Jenny Kassan

Senior Attorney

My passion is helping small business owners, mission-driven organizations, and changemakers to raise the investment capital they need in a way that lets them stay true to their goals, values, and dreams. I have devoted my career to understanding the creative legal structures, financing tools, and compliance strategies that make this possible.

Jenny Kassan (she/her)
Fremont, CA and Baltimore, MD

jenny@jrwiener.com
Read Jenny’s blog here

Jenny has almost 30 years of experience as an attorney and advisor for mission-driven enterprises. Her practice focuses on entity structuring, values-driven financing, and securities law. She has helped her clients raise millions of dollars from values-aligned investors and raised over $3.5 million for her own businesses.

She is the author of Raise Capital on Your Own Terms: How to Fund Your Business without Selling Your Soul (Berrett-Koehler, October 2017).

Jenny earned her J.D. from Yale Law School and a masters degree in City and Regional Planning from the University of California at Berkeley.

Jenny co-founded the Force for Good Fund, an impact investment fund managed by Community Ventures, a nonprofit organization that Jenny founded in 2008. She also co-founded Crowdfund Main Street, a licensed portal for Regulation Crowdfunding. Most recently she co-founded Opportunity Main Street, a social enterprise that owns a mixed-use building in Baltimore which will serve as a community wealth building hub.

Jenny served on the Securities and Exchange Commission Advisory Committee on Small and Emerging Companies. She submitted the petition to the SEC that led to the passage of the 2012 JOBS Act and was present at the White House signing ceremony.

Jenny co-founded the Sustainable Economies Law Center, a nonprofit that provides legal advocacy and education to support sustainable economies. She is the president of the Crowdfunding Professional Association and formerly served as a director of Berrett-Koehler Publishers and a fellow at Democracy Collaborative.

Before becoming a securities lawyer, Jenny worked for eleven years at a nonprofit community development corporation in Oakland called the Unity Council, where she served as staff attorney and managed community economic development projects including a $100 million transit-oriented development project and the formation and management of several social ventures designed to employ and create business ownership opportunities for low-income community residents.

Jenny is certified as a coach by the International Association of Women in Coaching. In 2020 she was named to the list of World-Changing Women in Conscious Business by SOCAP Global.

She is on the planning committee for LetsBMore, Baltimore’s timebanking network.

In her free time she loves to do yoga, spend time outdoors, and spoil her cats.

Practice Areas

  • Entrepreneurship coaching and consulting
  • Business and capital development strategy
  • Ownership design, prioritizing long-term
  • Coop, LCA, Multi-stakeholder entities, Employee Ownership
  • PBC
  • Corporation
  • LLC
  • Non-profit corporation
  • Entity choice and analysis
  • EIN
  • Form 1023 – IRS Tax Exemption
  • S-Corp election
  • Vesting equity structures
  • Founder equity allocations
  • Founder vesting equity incentive compensation
  • Operating agreement
  • Alternative and non-extractive financing strategies and implementation
  • Securities law compliance
  • Exempt and registered offering (Reg D, Reg CF Crowdfunding, Intra-state direct public offering, Reg A+, accredited and non-accredited investor offerings)
  • Equity, debt, convertible debt, warrants and revenue share instruments
  • Direct Public Offerings
  • Crowdfunding
  • Friends & Family
  • Cooperative and employee ownership conversions and recapitalization
  • Cooperative capital development
  • Cooperative Formation

Learn more about our services

Education

J.D., Yale Law School

Corporate Finance Certificate, Berkeley Law

Masters in City and Regional Planning, U.C. Berkeley

B.A. Psychology and Ethnic Studies, U.C. Berkeley

Honors & Awards

  • Named a World-Changing Woman in Conscious Business by SOCAP Global (2020).
  • Selected to teach Conscious Finance for the Sounds True Inner MBA program.

Bar Admissions

California

Maryland

Speaking Engagements and Podcasts

  • Host, Capital Insight Podcast
  • Faculty, Integrating Philanthropy and Investing to Maximize Impact, Center for Sustainable Finance and Private Wealth (2025)
  • Columbia Law School seminar on community-owned real estate (2025)
  • University of California Office of the President Community Impact gathering (2025)
  • American Bar Association, Lawyering for “Buy Back the Block” (2025)
  • Presidio Graduate School, Fundraising Strategies for Social Enterprises (2025)
  • Astera Institute’s Open Science Entrepreneur-in-Residence program, Fundraising AMA (2024)
  • Money Tales (the Aspiriant Podcast)
  • Building a Borderless Crowdfunding Future

Publications