical every five years of employment helps team members refresh and focus.
A 1:1 charitable match of up to $3,000 each year helps team members give.
Beginning in 2023, our employee-owners participate in a retention pool that pays a share of profits when our firm does well.
Introducing our Washington, D.C. office
In the fourth quarter of last year, Linksbridge opened our first new office outside our Seattle headquarters.
Up and running in the U.S. capital: You can reach us on the East Coast by contacting Lena Stashko at lena.stashko@linksbridge.com.
Income and expenses
Profitability is our responsibility as stewards of finite resources.
Our bottom line: In 2023, Linksbridge realized a 9.7% operating profit after taxes.
As usual, payroll (plus benefits and related taxes) represented our most significant expense, comprising 81% of the year's costs.
Information and communications technology made up the next-highest outlay, at 7% of overall expenses.
The Linksbridge Foundation
Since 2021, we've invested a portion of our proceeds in the Linksbridge Foundation, awarding no-strings-attached gifts to nonprofits fighting for intersectional justice and human rights locally and globally.
Our commitment to the foundation is at least 5% of annual profit.
Gifts: To date, the Linksbridge Foundation has invested some $200,000 in a range of partners:
Pro bono advisory services in Afghanistan: As part of ongoing support to the
Khadijah Project, the Linksbridge Foundation provided organizational strategic support, emergency response advisory services, and technical expertise in the areas of staff mental health and well-being.
These efforts culminated in a field mission to Kabul, Jalalabad, and Torkham in November 2023.
The Linksbridge Foundation supported both the Khadijah Project and Women for Women International for a needs assessment in the growing Torkham refugee camp at the Pakistan border.
The foundation also co-designed and co-facilitated a workshop with Médecins Sans Frontières Afghanistan to help improve support services to female healthcare staff.
Pro bono strategic support in Seattle: Linksbridge provided pro bono assistance in developing a strategic plan for the Hepatitis Education Project (HEP), a Seattle-based organization dedicated to eradicating viral hepatitis. Our collaboration resulted in well-defined goals spanning local, state, and national levels.
Events: The foundation makes the Linksbridge offices in Seattle available to counterparts. In 2023, we co-hosted the Khadijah Project's inaugural fundraising reception.
If you need space for an event or community gathering, please let us know.
Team update
Our team welcomed six new hires in 2023:
Chiara Brust joined after completing an MPH in global environmental health at Emory University.
Northwestern and Johns Hopkins grad Jaquelyn Goldsberry came on board after a research fellowship with WHO's Immunization, Vaccines and Biologicals department.
After wrapping up an internship at Linksbridge, Katie Guité has now signed on as a front-end developer.
Lauren Reising comes to us from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, where she completed a master's in public health for development.
A graduate of Ontario's Queen's University, Katie Thackray brings a background in office management and human resources.
Peter Windus has joined Linksbridge, bringing experience in finance and information systems.
Global and local citizenship
As conscientious citizens of an imperfect world, Linksbridge chooses to invest in justice and sustainability.
Real Rent: Our office in the lower Queen Anne neighborhood of Seattle is situated on the unceded ancestral land of the Duwamish people. Through the Real Rent program, we make annual payments, aligned with our King County property taxes, to the Duwamish Tribe in recognition of its historic rights.
Carbon offsets: We estimated our carbon footprint using the U.S. EPA Simplified Greenhouse Gas Emissions Calculator, accounting for office emissions from refrigeration, electricity consumption, waste/recycling/compost production, employee commuting, and business travel.
For 2023, we invested in two projects to offset our 44 metric tons of emissions:
