About

Alfredo Mathew III is the originator of the Shared Prosperity Trust and the author of this Declaration. He is a former teacher who spent fourteen years in classrooms in the South Bronx, Pasadena, and East Oakland, and a workforce development and entrepreneurial ecosystem builder who has spent the years since working across the public, private, philanthropic, and community sectors to build infrastructure for economic mobility. He served as the Bay Area Director for the Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship (NFTE), and is a co-founder and Board President of ESO Ventures Inc., where he led business development and closed $22M in contracts from 2021 to 2023. He is currently the founder and CEO of SPCC.1 and AM3 LLC.

He is the grandson of Lydia Rosa Mathew, who arrived in New York Harbor from San Juan, Puerto Rico in 1927, raised eight children through the Great Depression in the South Bronx and Spanish Harlem, and never complained about this country because it gave her opportunity. That lineage is the ground this Declaration is written from.

He lives in Plano, Texas with his wife and children.

This Declaration exists because the economic architecture that produced the twentieth-century American Dream has reached its structural limits, and the architecture being built to replace it is being designed by a small number of people in a small number of rooms. The Declaration is an invitation to change who is in the room.

This document names prosperity as a collective creation. The author is named above. The ledger of contribution is below.

The people who shaped the thinking of this Declaration through sustained conversation, review, critique, and partnership over the years the ideas took form.

Amy Chan, Chief of Staff, and Alfred Solis, Chief Catalyst at SPCC.1, have been integral to the design, thinking, and application of these principles over many years, and played a critical role in the founding of SPCC.1 in 2024–2025. Claudia Escobar, Ecosystem Research and Writing Fellow, helped craft the first version of this essay during a five-month engagement in 2025 and has been a thought partner throughout. Steven Hill, political-economic journalist and Kelso advocate, provided generous feedback, introductions to thinkers and practitioners in the ownership space, and helped inform earlier versions of this essay in 2025. Ben Wanzo and Martha Hernandez, whose early belief in ESO Ventures Inc. made the path visible, shaped the business through which many of these lessons were first learned in application. Elias Crim and Genevieve Sheridan are more recent allies who have helped shape this body of work as fellow travelers on the camino. Van Ton-Quinlivan, who opened the door at Futuro Health, and Toby Ewing, former Executive Director of California's Mental Health Services Oversight and Accountability Commission, helped inform the section on health care and the demographic shifts stressing the social sector. Steven and Luke Jubb, father and son, have shaped my thinking over the past twenty years, especially with regard to social capital and technology as tools for empowerment. Dorian Johnson, Far I Shields, Ruben Hernandez, Paulo Gregory, and Hector Guadalupe all played critical roles in the gestation period of this body of work from late 2023 through early 2025, and helped the author make the invisible more visible. Attorney Jim Black has been a thought partner in shaping the legal standing of the model.

Alfredo Mathew Jr., my father — a history teacher, a South Bronx principal, and the first Puerto Rican superintendent in New York City schools. He believed in the promise of this country and spent his life trying to make its institutions accountable to all of its people. His intellectual lineage in education reform runs through every page of this document.

Lydia Rosa Mathew, my grandmother, whose faith in this country is the reason its promise is still worth completing.

Alfredo Mathew I, my grandfather, who organized garment workers in the South Bronx as a communist atheist, and knew that structural questions are never finished.

Titi Isabel, who did not live to see what came next, and is held in everything that has.

Cheryl Mathew Berardi, my mother, who comes from a proud line of Protestants from England, Germany, the Netherlands, Ireland, and Scotland who have spent nearly four hundred years in the cold Northeast of the United States. I am the child of both of these worlds. An American.

Rita Kiranchandra Mathew, my wife. Tara Luna Mathew, my daughter. Jayden Alfredo Mathew, my son. They have been with me every step of the way. It is our daily conversations, and the invisible labor of the endless conversation that is our family life, that is the basis for this entire body of work. Those who came before us, and those who will come next, are all present and essential to it.

The organizations, boards, and partners whose work is entangled with the thinking of this Declaration: ESO Ventures, The James Irvine Foundation, Cohado, and the wider network of practitioners, funders, and builders whose paths have crossed the ledger.

The thinkers whose work the Declaration stands on — named in the bibliography of the full essay and held in the structural argument throughout: Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, Richard Hofstadter, Christian Parenti, Michael Sherraden, Thomas Piketty, Louis Kelso, Warren Buffett, Peter Thiel, Mariana Mazzucato, Robert Putnam, Nancy Folbre, Arlie Hochschild, Hernando De Soto, Elinor Ostrom, Shoshana Zuboff, Jaron Lanier, Mustafa Suleyman, W.E.B. Du Bois, Eric Foner, Kate Raworth, Joseph Schumpeter, and the scholars and practitioners across 250 years whose arguments this Declaration synthesizes into its own.

This Declaration was synthesized with the help of Claude (Anthropic, claude-opus-4-7), working as a Layer 1 synthesis tool under the Conversation-to-Asset Protocol (SPT-2026-0001). Claude holds no ownership, no governance rights, and no attribution stake in the Trust. The authorship is human; the tool is named because Principle VIII of this Declaration is true: the twenty-first century economy rewards conversations with machines, and honesty about how the work was produced is part of making the human contribution legible.

Earlier versions drew on ChatGPT (OpenAI) and Gemini (Google), and the Trust's working papers carry a complete record of which sessions, versions, and artifacts used which tools. The full synthesis methodology is documented in the Epistemological Constitution (SPT-2026-0000.1).

The models that did this work were trained on the accumulated written output of human civilization. Every teacher, scientist, writer, and storyteller whose work entered a training set is, in a real structural sense, a contributor to this document. The Declaration argues that those contributions must eventually be made legible and compensable. Until that architecture exists, the acknowledgment is what the medium permits.

Language itself, developed across centuries by every person who ever spoke. The institutions of American democracy, built and maintained by generations of uncompensated civic labor. The public universities, the land-grant colleges, the libraries, the public schools. The care workers, the teachers, the organizers, the parents whose labor sustained the workforce that built what this country built. The village. The ancestors. The commons we have not yet named.