Hello and Happy Friday! You may have missed it, but the editorial board of The Economist published an article earlier this month titled “How to fight back against Gen-Z socialism".

While conceding that the grievances animating Gen-Z all “stem from real issues,” the article argues that current proposals threaten prosperity and functioning markets.

Nothing noteworthy, yet.

But a single line, tucked away at the end of the article, piqued my interest. Commenting on what an appropriate political response would be, The Economist writes, free market liberals:

“…must be more positive and imaginative in their own prescriptions, using a mixture of taxes, distributed capital ownership, and support for workers to make sure that the upsides of labor-market disruption are widely shared.”

That phrase “distributed capital ownership” is not defined in this article or, according to a few AI models we use, anywhere in any article published by the outlet in the last year.

I could think of a few ways to define it (with concrete examples), but I thought asking you all for your thoughts would be more interesting. Even better - perhaps an intrepid Stakeholder would be up for writing a letter to the editor asking for a definition and providing examples.

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🥃 Top Shelf News

• Labor leaders warn that German codetermination is under assault, pressured by AI-driven restructuring, EU reforms, and management tactics meant to bypass worker representation rules

• Yahoo Finance details Mark Cuban’s proposal: every worker should receive company stock in the same manner as CEOs

• ICYMI: NCEO paper finds that selling to an ESOP costs less than selling to another buyer

👉 In This Issue

• Events + Reflections & Recaps

• Employee Ownership, ESOPs, Employee Ownership Trusts & Worker Cooperatives

• The Ownership Economy, Consumer Co-ops, Community-Owned Real Estate

• Academic News, Higher Ed Governance

📅 Events + Reflections & Recaps

To see a comprehensive list of events, go to our main Events page.

This Next Week

• June 24: The National Cooperative Business Association’s webinar Stronger Together: Cooperative Models

  • 🆕 Session 3 of the Cooperative Fund of the Northeast’s Co-op Curious Mini Course

  • 🆕 Employee Ownership Canada hosts an Ask the Experts webinar covering EOTs

• June 25: Oxford’s one-day conference Reimagining the future of work - towards a right to shape AI

  • The ICA Group’s NYC Cooperative Community 2026, aimed at helping co-ops integrate deeper into the co-op world of NYC

Reflections & Recaps

• The Aspen Institute published video recordings of the 2026 Employee Ownership Ideas Forum

  • Read our Claude-created summary here

• Professor Júlia Martins Rodrigues of Colorado University reflects on her trip to Mondragon and the Basque region of Spain.

• The CA/NV Chapter of The ESOP Association reflects on the ESOP Employee Accelerator

Employee Ownership

• Decathlon, the world’s largest sports retailer, extends its employee ownership program; 54% of employees already hold shares.

• Ownership Capital Lab and Catalyze launched a free nine-month accelerator for emerging EO fund managers

• 🚀 SpaceX’s IPO raises the question of what workers with equity will do once shares go public; Rutgers’ Bill Castellano weighs in

• Employee Ownership Canada announced its three keynote speakers for its October conference in Vancouver

• Ownership Works welcomed Allyson Tucker and Scott Chan to its Board of Directors

📈 Employee Stock Ownership Plans

• The NCEO releases a new 98-page report detailing recruitment and retention strategies among ESOPs

• Bill Fotsch made the case that ESOP-driven rollups are quietly emerging as a real competitor to private equity

• NewAge Industries CEO Ken Baker announced his retirement after 42 years leading the 100% ESOP-owned manufacturer

• 🩺 Keena Healthcare Technology recently transitioned to employee ownership via a 100% ESOP. Congrats!

• The ESOP Association spotlighted Maine-based engineering firm Sebago Technics for its ownership culture and talent retention

🤝 Employee Ownership Trust & Worker Cooperatives

• KCI, a Toronto-based philanthropy and talent consultant, transitioned to an Employee Ownership Trust, benefiting from the new developments in Canadian EOT law

• Rachel Medina, CEO of LiveOak Living Community, discussed why the Texas-based company used an EOT to transition ownership

• KU Leuven launched its Cooperative entrepreneurship: organizing for sustainability course on Tuesday

The Ownership Economy

• Tej Gonza, co-founder of the Institute of Economic Democracy, announced he is stepping down from his CEO position and will serve as president, while Kosta Juri takes on the leadership position

• ICYMI: The Predistribution AI Lab launched a three-paper series on broadening equity ownership as the fix for AI’s K-shaped economy

• Rowland Brohawn traced how George Mason’s revolutionary-period writings inspired Louis Kelso’s case for broadly owned capital

Consumer Co-ops

• Blackberry Food Cooperative, a local grocery store in Cottage Grove, OR, opened under new ownership this week; the community

• Farm Supply Company and Grange Co-op are pursuing a merger to expand their regional agricultural cooperative network

• Northside Food Co-op lost a $6.8M endowment grant after IRS compliance issues surfaced, a cautionary tale for co-op governance

🏘️ Community-Owned Real Estate

• Rep. Becca Balint pitched Vermont’s community land trust model for national rollout, the first serious push to scale CLT infrastructure beyond local pilots

• Homestead Community Land Trust unveiled 30 permanently affordable condos in Seattle’s Phinney Ridge neighborhood

📚 Academic News

• Jessica Pollock, writing for Harvard’s Forum on Corporate Governance, argues that classifying broad employee equity grants as dilutive ignores important technical aspects and benefits of shared ownership, including value creation.

• Gorm Winther contends that cooperative enterprises are an active expression of concrete human needs, not a niche economic form

• Lenart Nici writes that competitive markets reproduce capitalist exploitation even in worker-managed companies

• Hiroyuki Fujimura introduced a special issue on employee participation in Japan

Higher Ed Governance

• Auburn University scrapped its faculty-led shared governance structure in response to state legislation going into effect this October

• Columbia University’s president, Claire Shipman, pledged greater transparency and renewed support for shared governance after a year of scrutiny over secrecy

Happy Saturday, everyone. I headed into this week thinking I’d talk about the World Cup, then two BIG Texas stories won out.

First, the Stakehold team just got bigger! Mark Hand welcomed his little bundle of joy —Mr. John Clayton Hand—into the world earlier this week. Big congrats to Mom, Dad, and the whole family!🎉🎉🎉

Then, only days later, the EO universe delivered another story that I suspect made Dr. Hand smile.

P. Terry’s, a beloved restaurant chain in Central Texas, transitioned to employee ownership using an employee ownership trust. With 1,800 employees across 38 locations, it is now one of the largest EOTs in the US. The chain also established a profit-sharing plan that will distribute 5% of the company’s operating income, with the goal of increasing it to 20%. All while retaining its commitment to an affordable menu—as of today, a scratch-made burger costs $3.10.

Commenting on the transition, co-founders Patrick and Kathy Terry said:

From the beginning, we believed that taking care of people and building a great business weren’t competing ideas… This transition is the most honest expression of that belief we’ve ever made. P. Terry’s always belonged to the people who show up every day. Now, it’s official.”

Here’s to the Hands, the Terrys, and everyone building a future worth sharing!

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🥃 Top Shelf News

• New Jersey’s Senate Economic Growth Committee advanced a bill to create an Employee Ownership Transition Program

  • Sen. Zwicker, sponsor of the bill, wrote an op-ed on why NJ needs more employee ownership

• The Predistribution Initiative launched its AI Lab with a three-paper series on broadening equity ownership as the fix for our AI-powered K-shaped economy

• Elias Crim published a new book, Social Cooperatives: How local communities can reclaim control of social care

👉 In This Issue

• Events + Reflections

• Employee Ownership, ESOPs, EOTs, & Worker co-ops

• The Ownership Economy, Community-owned real estate, & Member-owned finance

• Academic News

📅 Events + Reflections

To see a comprehensive list of events, go to our main Events page.

This Week

• June 15: OEOC and NCEO’s Is an ESOP right for you? in Columbus, OH begins

• June 16: NCEO’s New [ESOP] Manager Workshop in Denver, CO begins

  • ESCA’s Midwestern Regional Policy Seminar in Chicago begins

  • First day of the DiO 2026 Conference in Fontainebleau, France

  • Food Co-op Initiative and Start.coop host a workshop on rural food co-op feasibility and community organizing

  • Ownership Capital Lab hosts a virtual webinar: EO Fund Spotlight: Catalytic capital for employee ownership

• June 18: Common Trust hosts virtual Owners Session: Employee Ownership as an Operating Model

• June 19: UK EO Day in Birmingham

  • Including Scott Bader’s webinar, Combining stewardship and entrepreneurship, celebrating 75 years of employee ownership

Reflections

• EOX reflects on its presence at the 2026 Employee Ownership Ideas Forum

Employee Ownership

• 🎉 Darcy Valent joins Ownership Capital Lab as Development & Philanthropic Partnerships Lead and reflects on her work ahead. Congrats!

• UMass Amherst’s Building Solidarity Economies program won a 2026 Distinguished Community Engagement Award (h/t ICA Group)

• Mike Harris outlines the growth of employee ownership from 2019-23 and what it means for the California Central Coast

📈 Employee Stock Ownership Plans

• Newsweek’s 2026 Greatest Workplaces list includes ten ESOP companies

• Massachusetts-based Surety Bond Professionals becomes an ESOP

• Forvis Mazars outlines the five ESOP audit considerations for leaders

• ESCA highlights employee-owned businesses involved in the FIFA World Cup

• 🎙️ ESOP Radio hosts discuss encouraging EO developments coming out of Washington

🏛️Employee Ownership Trusts

• Common Trust published a short case study on how Clegg Auto’s transition led to business growth

  • 🎙️CEO Kevin Clegg also speaks about the transition on The Steward Chair

• 📱 Vermont-based social media company Front Porch Forum intends to sell the company to its employees using an EOT

🤝 Worker Cooperatives

• Resilience re-published an article from Josh Davis, arguing that for the cooperative movement to thrive, open debate is key (h/t ICA Group)

• Sean Geobey argued that the best cooperatives don’t get governance right at founding — they build structures flexible enough to respond to changes

• Cooperatives Europe published its annual report for 2025-26

• NCBA applications for its ‘Lightning Talks’ at IMPACT 26 are due on July 17th

• 🤖🎙️ We recently found what we believe to be a completely AI-generated podcast about co-ops. Weird.

The Ownership Economy

• 🎙️ Aaron Tanaka argues on the Luce Change Podcast that America’s political crisis is actually an ownership crisis at its root

• Well-known economist Mariana Mazzucato reflects on the origina of her new book, The Common Good Economy; US release date is September 11th

🏘️ Community-owned Real Estate

• East New York Community Land Trust purchased its first commercial property, marking a milestone for CLT-owned commercial real estate

• Ottawa Community Land Trust acquires its third property intended to protect affordable housing

• Green Bay’s community land trust could receive its first 11 donated homes (Paywalled)

Member-owned Finance

• Nationwide Building Society distributed £440 to 4.4 million of members this week, while its CEO pay nearly doubled to £4.67m, raising questions about its current member governance arrangements

📚 Academic News

• Ian Macfarlane writes on what social and economic factors support 100% ESOP adoption

• Kovačević et al. proposed a dual-model path to property-owning democracy, using Serbia’s succession crisis as a test case

• Omar Mehdi surveyed employee share ownership practices across the US, UK and France, finding that while the term is universal, the models vary considerably

• Kim and Morales found that worker cooperatives build collective resilience among immigrant domestic workers

• Shin and Park discover that employee ownership deters managers from withholding bad news, reducing stock price crash risk

• Véronique Dutraive argued that Dewey’s pragmatic democracy enriches Hayek’s market liberalism by embedding ethics and institutional learning into social coordination

Happy Saturday, folks! I had the pleasure of getting out of the office this week to attend the 2026 Employee Ownership Ideas Forum in Washington D.C. It was my first time attending but according to a few veteran attendees, this year was standout.

The Aspen Institute and Rutgers University, co-organizers of the event, posted full recordings of the two-day gathering. Here are a few quotes and ideas that stuck with me:

• ESOPs have long lost siblings. Steven Hill reminded us that Louis Kelso, the creator of ESOPs, had a vision of shared ownership that went beyond companies and workers; he called it “universal capitalism.” In addition to ESOPs, Kelso thought deeply about what he termed CSOPs (C=consumer) and GSOPs (G=general).

• The EO field is not organized to meet the moment; Loren Rodgers has a plan. As he put it, “at best we support each other haphazardly, and duplicate each other’s efforts… At worst, we tussle.” Rather than dwell on diagnosing the “why,” Rodgers proposed “ield-wide responses, including more joint events, community statements on urgent issues like AI, and a shared EO event calendar [in the meantime, here is ours!]. He also committed NCEO staff and resources to help get the project off the ground.

• What are we actually achieving when appointing workers to the board of directors in ESOP companies? Melissa Hoover argued that “being the single worker on the board” can have “negative impacts on worker well-being and job satisfaction.” Chris Mackin, noting the difference between decision-making power and consultative power, thinks workers should occupy vetting committees for board members.

• The coming economic inequality and power concentration of the AI revolution cannot be solved by employee ownership alone. Even if all AI-related firms became employee-owned, economic inequality would continue to rise due to the monopolistic nature of the market.

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🥃 Top Shelf News

• Anthropic submitted a confidential filing for an IPO on Monday; Dr. Hand asks how it will relate to Anthropic’s Long-Term Benefit Trust

  • Bernie Sanders announces he will introduce legislation to create an American A.I. Sovereign Wealth Fund through a one-time 50% tax paid in stock, giving the public a direct ownership stake in major AI companies

• NCEO’s Corey Rosen finds sales to ESOPs are slightly lower than sales to outside buyers

• 🎨 Colorado passed the Artist Company Act, creating the world’s first legal entity built for artist-owned businesses; Jason Wiener explains

• Rutgers launched their Employee Ownership Research-to-Practice Hub, translating research into practical tools

👉 In This Issue

• Events This Week

• Employee Ownership, including ESOPs, worker coops, and employee ownership trusts

• The Ownership Economy, including AI + ownership and perpetual purpose trusts

• Academic News,

📅 Events

To see a comprehensive list of events, go to our main Events page.

This Week

• June 8-10: Cooperatives and Mutuals Canada’s CMC Congress 2026 is set to take place at York University, ON

  • 🆕 NCEO’s webinar with Mike Brady on Demystifying M&A for Acquisitive ESOPs

• June 9: University of Pittsburgh School of Business’s Pittsburgh Business Legacy Conference

• June 11: VEOC’s Selling Owner Pre-Conference in Burlington, VT

• June 12: VEOC’s annual Employee Ownership Conference

  • Pura Vida Festival hosts a panel on Conscious Capitalism and Steward Ownership

Employee Ownership

• The World interviews Joseph Blasi about Samsung Electronics’ plan to share 10% of the profits from its AI chip manufacturing with 78,000 of its employees

  • Read deeper context here (H/t Jenny Everett)

• Bill Fotsch, writing for Inc., explains how the benefits of employee ownership are realized when combined with management practices and engagement

• Regina Carls from JP Morgan writes for EO Equals on why more companies are exploring employee ownership earlier in the succession planning process

📈 Employee stock ownership plans (ESOPs)

• Tuttle Printing of Vermont has just became 100% employee-owned via an ESOP. Congrats!

• The SBA quietly raised barriers to ESOP loans for companies with non-citizen employees

• Beloved Economies stresses that ESOPs thrive when financial ownership is paired with worker input and accountability

• 👷 Matt Barney, CFO of Ohio-based Messer Construction, argues that ESOPs are an underutilized workforce strategy in the industry

• Bloomberg Tax’s Zachary Wertheimer examines how ESOPs can use outside debt to manage repurchase obligations

• TynanGroup CFO shares why they chose an ESOP rather than private equity when developing their business succession plan

• The Employee Ownership Foundation opened applications for its Charles R. Edmunson Scholarship; Applications close on June 15th

• 🎙️ ESOP Radio covered research from Rutgers showing that ESOPs increase productivity

  • The latest episode of Journey to an ESOP & Beyond brings on Art Smith to discuss DB Engineering’s transition to 100% employee ownership

🤝 Worker cooperatives

• North Carolina’s Poder Emma is teaching industrial sewing classes to members of the Latino community, with plans to create a worker-owned textile cooperative

• The International Center for Cooperative Management at Saint Mary’s created a playlist of videos from their recent Symposium held in May

• Euricse created the Doctoral Thesis Award in memory of Carlo Borzaga, rewarding research exploring the intersection of cooperatives and pathways to peace; the submission deadline is June 30th

• 🎙️ ICYMI: Episode four of the Coops Building a Better World podcast, called Educating and participating for a cooperative world

Employee ownership trusts

• Writing for Forbes, Project Equity CEO Evan Edwards introduced employee ownership trusts as a flexible, lower-cost succession alternative to ESOPs for mission-driven business owners

The Ownership Economy

• Julie Menter reviews Eric Ries’ new book, Incorruptible, on how companies stay true to their mission over time

• Clarasys’ MacCallum-Orr and Willford argued that purpose without structural protection is just branding

• A new report from Beloved Economies and partners urges a unified narrative to bring inclusive‑economy work into mainstream economic conversations

• Doughnut Economics Action Lab welcomed Pins Brown as its new Business and Enterprise Lead

• Forbes’ Aparna Rae shows how new grants are helping nonprofits pilot ownership‑based models

• Sarita Gupta writes for Time that to promote democracy, we need to address economic inequality

• Beyond Ownership officially launches its blog with a post titled “Why Are We Here? What Problems Are We Here To Solve?”

🤖 AI and ownership

• Daniel Wortel-London reminds us that the AI-and-ownership debate isn’t new. Louis Kelso made the same case for broad capital ownership in 1965

• In a new report, CanTrust Hosting and Hypha Worker Co-operative argue that building an alternative co-operative AI infrastructure in Canada is technologically feasible and necessary

• ICYMI: Paula D’Ambrosa asked who should own the AI stack and how communities can capture a share of the value it generates

Perpetual purpose trusts

• 💆 Osmosis Day Spa has become a perpetual purpose trust. Congratulations on the milestone!

📚 Academic News

• Abstracts are due June 15th for The Ownership Project at Harvard Business School’s Steward Ownership Conference

• Schmid and Dobusch find that most “open strategy” initiatives engage many voices but few actually count; workplace democracy is the fix

• Hannes Kuch defends plural cooperativism against critics, arguing that cooperatives outperform trust-owned firms and can deliver benefits that extend beyond the workplace

• In Renewal, Benjamin Thomas argues that “industrial democracy” has historical roots in the British left and right

We plan to keep learning and writing about this, and eventually launch a second newsletter on the broader ownership economy. If you’d like to become a partner or founding sponsor of that newsletter, please email us! And in the meantime, subscribe to our current weekender:

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A working definition of the ownership economy

In an ownership economy, those affected by or who contribute to an organization also have a stake and/or a say in how and for whom those organizations operate.

The ownership economy includes ownership of where we work (worker, employee, and producer ownership); where we live (community ownership of real estate); where we spend money (consumer ownership); our data (digital user ownership); and where our money lives (member-owned finance).

We’ll walk through each of those categories below, in addition to steward ownership, which might philosophically reject all of the above.

Ownership of where we work

Employee, worker, and producer ownership are much more widespread than you might think. 25 million Americans, ~14% of the US workforce, are employee owners in some way. That's far more than the country’s 15 million union members, more than half of whom are public sector workers. Walking through a few of those ownership forms:

• You have likely heard of the employee stock options common in the tech industry; some 12 million people are part of equity compensation plans like that. Millions of other Americans who work in publicly traded companies might have purchased or been granted stock.

• Typically, though, employee ownership in the US describes four forms of broad-based worker and employee ownership: worker cooperatives, employee stock ownership plans (ESOPs), employee ownership trusts (EOTs), and direct employee ownership. Employee stock ownership plans (ESOPs) are retirement plan equivalents regulated by the Department of Labor. They make up the lion’s share of the 11 million employee owners in America. WinCo, Bob’s Red Mill, and King Arthur Baking are all 100% employee-owned via an ESOP.

• More recently, private equity firms affiliated with Ownership Works, a nonprofit, have gotten in the employee ownership game by offering restricted stock to employees of the companies they buy and intend to sell.

• Globally, worker and producer cooperatives are much more common than in the United States. They “provide jobs or work opportunities to 10% of the employed population,” or ~280 million people. Mondragon, a 70,000-worker network of cooperatives in the Basque region of Spain, is the largest.

  • A note to the eagle-eyed reader: “and producer” is doing a lot of work in that sentence above. Worker cooperatives tend to be in a single firm; producer cooperatives are typically made up of independent producers of a similar good, often an agricultural commodity.

    They were central to Black Americans’ efforts at self-determination, bring much of India’s milk to its citizens, and also bring Tillamook Cheese, Land O’ Lakes butter, and Organic Valley milk to Americans. In Australia, Cooperative Bulk Handling handles generates $4 billion of revenue a year for its >$4k farmer-members.

  • Beyond cooperatives, countries like Canada and the United Kingdom have established other forms of government-incentivized employee ownership. Others, like France, have had government-mandated profit-sharing systems in place for some time.

One final note: Platform cooperativism is an emerging concept that references shared ownership of digital platforms by producers or contributors. Think Stocksy in Canada, CoopCycle in France, or the Drivers Cooperative in the US.

Ownership of where we live

In the early- and mid-twentieth century, entrepreneurs in England, India, and the US South began setting up what would become community lands trusts, in which a nonprofit permanently owns land, while residents own the structures. Many of the first CLTs in the US were formed to protect and empower Black farmers. Then, in the eighties, Bernie Sanders municipalized the model, and the housing-focused community land trust he helped set up is now the largest in the country. (Our own wrote about their potential use in Mexico, too.)

Also in the mid-twentieth century, energetic New Yorkers began scaling up local labor-focused housing cooperatives. Since then, other forms of community ownership (aka community wealth-building models) have ramified:

• In Los Angeles in 2001, The Staples center became the first real estate project to sign a community benefits agreement. That’s not exactly ownership, but it does lock in benefits to communities typically left out of major projects.

• In 2015, the NYC Real Estate Investment Cooperative launched one of the first real estate investment cooperatives, member-owned cooperatives that finance and hold commercial space—not housing, but still real-estate.

• In Portland in 2017, Mercy Corps launched the first community investment trust, designed not just to protect land for use by a community, but also to give community members appreciating ownership in it.

• In Philadelphia in 2019, Kensington Corridor Trust launched the first neighborhood trust, a sort of community land trust but built on top of a non-charitable purpose trust dedicated to a purpose rather than to beneficiaries.

The US hasn’t been alone in this experimentation, of course—along the way Americans have learned from similar efforts in Europe, Australia, Latin America, and the rest of the globe.

Ownership of where we spend money

What do REI, the Basin Electric Power Cooperative of North Dakota, and the Green Bay Packers have in common? They’re all owned by their customers, like the internet briefly hoped Spirit Airlines could be.

• Start with the most popular, but perhaps least powerful, example of consumer ownership: the Green Bay Packers. The football team is owned by half a million fans, but their ownership “pays no dividends, benefits from no earnings, isn't tradeable and has no securities-law protection.”

If that doesn’t sound like real ownership to you, we agree: the sort of ownership we imagine here includes both financial and/or decision-making rights. By contrast:

• The owners of outdoor gear chain REI have both: we get a patronage dividend and also elect REI’s Board of Directors.

• The Basin Electric Power Cooperative of North Dakota is a sort of meta-cooperative: it sells electricity to 138 rural electric cooperatives, in turn owned and controlled by their 3 million users.

• ACE Hardware is a cooperative owned by individual store-owners.

All these are examples are of consumers, users, customers, or even businesses owning the companies they buy stuff from, rather than the companies they work for.

Ownership of our data

In this economy, one industry hoovers up the lion’s share of our data, investment, and trained electricians: artificial intelligence. Think tanks, philanthropists, commentators, policymakers, and even tech industry insiders are asking:

Who should own and control these private companies, whose leaders make decisions with public consequences?

This is not the first time someone has asked who should own/control/make money from a new technology. For example:

• Wikipedia, Mozilla, the Internet Archive, ProtonMail, and Signal are all nonprofit- or foundation-owned; BlueSky is a Public Benefit Corporation, which (mostly) locks in it mission.

• Silicon Valley luminaries have long argued that data is the new labor, and we should be compensated when others profit from it.

• Data trusts, collaboratives, and cooperatives help protect user control over their data.

• Before Spirit Airlines’ brief TikTok moment, #BuyTwitter and The People’s Bid for TikTok explored what user-owned social media might look like.

One interesting thing: these examples tend to understand users (us) as producers, not customers.

• For most of these platforms, advertisers are the customer. We are the producers, and the product is our attention, which we trade for nice software or entertainment.

• For others (e.g. Anthropic’s Claude, which doesn’t have ads) we are both customers (if we subscribe) and data producers (if we don’t uncheck that box).

Ownership of where our money lives

Credit unions, mutual savings banks, mutual insurers, and cooperative banks offer

• Over 140 million Americans—more than half of adults in the US—are members of a credit union like Navy Federal Credit Union.

• State Farm and Nationwide are both examples of mutual insurance, or insurance companies owned by their policyholders.

• In Europe, mutual finance shows up as cooperative banking. Some of the Europe’s largest regional banks (Crédit Agricole and Crédit Mutuel in France; Rabobank in the Netherlands) are member-owned.

As with the Green Bay Packers above, there are some edge cases worth mentioning: Public wealth funds, public banking, and baby bonds are all to de-privatize finance in some way, and some descriptions of ownership economy-related terms include them. While those ideas have their merits, they are either (1) government ownership, or (2) at-a-distance ownership of companies via index funds, which seems pretty far from an individual having a meaningful stake in any particular company, much less a say in how they operate.

Ownership of—wait, have we gotten this all wrong?

There are three expressions of the ownership economy that don’t fit neatly into this bullet point framework.

Multi-stakeholder ownership

This category including multi-stakeholder cooperatives and multi-stakeholder purpose trusts. In both of these, as the name implies, multiple stakeholders (workers, customers, residents, users, suppliers, communities, nature) hold ownership of some kind.

• Multi-stakeholder cooperatives have developed mostly in two places: in Italy, thanks to a 1991 law supporting social cooperatives; and the Canadian state of Quebec, which in 1997 developed the legal framework for solidarity cooperatives.

• Organically Grown Company of Oregon is the first (and maybe only?) multi-stakeholder purpose trust.

Steward ownership

The second outlying expression of the ownership economy that doesn't quite fit our boxes is steward ownership, which stands somewhat apart from all this (and perhaps sometimes in opposition to it). For steward ownership advocates the answer to “who should own this?” is “no one.”

Steward ownership includes a commitment to two principles:

• Self-governance, in which control of the company is detached from passive, absent, or speculative investors; instead, people involved in the company control it.

• Purpose-orientation, which is that a company’s profits should serve the company’s purpose, rather than being extracted to owners.

In practice, steward ownership takes multiple forms, with varying degrees of commitment to those two principles.

• In Northern Europe, steward ownership manifests as enterprise foundations.

• In the US, it usually means purpose trust ownership (e.g. Patagonia and Anthropic) and sometimes foundation ownership (e.g. Newman’s Own, Dr. Seuss Enterprises, and the John Green’s Good Store).

• Others, like German search engine Ecosia and Finnish software company Sharetribe, use a golden share or veto share to protect their purpose.

• Another group, led by B Lab, advocate for nature inclusive governance.

We think this still belongs under the ownership economy umbrella as one set of defensible answers to our core questions about ownership. What is distinct about their answers is that they look (to us) more like the rejection of private property practiced by indigenous Americans.

Organizational democracy

The third concept that we think is a part of the ownership economy, cuts across these categories, and isn’t well defined is shared decision-making power. More on that in our next long read!

With A Little Help From Our Friends

As always, thank you for reading. We would love to hear from you in the comments or via email. Which of the above phrases resonate with you? What else do you think should be included here? Excluded? Broken out or described some other way? What other examples should we include?

Postscript: On Labels and Definitions

Many other organizations are building this ownership economy, with different labels and/or definitions, and with varying levels of overlap with our own (working) definition.

On the ownership economy:

• Unless you count George W. Bush’s ownership society, the first use of the phrase I could find to is a now-deleted distributist video series from 2015.

• In 2017 NCEO set up www.ownershipeconomy.org to host their research on employee ownership’s effects on early-career workers.

• In the early 2020s it re-emerged among technologists in reference to cryptocurrency and decentralized finance. The Ownership Economy Summit grew out of that world and has since become a more broadly-focused ownership certification program.

• The first recent use of the phrase in this broader sense might be ’s 2022 article in Fortune.

• launched ImpactAlpha’s ownership economy beat in 2024, the same year Ashoka’s started using the phrase.

• In 2025 raised >$100k for her forthcoming book, We Should Own the Economy.

  • The 2025 Aspen Ideas:Economy conference used the phrase and called for more ownership investing.

  • In the same year, Marjorie Kelly used the term to refer (only) to employee and worker ownership in an SSIR article

• In 2026, Former Ashoka fellow Alison Lingane uses it today to describe her Ownership Capital Lab roadshow

The phrase ownership economy has some momentum, but it isn’t the only label out there:

• Sara Horowitz’s definition of mutualism, for example, includes much of the above plus non-monetary organizations like mutual aid societies.

  • Kellogg College at Oxford’s Centre on Mutual and Co-owned Business is more narrowly focused on businesses owned by their members (customers, employees and communities).

Other labels include: shared and mutual ownership (used by the Urban Institute), community ownership (Nonprofit Finance Fund, Justice Capital, and Exit to Community), the solidarity economy (most of Latin America + ), alternative ownership enterprises (Transform Finance), the democratic economy (The Democracy Collaborative), a pluralist commonwealth (), an economy for the common good (the Germans and ), plural ownership (Elaine Tod and company), a distributism (Catholics), economic democracy (leftists), predistribution (other leftists), binary economics (Louis and Patricia Kelso), property-owning democracy (liberal political theorists), shared ownership (us, in a previous life), and incorruptible companies (Maybe? Eric Reis’s term).

Happy Friday! I don’t know if it’s the same for you, but this past week I have been (pleasantly) inundated with analysis, reactions, and hot takes on Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas. For the uninitiated, an encyclical is basically the pope’s long-form memo to humanity — and this one puts humans, specifically workers, at the center of the text. And it speaks to the same questions and issues that those working in the shared-ownership space are asking and answering today, including questions about the centrality of work to human dignity, technology’s benefits for or harms to workers, and a singular focus on the pursuit of profits (I can go on!).

As Nathan Schneider points out, this encyclical is best understood alongside one issued in 1891 by Pope Leo XIII, which focused on the upheavals of the Industrial Revolution and provided a “spiritual foundation” for reshaping economic policy and workers’ rights movements. Then, as today, the encyclical is best read not merely as a religious document, but as a rough sketch of what a system that works for all humanity would look like.

I’d like to think all you fellow Stakeholders have a few ideas of how to make that happen. It’s good to know the Pope does too!

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🥃 Top Shelf News

• The Aspen-Rutgers Employee Ownership Ideas Forum kicks off in DC next week

• Nathan Schneider argues that Pope Leo XIV’s new encyclical Magnifica Humanitas has the potential to help shape our economic future

• MICEO is hiring an Executive Director in Grand Rapids

• CU Boulder’s MEDLab launches a student-led and faculty-guided media campaign aimed at bringing community ownership into mainstream entrepreneurship in Colorado

• Jo Hun Han et al. use a dataset of over 1 million workers to understand what drives participation in company-sponsored Employee Stock Purchase Plans

• In Social Capital Insider, Chris Benguhe et al. highlight that workers’ well-being is directly connected to business performance, including profitability

👉 In This Issue

• Events + Reflections, including events this week, recaps, and job postings

• Employee Ownership

• The Ownership Economy

• Academic News

📅 Events + Reflections & Opportunities

To see a comprehensive list of events, go to our main Events page.

This Week

• June 1: Project Equity hosts a free webinar, Employee Ownership for B Corps: A Deeper Dive

  • And the Economy of Francesco’s webinar: What Is Integral Finance?

• June 2: The Aspen-Rutgers Employee Ownership Ideas Forum in DC begins

  • At SXSW London, Purpose Foundation hosts a fireside chat with Ben & Jerry’s co-founder Ben Cohen

  • The Grunin Center’s Conference on Legal Issues in Social Entrepreneurship and Impact Investing, with a track on ownership investing

  • 🆕 NCEO’s Mature ESOPs: What Boards and Leaders Need to Plan for Next webinar

• 🆕 June 3: Cooperatives Europe hosts a webinar for episode three of their dialogue series: Cooperating, adapting, responding: spotlight on environmental crises

  • 🆕 Boston Impact Initiative’s Advancing Regenerative Capital Fellowship Info Session Zoom webinar

• June 4: The Walker Group’s Beyond the Traditional Sale webinar, brings together owners of PPTs and EOTs

  • 🆕 Also, the UK Society for Cooperative Studies 2026 Annual Online Lecture: Co-operatives and their ecosystems: The ‘why’, ‘who’, and ‘how’ in supporting the sector to grow

Reflections & Opportunities

• Ownership Capital Lab reflects on its EO Capital Roadmap Roadshow in Atlanta, focusing on the post-conference workshop

  • Watch attendees share why community ownership matters, from frontline workers to philanthropic investors

• MICEO is hiring an Executive Director in Grand Rapids

Employee Ownership

• Zoe Schlag of Common Trust explains how to build an effective EOT transition team capable of assisting with the layered decisions selling owners must make

• Aspen Institute’s Matt Helmer and Maxwell Johnson writing in Forbes propose an answer to the problem of the “silver tsunami” - employee ownership (paywalled)

• A newly introduced House bill would exempt RSUs from overtime pay, making it easier for employee-owned companies to share equity with workers, writes Corey Rosen

• Peter Koehler suggests employee and trust ownership aren’t new; they’re modern solutions to an ancient question: How to make productive property serve the broader community?

• 🎙️ The Owners at Work podcast released a new episode exploring how employee ownership fits into economic development

• The ESOP Association released its monthly report, including event reflections and announcements

• Ownership Works outlines five key takeaways from its 2026 CEO & Executive Convening

Worker Cooperatives

• Congrats to the organizations selected to receive funding from the Cooperative Development Fund!

• COWOP launches a cooperative reading circle and podcast alongside a new Routledge Research Companion on cooperative economics

• ICYMI: CooperationWorks! posted an introductory presentation on cooperative governance

The Ownership Economy

• Jennifer Harris argues AI is speeding the creation of a new aristocracy, and expanding ownership through worker co-ops and public equity is the strongest remedy (paywalled) (H/t Jenny Everett)

• Nick Hanauer and Eric Beinhocker note that minimum wage increases, once feared to kill jobs, don’t. They hope this challenges our “certainties”(paywalled)

• Kyle Westaway of Vanguard breaks down how its customer-owned governance design saved $1 trillion for everyday investors

• For , Jeff Fong proposes giving city residents shares in their municipality, allowing residents to share the value created by their collective presence

📚 Academic News

• Investigating Japan’s labor-management relations, Hiroyuki Fujimura finds they remain stable and collaborative; however, working conditions have not improved as much as they should do to unions being too “cooperative” with management

• Jonathan Michie and others argue that cooperatives and mutual businesses are not just “ethical alternatives” but disciplined enterprises that generate social value

• Jason Spicer and Ruoniu Wang find that while most community land trusts pursue climate action and economic security, financial constraints force them to choose between the two, creating a “double bind”

• Reviewing forty-four studies, Norgaga et al. find that employee ownership is an effective tool for reducing agency costs and improving governance

Readers, I’m happy to report we have added another member to The Stakehold summer team. Co-author and friend will ship your next few newsletters while I take a breather to be with my (soon to be growing) family. Enjoy his first edition! - MCH

Happy Friday! Editing my first edition of The Stakehold got me thinking about community benefits agreements—formal agreements that developers and other organizations enter into with communities in which their project will be built.

One example: The Denver Broncos are negotiating a community benefits agreement with with community members from the host county for their new stadium that might commit the Broncos’ owners to things like “building affordable housing, expanding childcare options and creating opportunities for local artists.”

There is a long history of sports stadiums—often publicly subsidized, like the Cleveland Browns’ planned $1 billion new stadium—that do not quite deliver for local communities. Denver could serve as a model for development projects across the country, creating a formal mechanism that sets up stakeholders to benefit from a project they will have a hand in building and maintaining.

This is not quite shared ownership, but perhaps a distant cousin? And it could be applied to any project—including the 1000+ planned data centers across the US or the Tallgrass pipeline in Nebraska (h/t ).

About me: I’m a nerd for employee ownership and (strangely) thought it was a good idea to get a PhD focused on it. At the Ohio Employee Ownership Center I am lucky to work daily with business owners, employee owners, and academics in the employee ownership community. And finally, I am super excited to be in conversation with all you Stakeholders! -

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🥃 Top Shelf News

• Gavin Newsom’s Executive Order on AI includes language on worker ownership, writes NCEO’s Scott Rodrick

• The Perpetual Trust Ownership Network is hiring a Network Coordinator. (Maybe this will put me in Mark’s good graces, given that he co-founded the organization!)

• In Europe, the Steward Ownership Network (StOne) won a highly competitive grant from the European Cooperation in Science & Technology (COST)

• In case you missed it, Fidan Kurtulus and Eric Hoyt recently published a landmark ESOP study:

  • Using three national datasets, they find that ESOP adoption in manufacturing companies leads to productivity increases between 5.6%-6.7%, with those gains increasing as ESOP accounts increased in value

👉 In This Issue

• Events + Opportunities. This week’s events + new jobs

• Employee Ownership, including ESOPs and worker cooperatives

• The Ownership Economy, including community-owned real estate

• Academic News, including new papers

(Editor’s note: Thank you for filling out the poll! None of you use the links, and you were 50/50 on whether this section is useful, so we cut it in half.)

📅 Events + Opportunities

Visit our Events page for recently announced and other events.

This Week

• May 23: The Economy of Francesco’s International Conference on Franciscan Economics in Sansepolcro, Italy

• May 26: CUNY Law School Community Economic Development Clinic’s Building Mutual Social Economy Bridges in Queens, NY

  • And Steward Market’s Live Demo + Q&A

• May 28: The first day of the International Cooperative Banking Association’s 2026 Symposium at the UN Headquarters in Manhattan, NY

  • And Humanity @ Work & Life and ASETT’s Building Mutual Social Economy Bridges Reception in Boston, MA

Opportunities

• 40 Million Owners opened applications for an Employee Ownership M&A Analyst

• The Missouri Center for Employee Ownership is hiring a Community Partnerships Coordinator

Employee Ownership

• Employees at Hustle, a San Francisco-based social messaging company bought it from Social Capital

• EOX added Direct Employee Ownership as a flexible, low-cost path to ownership transition on its website

• The leaders of Text-Em-All, an employee ownership trust, won the Small Giants Founder & CEO Hall of Fame Award (h/t )

• Ownership Works launched its own newsletter, The Ownership Exchange

• Sophie Hares from MasterCard interviews Pete Stavros about the 180 companies where the Ownership Works model has been applied

Employee stock ownership plans (ESOPs)

• The Rutgers Institute is running a national survey of ESOP companies and their workers. Contact Doug Kruse if you (or someone you know) would like to participate

• SteadyRain, a 100% employee-owned digital agency, acquired fellow ESOP company Smooth Fusion (h/t TXCEO)

• The House Appropriations Committee urged the Commerce Department to address the financing gap holding back ESOP growth in small and mid-sized businesses, writes Corey Rosen

• Verit Advisors’ Jake Cravens outlines the benefits of partial ESOPs

• 🎙️ Journey to an ESOP episode covers the work done during the negotiation process of ESOP transactions

  • In the latest episode of Alternative Exit, Bob Whalen discusses how he turned a 94-year-old family business into a 100% ESOP

Worker cooperatives

• Solar Shaw of Colorado and Wasatch Food Coop in Salt Lake City are now worker-owned. Congrats!

• A National Survey of Worker Cooperatives is under way. If you would like to participate, or know a business that would, reach out to Mike Palmieri (yes, the same one)

• Adam Schultz and others are building a school in Durham to teach founders and workers how to create cooperative enterprises

• Tamah Yisrael reflects on her keynote speech at the California Co-op Conference

• ICA’s May 2026 Coop Insider newsletter is out

The Ownership Economy

• On ImpactAlpha, covers Calvert Impacts recent investments in employee and community ownership

• Two foundations filed a shareholder proposal demanding clarity about Home Depot’s use of customer data

• Michal Leibowitz of the New York Times profiled Deep Springs College, a student-owned and operated institution in the California desert (paywalled)

• We spotted that The Ownership Economy has ratcheted up their LinkedIn posts—give them a follow for their more-than-bullet-point analysis

• ICYMI: 🎙️ The Screw this… Let’s try something else podcast released all six episodes of its podcast telling stories of communities making changes from the ground up (h/t Jessica Friday):

Community-owned real estate

• The UK’s Community Right to Buy became law, though Yasmin Ibison of the Joseph Rowntree Foundation warns that the most deprived communities will need targeted funding to benefit

• Jessica Friday revisits Hazel Sheffield’s recent interview on community land trusts

• The Farm Bill that passed through the US House includes a provision to reinstate the Rural Cooperative Development Grant program through 2031

• Neil McInroy argues that Community Wealth Building isn’t soft social policy; it’s economic development done properly

📚 Academic News

• The University of Miami created the Community Ownership Learning and Action Lab, and it released its first report, as well as a webinar

• New papers

  • In his new article, Tej Gonza breaks down how Slovenia quietly built its new employee ownership law

  • Lisa Herzog published a new Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on economic democracy

  • Here’s a hot take: Stephen C. Miller believes Catholic Social Teaching supports free market capitalism

• Allen Tellis’s recently completed dissertation, The Well-Balanced Republic: Liberty, Domination, and the Maximal Production of Antipower, has a chapter on the “strategic interventions meant to ensure widespread ownership of productive property,” including employee ownership. Congrats!

Happy Friday. I’ve been thinking about the relationship work and meaning this week.

• My buddy Claude and I came up with fourteen potential relationships, ranging from work-is-a-calling to work-is-a-curse.

So it caught my attention when wrote:

…if artificial intelligence generates so much wealth that people can be compensated for their lost wages—which is more than plausible—where will they find a sense of purpose?” - in The Economist This Week

As someone expecting a second child next month, I laughed at how easily I could answer this question at the moment.

• But beyond parenting and caring for others, I haven’t come to a clear conclusion on this question any more than Claude did.

• Still, I have to think that purpose (at work) is only partially about the work done and mostly about (1) who you’re doing it with, and (2) who you’re doing it for.

• What I do know: It feels pretty great to be a part of a community asking those questions not just individually, but structurally.

I’m off to daycare pickup. Happy weekend! - MCH

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🥃 Top Shelf News

• Now is the week for launching…everything, it seems! All new this week:

  • Steward Market’s marketplace connecting mission-driven buyers and sellers

  • Subvert, the “Mondragon of Music”

  • The Center for Enterprise Foundations at Copenhagen Business School

  • ’s new not-a-newsletter, Writings and Rehearsals (thanks for the Stakehold shoutout…and maybe subtweet‽)

  • Beloved Community Incubator’s Cooperative Futures, fusing guaranteed income with worker co-op incubation in DC

  • Professor Ralph Hall’s Community Wealth Building Library Guide

  • 🎙️ Scaled Purpose’s The Equity Gap podcast

👉 In This Issue

• Events + Opportunities

  • This week

  • Opportunities

• Employee Ownership

  • Employee stock ownership plans

  • Worker cooperatives

  • Employee ownership trusts

• The Ownership Economy

  • Steward ownership

• Academic News

  • New papers

Editor’s note: We previously hyperlinked the “In This Issue” section, but Substack makes that a pain. A question for you:

📅 Events + Opportunities

To see a comprehensive list of events, go to our main Events page.

This Week

• May 19: Menke’s Executive Webinar on succession planning

• May 20: Austin Cooperative Business Association’s online Solidarity Economics: A Panel Discussion

  • Also in Texas, Texas Association of Community Development Corporations’ webinar with TXCEO’s Taylor Knickel

Opportunities

• The US Division of Employee Ownership created a new internship for students

• USFWC is electing new board members, recommending people, or self-nominating

• The Center for Community Wealth is hiring a Development Director

Employee Ownership

• Rhode Island unanimously voted to establish a Center for Employee Ownership

• Project Equity compiles four businesses’ journey to employee ownership

• WORC added to its Ownership Impact Index a feature connecting culture with financial projections (h/t )

Employee stock ownership plans (ESOPs)

• Fogle Pump & Supply of Washington sold 49% of the company to an ESOP

• Assistant Secretary of Labor Daniel Aronowitz, spoke to The ESOP Association on the Department of Labor’s new stance on ESOPs

• The House Appropriations Committee included pro-ESOP language in its FY27 funding bill

• Saunders Business School reveals the lineup for its ESOP panel at the Sharpen the Saw conference

• 🎙️ ESOP Radio talks with Jeremy Ames about the increase in entrepreneurs using their retirement savings to buy businesses

  • And Great Mondays interviews Bob Whalen on his new book, Beyond Your Ownership

Worker Cooperatives

• Dean’s Beans, a worker-owned organic coffee company, was recently named as Rural Business of the Year for Massachusetts. Congrats!

• Applications for the Capital Impact Coop Innovation Award are due June 12

• Heather McKay of Coop News outlines some of the barriers for youth in co-ops and how to address them

• ICYMI: Ian Adderley’s book Co-operatives: Linking practice and theory is now on our to-read list (h/t )

Employee ownership trusts

• Signature Vacuum of Pennsylvania is now an employee ownership trust. Congrats!

• Emily Alston explores why leadership succession is the most overlooked challenge after transitioning to an employee ownership trust (in the UK)

The Ownership Economy

• In Nashville, The Contributor interviews Stephen Watts of the Southeast Center for Cooperative Development

• makes the case for credit unions and community land trusts as natural partners in closing Canada’s housing equity gap

Steward ownership

• Copenhagen Business School has officially launched its Center for Enterprise Foundations. Congrats!

• Purpose Foundation’s Annika Schneider provides insight on the Spirit Airlines buzz

• Amy Clarke argues that mission doesn’t die at exit because founders sell out, but because most ownership structures aren’t built to protect it

• Newman’s Own Foundation’s CEO makes the case for steward ownership as a succession alternative for boomer-owned businesses

• Marie Arbelias Schuster compares steward ownership and FairShares Commons, arguing FSC goes further by distributing governance across all stakeholders and ecosystems (h/t )

📚 Academic News

• Harvard Divinity School opened applications for a Professor in Religion, Business Ethics, and the Economic Order

• Harvard Business School issued out a call for papers for its TOP26: Steward Ownership Conference; abstracts due June 15

• Haiming Li published a new book, Theories and Laws on Democratic Management of Enterprises in China

New Papers

• Seon Mi Kim et al. find that worker ownership and organizational support are the strongest drivers of job satisfaction among home care workers

• Andrew Skidmore looks at the relationship between ESOP comprehension and employee satisfaction

• Sor-hoon Tan proposes Confucian philosophy as an alternative for economic democracy, grounding ownership in social responsibility

• Elia Benveniste finds that worker-owned firms compress wages and flatten hierarchies, without sacrificing productivity or investment

• Peter Dorman argues that public ownership may be the fix for social media’s harms (cc and ?)

This week a dude on TikTok had an idea: What if customers owned Spirit Airlines? He put up a website and more than 500,000 people pledged at least $215 million to create a community-owned airline, reminiscent of the 2017 effort to buy Twitter.

• Folks on Instagram went even farther, asking “wait, why can’t all this other stuff be owned by us?” with just two posts getting 28k and 65k likes (h/t )

• My own post this week about who should own AI companies did not do those numbers, but I liked it

Jason Wiener is right we should be skeptical about the cash value of those pledges, but my reaction was similar Aunnie Patton Power’s:

• 500,000 people were talking about shared ownership this week, many of them for the first time

• Messaging about employee ownership tends to be directed at policymakers and business owners; this week is a signal of latent demand for organizational alternatives among employees and consumers

If any of you are connected to or , send them to The Stakehold! - Dr. Hand

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🥃 Top Shelf News

• The ESOP Association held its annual conference this year; Jim Bonham posted his remarks on the seven forces shaping employee ownership

• The leaders of Dr. Bronner’s and Patagonia joined the fight to free Ben & Jerry’s

• This week’s unlikely potential ally for the ownership economy is Tucker Carlson. Arguing that our current economic system “is not working,” Carlson told the :

  • “People have to own things. They have to be vested in the country in order to de-radicalize them. But when people own nothing, they’ve got nothing to lose.”

• 🎧 The Freakonomics podcast hosted Judy Faulkner of purpose trust-owned Epic Systems

👉 In This Issue

• Events + Opportunities

  • Newly announced

  • This week

  • Opportunities

• Employee Ownership

  • Employee stock ownership plans

  • Worker cooperatives

• The Ownership Economy

  • Steward ownership + purpose trusts

  • Community ownership of real estate

  • Workplace democracy

• Academic News

📅 Events + Opportunities

To see a comprehensive list of events, go to our main Events page. Send us your conference recaps, too!

Newly announced

• May 20: Austin Cooperative Business Association is hosting Solidarity Economics: A Panel Discussion, online

• May 26: CUNY School of Law hosts Building Mutual Social Economy Bridges in Queens, New York

• Aug 8-Dec 14: Trebor Scholz’s Community Section of his Fall 2026 course, AI Without Bosses

• Sep 1-3: Project Equity’s EO Equals Summit in Chicago

• Nov 12-13: The Institute for Business in Global Society at Harvard’s TOP26: Steward Ownership Conference in Cambridge, MA

This week

• May 11: Platform Cooperativism’s Consortium on cooperative platforms and democratic infrastructure

• May 12: PathLight Law’s webinar on community wealth building

  • Also, NCEO’s Creative ESOP M&A: Innovative Structures for Growth and Ownership (NCEO Member only)

  • And Raymond James’s Business Exit Planning Workshop webinar

• May 13: MICEO’s introductory webinar on smart profit share

• May 14: NCEO’s session on Understanding and Implementing Compensation

  • Along with the UK’s EsopCentre’s webinar, Esop Sofa: John Hoffmire on Transatlantic Perspectives on Employee Share Ownership

  • And St. Mary’s Energizing the Co-operative Brand online symposium

• May 15: Rutgers NJ/NY Center for Employee Ownership’s Business Exit Planning Conference in New Brunswick

  • As well as day one of the California Co-op Conference

Opportunities

• Ownership Works is on the hunt for a Managing Director for its European branch

• CFNE is hiring a Loan & Outreach Officer to help grow cooperative enterprises

• Village of Leaders Thriving in Solidarity seeks a Cooperative Business Launch Lead, in Chicago

• CDI has opened applications for its (remote) Executive Director position

Employee Ownership

• 🌊 Daniel Goldstein on why employee ownership is emerging as a key answer to the ‘silver tsunami’

• The Rhode Island Senate will vote to establish a Center for Employee Ownership after bill S2922 advances

• Martha Bentley and Coastal Enterprises have launched a Business Legacy Lab in Maine (h/t )

• Private equity-backed CoolIT Systems delivered payouts to long‑tenured employees

• Evergreen Cooperatives expands its network of employee-owned businesses by acquiring North Coast Sign and Lighting

• Angi Krueger offers key takeaways from NCEO 2026

• 📺 Employee Ownership Canada posted video of Tallgrass EO Equity Fund President Chad Friesen’s seminar on building an ownership culture

  • BLG also highlights ten key tax takeaways from the new Canadian EOT policy

• Carlisle announced its latest employee stock option grant

Employee stock ownership plans (ESOPs)

• ✈️ OGARAJETS of Atlanta, Georgia, announced its transition to an ESOP. Congrats!

• In Dallas, Pogue Construction’s conversion an ESOP won D Magazine’s 2026 Mergers & Acquisitions Award (h/t @TXCEO). Lazear, the advisory team on the deal, also helped Axis Neuromonitoring become employee-owned in April

• Congratulations to Christie Schuh, newly appointed member of the EO Foundation’s Board of Trustees!

• Corey Rosen reviews Bob Whalen and Jamie Dykstra’s new book on how employee ownership fueled HB Global’s 14‑year growth

• UC San-Diego is hosting a virtual course to train individuals on entering ESOPs; apply here

• 🎧 ESOP Radio talks with David Odell on the parallels between endurance running and running a business

Worker Coops

• 🕵️ Former FBI agents founded Ravenwood, a worker-owned intelligence service. Congrats!

• David Alcock reviews the UK’s progress on promoting co‑ops and identifies key areas for further action

• Connecticut theatre design firm Nextstage Design look backs on what they have learned since their transition in January

• Business Insider interviews Daniel Mondragon of The Drivers Cooperative in Denver (paywalled)

• The newly announced theme of the UN International Coop Day (July 4th) is “Cooperatives for a peaceful world;” ICA explains here

• RMEOC interviewed Minsun Ji on the struggles between co-ops and labor unions

• COWOP is looking for worker co-ops to fund in Massachusetts; apply here

• 🎧 ICYMI: Last month Stuff you Should Know explained how worker co-ops work

The Ownership Economy

Steward ownership + purpose trusts

• Purpose Foundation recaps its interview with Eric Ries on his new book, Incorruptible

• Purpose LatAm published a state-of-the-field on steward ownership in Latin America, Repensando la Propiedad (rethinking property)

Community-owned real estate

• East Side Community Investment Cooperative of Saint Paul, Minnesota, hosts its launch party

• Tabitha Eck reflects on the CLT Practicum by Habitat for Humanity in Sisters, Oregon

• Dallas, TX is one of fifteen cities in Enterprise Community Partners’ first Ballmer-funded cohort on land use and affordable housing; whether this will involve the Dallas CLT we don’t know—yet!

Workplace democracy

• In Platoniq’s WilderJournal, and Cristian Palazzi interview Adrian Bua on participatory democracy, capitalism and co-optation

• recaps his recent webinar with Tamarack Institute on collective decision-making

📚 Academic News

• David Wang and Shaun Pichler argue that a CEO’s political perspectives impact the likelihood of transitioning to ESOP and worker-family benefits

• Katharina Johanna Oetken introduces steward ownership as a potential tool for co-creation in urban design

• John D Wisman published a new book, Why We Must Work, on economic freddom, fulfilling work, and workplace demcoracy

• Philipp Stehr argues that a right to strike can fight organizational degeneration in democratic corporations

• Richard C. May & Chris Mackin argue that the primary obstacle to expanding ESOPs is the lack of access to equity capital

Most people I know in AI think the median person is screwed, and they have no idea what to do about it.

Sun’s Silicon Valley peers have begun to worry that a white-collar “underclass” is upon us, one just as precarious as the blue-collar workers left behind by Chinese industrialization. The leaders Sun interviews offer thin hope:

[Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark] sees the default path for A.I. as dire: one where we ‘let technology rip, and don’t think about the social effects until later.’ But he also feels optimistic that sufficiently conscientious A.I. builders and policymakers can steer the ship away from the storm.

“Sufficiently conscientious” is doing a lot of work there. When pressed on dealing with those societal effects, most in Silicon Valley point to universal basic income or jobs guarantees. But both will leave us vulnerable to domination by AI companies and the governments that control them, keeping our fingers crossed they prove wise rulers.

More redistribution won’t fix what ails us

In the language of political scientists, Clark is describing welfare capitalism, one of political-economic regimes found wanting by 20th century theorist John Rawls. Rawls similarly discarded laissez-faire capitalism and the command economy as fundamentally unjust. He considered two systems potentially fair enough to consider: liberal democratic socialism and property-owning democracy.

I recently posted a preprint of a paper on the politics AI (readers, please download and share it with your AI-obsessed friends!). In researching it, I became convinced that property-owning democracy—what we call here the ownership economy—could expand our imaginations about what political and economic realities are possible. I believe the answer lies not in redistribution but predistribution. Yes, we should have a stake in the profits generated from the technology built on all recorded human labor, as OpenAI argues in their recent policy paper. But we should also have a say—we should own them.

As artificial intelligence works its way into our workplaces, we should have a stake and a say in the companies where we work, too. The magic of worker/employee ownership is that it doesn’t just resolve the tensions between people with money (capital) and those of us that have to work to get it (labor). It dissolves that distinction by making employees owners. Investors get equity because they put their capital at risk. Workers should get equity, too, because they put their careers at risk when they dedicate their time and energy to building a company.

One last hopeful thing

In another working paper, my co-authors and I write about employee and worker ownership as a source of hope in the face of AI and other assaults on our students’ career prospects. One argument I have been persuaded by in researching for that paper: hope is a collective, not individual.

Compare the collective hopelessness inspired by generative AI to the collective hope inspired by the moon landing, which came from the (mostly) shared sense that humanity was taking a collective step forward. The attitude of many AI leaders, it seems, is more akin to

One small step toward wealth and power for me; one giant windfall for our shareholders; and…we’ll figure out what to do with the rest of you later.

The alternative is to ask now who should be benefiting from and shaping that future, and how. This is what worker and employee ownership ask about workplaces. It’s past time we start asking that about generative AI at the societal level, too.

The Stakehold started as a research cluster at SMU, and it was the inimitable who—as a freshman and sophomore, mind you—did all this:

• Created the first EO+WD newsletter three years ago

• Managed a team of student writers and event planners

• Helped plan the first national convening on purpose trusts, and

• Co-authored our first policy white paper, Policy Recommendations for Supporting Employee Ownership Trusts and Perpetual Purpose Trusts in the United States

This week Megan moseys on from her time at The Stakehold, which would not exist without her. Readers, connect with Megan and wish her well as she prepares to crush law school!

Finally, some happy news for The Stakehold: new team member will work this summer to fill Megan and Tiffany’s shoes. Welcome, Gabriel!

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🥃 Top Shelf News

• Happy May Day! USFWC lays out what co-ops can do and shares Democratizing Work’s May Day momentum

• 🇨🇦 The Canadian Government just made permanent the country’s employee ownership capital gains exemption, which Falice Chin argues could reshape business ownership in Canada

• A new multi-organization report, The Business Case for Community Ownership, frames community ownership as made up of community-centered vision, governance, and benefits. This resonates deeply with:

  • B Corps’ increasing focus on ownership, power, and accountability

  • Momentum building around the release this summer of our Skoll Centre white paper (broken link fixed; sorry!)

  • The revival of academic interest in common purpose

👉 In This Issue

• Events + Opportunities

• Employee Ownership

  • Employee Stock Ownership Plans

  • Worker cooperatives

  • Employee ownership trusts

• The Ownership Economy

  • Steward ownership + purpose trusts

  • Community-owned real estate

• Academic News

📅 Events + Opportunities

For events more than a week away, see our main Events page.

• May 2: Cooperative Development Foundation’s 5k in DC, aiming to bring people from the Co-op community together

• May 4: Purpose Foundation’s fireside chat with Eric Ries on his new book, Incorruptible

• May 5: The start of the ESOP Association’s National Conference in DC

  • Plus the IFG New York 2026 Conference, where David York speaks on steward ownership and purpose trusts

  • Also see HBS Ownership Project’s seminar on establishing norms in employee-owned companies at the Harvard Business School, with Prof. Ashley Whillans

• May 6: Project Equity’s Exit, Succession Planning, and Employee Ownership Options panel discussion in San Francisco

  • Also, WICEO and Common Trust’s joint introduction to EOTs webinar

• May 7: VEOC’s Introduction to Employee Ownership Trusts featuring Matt Cropp and Christina Newbrough

  • And the first day of the Economy of Francesco’s event in Assisi, Italy

Opportunities

• The Skoll Centre at Oxford is hiring a Senior Manager for Research and Insights (who might get to work with me on our white paper!)

• The application deadline to speak at for NCEO’s August Forum is this this Monday, May 4th

• Transform Finance asks to speak with founders who want to align culture, product, and values

Employee Ownership

• An Illinois bill to support employment social enterprises is headed for a vote

• A recent post from HBS covers how employee ownership can help close the wealth gap

  • Also from Harvard: Ethan Rouen also released a new video about the profit-sharing at guitar-maker Gibson (also see Taylor Guitars of Canada, which became 100% employee-owned in 2021)

  • 🎧 NPR’s Planet Money sits down with KKR’s Pete Stavros and Capital Safety’s Cindy Cordes to discuss the “pro-worker movement” in private equity

• Corey Rosen covers the argument by the Norwegian sovereign wealth fund CEO that employee ownership belongs on every board’s agenda

• For even more employee ownership news, check out Jason Wiener’s latest newsletter

📈 Employee stock ownership plans (ESOPs)

• Haverford Systems of Pennsylvania and The Boldt Group of Wisconsin are now employee-owned, and Dallas-based, ESOP-owned Databank won a 2026 TITAN Business Award for its employee engagement strategy. Congrats all!

• Employee owners won a $4.5 million settlement from an Alabama poultry company

• A California bill supporting ESOP-owned construction companies passed out of committee

• Analysis and opinion: Katie Boland on Bob’s Red Mill and King Arthur Baking; on S-Corp vs. C-Corp ESOPs; Rob Francais on the state of employee-owned Registered Investment Advisors

• 🎧 Chuck Mazzanti is three weeks from launching the Construction ESOP Collective Podcast; Journey to an ESOP hosts Steve Baker on employee education; and Alternative Exit hosts Joseph Cureton, CEO of an ESOP-based roll-up of home care agencies

• For more ESOP news, check out The ESOP Association’s latest ESOP Report

Worker cooperatives

• The International Cooperative Alliance released a new study on gender-based policies in cooperatives in Asia-Pacific countries

• For more co-op news, check out the latest newsletter from Coop Insider

Employee ownership trusts

• 🇬🇧 William Sword, a fourth generation family bakery in the UK, is now an employee ownership trust. Congrats!

  • Magenta Associates published a communications guide for employee ownership transitions

• CommonTrust recaps Cypress Valley’s transition to an EOT

• 📺 The Steward Chair interviews Texas-based Text-em-all on their “culture code”:

The Ownership Economy

• Bloomberg’s Matt Levine wrote up ’s six-digit fundraise for her book We Should Own The Economy

• The and others ask Congress to center workers in federal AI legislation

• 🎧 This Week in Impact asks: Will the real ownership economy please stand up?

• argues we are owed a dividend from the wealth generated by AI

Steward ownership + purpose trusts

• Germany took a step forward on being the first country to create a legal form for steward ownership

• Skoll Centre released six case studies of large-scale, sustainability-focused companies, at least half of which are steward-owned

• For more purpose trust ownership news, check out the latest newsletter from the Purpose Trust Ownership Network, which introduced itself in a webinar last week:

Community-owned real estate

• Steve Dubb of Shelterforce lays out what the US can learn from the success of community land trusts and cooperative housing in Canada

• Community land trusts are advancing in California, Idaho/Montana, Georgia, Massachusetts, and Washington

📚 Academic News

• Cal State East Bay launched the Employee Ownership Opportunity Initiative with a $2m donation from Joseph Cabral

• Celine Schmidt and Gregor Bouville chronicle the unlikely transformation of a factory to a worker owned cooperative

• Chris Mackin reviews three recent employee ownership manuscripts

• Rodolphe Durand and Harrison John Munro-Clark are working to revive the idea of common purpose management, an idea that traces at least back to the work of early 20th century political scientist and management scholar Mary Follett (h/t Kevin Miner)

We recently watched Kate Raworth’s TED Talk on her now-famous doughnut economics, which argues for an economy that is regenerative and distributive

• The ownership economy seems clearly a part of that puzzle. Raworth has hinted at this, and co-authored a paper with a “doughnut design for business” tool built on the work of employee ownership advocate Marjorie Kelly

• So…who is going to invite Raworth to keynote their next [employee/steward/purpose trust] ownership conference?

• Update (4-28): We learned this week that Raworth also wrote the preface to Transform Finance’s Alternative Ownership Enterprises report from 2023—so we’re basically already best friends

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🥃 Top Shelf News

• Voting for SOCAP panels is still open—vote for your friends and fellow Stakehold readers!

• Deputy Labor Secretary Keith Sonderling will now head the DOL, which regulates ESOPs

  • This follows the exit of Lori Chavez-DeRemer, whose initial nomination was supported by a six-figure lobbying campaign by ESOP advocates

• The Rutgers Institute launched its Employee Ownership Applied Research Lab to connect research and practice

  • Also from Rutgers: Using establishment-level micro-data from the US Census, Fidan Ana Kurtulus et al. find that ”ESOP adoption increases labor productivity at the workplace by 5.6 – 6.7%,” all else equal

  • … and registration is open for the Aspen-Rutgers 2026 Employee Ownership Forum in DC in June

• In The Drift, Francis Norwood’s ESOP Fables takes aim at private equity employee ownership models and ESOPs:

  • “…if history is any guide, experiments with employee ownership typically end up juicing returns for the investor class rather than benefiting workers”

👉 In This Issue

• Events + Jobs

• Employee Ownership

  • Employee stock ownership plans (ESOPs)

  • Worker cooperatives

  • Employee ownership trusts

• The Ownership Economy

  • Steward ownership + purpose trusts

  • Platform cooperatives + digital ownership

  • Community ownership + land trusts

  • Good jobs + fair wages

• Academic Updates

📅 Events + Jobs

For events farther than two weeks away, see our main Events page.

• April 27-29: The Mission Investors Exchange 2026 National Conference in Atlanta

• April 28: Employee Ownership Canada’s Building an Ownership Culture webinar

• April 30: Tamarack Institute’s webinar on collective decision making

• May 1: The Center for Community Wealth’s Testing the Case for Financial Aggregation in Community Ownership webinar

• May 2: Cooperative Development Foundation’s 5k in DC

• May 4: Purpose Foundation’s fireside chat with Eric Ries on his new book, Incorruptible

• May 5: The first day of the ESOP Association’s National Conference in Washington, D.C.

  • Plus the IFG New York 2026 Conference, where David York will speak on steward ownership and purpose trusts

  • …and HBS Ownership Project’s seminar on establishing norms in employee owned companies

• May 6: Project Equity’s Exit, Succession Planning, and Employee Ownership Options in San Francisco

  • Also WICEO and Common Trust’s introduction to EOTs webinar

• May 7: VEOC’s Introduction to Employee Ownership Trusts featuring Matt Cropp and Christina Newbrough

• May 7-9: The Economy of Francesco’s event in Assisi, Italy

⏪ Recaps

• Delilah Rothenberg highlights what the institutional investment community can learn from employee ownership conferences like NCEO’s

👷 Jobs

• Cooperacion Santa Ana in California released an RFP for a feasibility study and business plan

• California Center for Cooperative Development is hiring their next Executive Director

Employee Ownership

• Texas-based Austin Courts & Floors is now (directly) employee-owned. Congrats!

• In the UK, the producer of Shambala—one of the UK’s largest music festivals—became employee-owned just in time for summer 🌞

• John Abrams announced a second edition of From Founder to Future; reach out if you have a story he should tell!

• Illinois Center for Employee Ownership introduces its new Executive Director, Adam Schuster

• In response to recent arguments about Ownership Works’ approach to employee ownership, Candide Groups’s Aner Ben-Ami channels Mel Robbins, basically arguing “Let them”

• David Ellerman writes about Owen D. Young, American industrialist and early proponent of shared ownership

• 🇨🇦 In Canada, ESOP Builders announced their acquisition by Rewrite Capital Advisors

📈 Employee stock ownership plans (ESOPs)

• Indiana home improvement company BEE Window and Michigan healthcare marketing firm Meraki are now esmployee-owned. Congrats all!

• The ESOP Association announced author Kyla Scanlon as a keynote speaker for their 2026 CEO Summit

• Last week we told you about the NCEO’s relaunch of its ownership culture survey; for another option, check out WORC’s current Ownership Impact Index

• DELCO Today writes about Wawa’s distinct ownership model, which has turned cashiers into millionaires

• 🎧 The latest Journey to an ESOP & Beyond argues that financial literacy is a crucial component of employee ownership

  • The newest episode of Alternative Exit discusses a co-op to ESOP transition and the role of AI

✊ Worker cooperatives

• A Denver rideshare cooperative is hoping to find a way to treat drivers better

• 2026 is the International Year of the Woman Farmer, a move welcomed by the cooperative community

🔒 Employee ownership trusts

• The Stakehold’s latest guest post is from NCEO’s Corey Rosen, who argues that TSA should be purpose trust-owned

• Colorado IT company RainTech and California landscape architecture firm CMG (check this out) are now owned by employee ownership trusts. Congrats, all!

The Ownership Economy

• has raised $100,000 for her book, We Should Own the Economy. Congrats Elle!

• Impactalpha’s David Bank makes the case for investing in the ownership economy (paywalled)

• Ground Works Consulting released a research brief on how small community-owned organizations can more effectively change policy

• In Shelter Force, Steve Dubb explores how public banks could play a role in local economic growth

Steward ownership + purpose trusts

• AllBirds’ AI pivot is the start of an argument for purpose trust ownership as a more resilient alternative than becoming a public benefit corporation

• Steward-Owned highlights recent remarks from Professor Johan Lambrecht on the advantages of steward-ownership for succession for family businesses

• Astrid J Scholz’s accounted the “Z School,” a new course on business model foundations for entrepreneurs that want to create a firm true to its mission

Platform cooperatives + digital ownership

• Taylor Jo Isenberg highlights recent work on the AI transition, including a new piece from Alex Bores on a proposed AI dividend

• A new initiative from Project Liberty will analyze how data cooperatives can function in the new AI landscape

Community ownership + land trusts

• In Maine, eighty land trusts have formed the largest land trust conservation network in the country (paywalled)

• The San Antonio City Council approved a $20 million investment (paywalled) in land trusts that would create >500 units of affordable housing

• Central Iowa Community Land Trust acquired its first homes

• The Housing Collective’s recent webinar covered how to start a community land trust

Good jobs + fair wages

• Nancy Folbre dissects Arindrajit Dube’s research on fair wage, arguing that gaps still exist, particularly concerning gender

• A new article explores why employees are miserable at work, and what leaders can do to change that

• The ratio of wage growth to price growth, says , puts the Trump administration in a bind: “Actual deflation—bringing prices back down—is essentially impossible without triggering a recession, as Paul Krugman and others have argued”

  • A thought: Perhaps it’s worth less focus on the denominator we can’t do anything about (prices) and more on the numerator we can (wages + profit-sharing + equity-sharing)?

📚 Academic News

• NCEO’s Corey Rosen analyzes a recent report from the Rutgers Institute on business owners’ perspectives on selling to employees

• A new textbook from Jongick Jong explores the strategic management of cooperatives

• Trebor Scholz explores how cooperatives can help workers build a more democratic internet

I am one of those lucky flyers whose home airport, San Francisco International, was not affected by the recent TSA nightmare. That’s because TSA employees at SFO are hired by a contractor rather than directly by the federal government. It is one of ten such airports in the country.

The idea of privatizing TSA has been proposed by a number of people, but privatization runs the risk of corporations placing shareholder value concerns over customer safety and working conditions for TSA agents. But what if there were a way to privatize TSA that could put the TSA employees and the passengers front and center? Transferring ownership to a purpose trust would be one way to do this. Purpose trusts are legal vehicles set up to own corporations for the benefit of a specific purpose. For instance, Patagonia is now owned by a purpose trust that former owner Yvon Chouinard set up to receive his shares. The trust uses profits from the company to benefit environmental causes.

A more common form of trust is the employee ownership trust. These trusts are very common in the United Kingdom where tax laws encourage their formation, and have been becoming more common here, although they have no tax incentives. The model for these trusts was the John Lewis Partnership, one of the United Kingdom’s largest companies and operator of the John Lewis department stores and Waitrose supermarkets. The company is a much beloved icon. It has been owned by an employee ownership trust since 1929. Employees elect a council to help oversee the company.

In the US, employee ownership trusts are a new variant of employee ownership, alongside the more common Employee Stock Ownership Plan (ESOP). Employee ownership trusts are typically designed to be permanent, with the trust charter stating that the company is not for sale. Instead, the company operates for the benefit of its employees by sharing profits or dividends that the employees helped create. Optimax Systems[HMC1] , for example, is a multi-million dollar, high-tech optics company in Rochester, NY, that has been trust-owned since 2020, and its permanence has given its customers new confidence that their contracts will not be disrupted by a buyout.

In the TSA case, the purpose trust would also be designed to be permanent so that the new company could not be sold. Instead, its charter would state that its purpose is to provide secure jobs for employees and secure travel for passengers. Congress could appropriate funds on a regular basis to pay for TSA activities, much as Congress does now. The difference would be that the employees would no longer be employees of the federal government and subject to repeated shutdowns. The company’s board could consist of representatives of employees, the Department of Homeland Security, the airline industry, airline unions, and airports. If the company is sufficiently profitable, it could provide profit sharing or dividends to TSA employees, something that research has shown helps reduce turnover and increase commitment.

It is politically practical as well. Employee ownership has been one of the rare ideas that has virtually unanimous political support. Changing the system in this way would not impose any additional costs on the taxpayer, while creating a far better way to deal with employee security going forward.

Corey Rosen is the founder of the nonprofit National Center for Employee Ownership, a sponsor of The Stakehold.

It is with great ambivalence we share this is Tiffany Vargas’s last post with The Stakehold.1 Longtime readers know Tiffany has been core to our work for years since she cold-emailed me as a student at UTA. Things to know:

• She is an excellent writer—see her most recent piece on rethinking property and belonging in Mexico City

  • We also co-authored book chapter on utilizing purpose trusts for rural succession and community resilience with

• Operationally, Tiffany also helped us:

  • Organize the convening that led to the creation of the PTON

  • Prepare a Shared Ownership 101 for our Black business in Georgia

  • Draft, edit, and re-edit our forthcoming Skoll Centre white paper on organizational purpose lock-in, decision-making power, and financial participation

  • … and handle too many critical back-end things to list

Thank you, Tiffany! Readers, please connect with her on LinkedIn, wish her well in her law school applications, and watch this space—she’ll be back in your news feeds someday doing great things.

- Dr. Hand

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🥃 Top Shelf News

• NCEO’s ownership culture survey is back in action

• SOCAP Open’s Community Voting is live; vote today!

  • Loads of your friends and fellow readers need your support, including Lafayette Square, Project Equity, Ownership Works, Delta Fund, Zingerman’s, Torana Group, Natural Investments, Ownership Capital Lab, the Purpose Trust Ownership Network, Steward Market, and more

• McKinsey’s recent report tipped off The Economist to the coming wave of small business closures, but they failed to mention employee ownership (paywalled). Who’s going to tell them?

• 🇺🇸 The ESOP Association and NCEO analyze encouraging new ESOP enforcement guidelines from the Department of Labor, as Assistant Secretary of Labor Daniel Aronowitz testifies that the DOL is now “pro-ESOP”

👉 In This Issue

• Events + jobs

• Employee ownership

  • Employee stock ownership plans

  • Worker cooperatives

• The ownership economy

  • Steward ownership

  • Community wealth-building

  • Workplace + economic democracy

• New academic research

🏙️ Events + Jobs

For a full list of upcoming events, see our events page. Share your conference recaps with us, too!

• April 19-21: The Exit Planning Institute’s annual summit in Nashville

• April 22: Project Equity’s session on Building a Culture of Ownership at the B Lab Champions Retreat in Milwaukee, Wisconsin

• April 22: Kellogg College at Oxford’s Impacting Investing with Mutuality event on the side of the Skoll World Forum

• April 23: Common Trust’s Owners Session: Turning Culture Into Ownership webinar with Cypress Valley Meat Company

• April 23: Introducing the Purpose Trust Ownership Network (PTON), hosted by Program Manager Issie Corvi and Cofounder Jenny Everett

👩‍💻 Jobs and Recaps

• The Cooperative Development Institute is hiring an Executive Director

• Recaps: NCEO’s Maria Lianos on their Annual Conference in Milwaukee; and Alison Lingane on Ownership Capital Lab’s recent conversation with institutional investors

Employee ownership

• In FastCompany, argues for new forms of ownership

• In ImpactAlpha, Roody Senatus finds that employee ownership can offer retiring owners a financially competitive alternative to private equity

• In the UK, The Times explains how veteran business owners are using employee ownership trusts to protect company values

• In Fortune, Vicente Reynal shares how employee ownership helped drive enterprise value growth at Ingersoll Rand, an Ownership Works-affiliated company

• David Ellerman’s latest revisits Paul W. Litchfield of Goodyear’s early 20th-century advocacy for profit-sharing and worker ownership

📈 Employee stock ownership plans

• Expanding ESOPs launched their #MyCompanyMyVoice project at the NCEO conference last week, recording employee owner stories; here’s one from Marcease Warren from Sentry Equipment

• NCEO’s latest blog post highlights HFA Enterprises’ journey to becoming 100% employee-owned

• Building Indiana Business explores Indiana’s growing ESOP movement

• 🎧 ESOP Radio hosts Jeff Bradley and Heather Hines of M-Group, an urban planning firm that used ESOP pre-funding to reduce stress on the business

  • Journey to an ESOP argues that the right first question for selling owners is strategic fit, not technical feasibility

  • ICYMI: The Nuts and Bolts of Leadership podcast recently hosted ESOP holding company OwnersEdge:

✊ Worker cooperatives

• California architecture firm MMPV Design and New Hampshire publisher Earth Sky + Water are now worker-owned. Congrats all!

• Worcester Business Journal covers Massachussetts’ growing employee ownership movement and spotlights Work, a cooperatively owned printing company (paywalled)

The ownership economy

• Axios reports on Sam Altman’s proposed “New Deal” for AI, including public wealth funds, robot taxes, and new worker protections as superintelligence approaches

• Enith Williams of the Reparations Finance Lab argues that reparative finance must center the people most harmed as the architects of repair, rather than passive recipients of institutional solutions

Steward ownership

• 🎧 The Explorers Podcast interviews Lisette Schuitemaker on steward ownership and conscious investing

Community wealth-building

• ’ latest post highlights four proven, scalable models for community wealth building

• Community Spaces Network published a manifesto for social purpose in real estate

• SHIFT Capital, Lafayette Square, and Aedera Companies launched the L|S|A Affordable Housing Fund

• NCBA CLUSA highlights how cooperatives can help rebuild rural healthcare through local ownership

Workplace + economic democracy

• In Social Europe, Valerio De Stefano argues that Silicon Valley’s anti-democratic turn begins in the workplace, where concentrated managerial power and worker surveillance normalize authoritarian forms of control

  • Stan De Spiegelaere argues that workplace democracy and ownership are essential safeguards against corporate capture and political authoritarianism

• Impact Tank’s report presents practical recommendations for democratizing the workplace, including key success factors, social impacts, and ways to scale collective governance solutions (in French)

• Alfredo Mathew III has put together a new high school curriculum on economic democracy, mapping four models of economic power and shared prosperity

📚 New academic research

• Adria Scharf, Oyindamola A. Ijewere, Matt Mazewski on business owners’ perspectives when selling to their employees

• Zahoor Ahmad Parray et al. on employee ownership for sustainable business

• Stan De Spiegelaere and Sigurt Vitols on worker participation

• Abhishek Sharma et al. on empowering employees through ownership

• Mehdi Nekhili et al. on employee shareholder board representation in family firms

• Alison Lingane on Ownership Capital Lab’s Employee Ownership Capital Roadmap

From Dr. Hand: It was a tall glass of water to see some of you in person at the US’s largest-ever employee ownership conference—2,300 people! For the FOMO-prone, check out all the #NCEO LinkedIn posts and the presentation PDFs. Two highlights:

• “Every company should be an employee-owned company” was a pretty great phrase to hear from best-selling author Adam Grant.

• In the ubiquitous talk about AI, here’s what struck us: Many companies will by default turn AI into more bossware to control and coerce and control their employees.

  • The alternative? Give employees decision-making power over how AI is used in the workplace, as Paula D’Ambrosa argues this week.

  • The American founders were concerned about ownership of land, the Marxists about ownership of the means of production. Maybe we call this...worker ownership of the means of deduction? 😏

Many thanks to the NCEO for their sponsorship of The Stakehold and for the invitation to Milwaukee. Still feeling FOMO? Check out the NCEO Forum in August.

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👉 In This Issue

1. Events + Jobs

2. Employee Ownership

   1. Employee stock ownership plans

   2. Worker cooperatives

3. The Ownership Economy

4. Academic Updates

🏙️ Events + Jobs

For a full list of upcoming events, see our events page. Share your conference recaps with us, too!

• April 13: The Institute for Law and Governance in Austria hosts The Law of Capitalism and How to Transform It

• April 13: Well Built Consulting’s Building an Exit, Securing a Legacy webinar

• April 17: St. Mary’s University’s Making Sense of AI with the Cooperative Movement webinar

• April 19-21: The Exit Planning Institute’s annual summit in Nashville

• April 22: Project Equity’s session on Building a Culture of Ownership at the B Lab Champions Retreat in Milwaukee, Wisconsin

• April 22: Kellogg College at Oxford’s Impacting Investing with Mutuality: Redesigning Capital for Shared Prosperity, on the side of the Skoll World Forum

• April 23: Common Trust’s Owners Session: Turning Culture Into Ownership webinar with Cypress Valley Meat Company

• April 23: Introducing the Purpose Trust Ownership Network (PTON), hosted by Program Manager Issie Corvi and Cofounder Jenny Everett

👩‍💻 Jobs

• KKR is hiring in London and Tokyo

• Boston Impact Initiative is looking for a Director of Development and Investor Relations

• MCE Social Capital is hiring an Associate Investment Manager in Bogota

Employee Ownership

• Lori Chavez-DeRemer, head of the Department of Labor, which regulates ESOPs, is facing civil rights complaints from department staff

• Antony Bugg-Levine shares his take on KKR’s sale of CoollT (h/t Scott M)

• ICYMI: California State University, East Bay, launched an Employee Ownership Opportunity Initiative earlier this month

• 🎧 Employee Ownership Canada features Aaron Schroeder of Brightspot Climate on the first episode of their new podcast, Ownership Nation

  • On the Poised for Exit podcast, Steve Storkan discusses employee ownership as a business exit strategy

📈 Employee stock ownership plans

• NCEO’s recent webinar covered what ESOPs should prepare for in year one

• 40 Million Owners outlines three ESOP deal-sourcing channels: on-market brokered deals, targeted off-market outreach, and relationship-driven conversations

• Katie and Brian Boland compare how Gibson and Taylor Guitars approached business succession, contrasting profit-sharing with a full ESOP transition

• 🎧 Journey to an ESOP’s latest episode focuses on communication, culture and trust

✊ Worker cooperatives

• Nominations are open for the Cooperative Cultural Heritage List

• K2 Enterprises explains worker cooperatives for CPAs and tax advisors

• The Boards of the Co-op Group and Southern Co-op are merging

The Ownership Economy

• Our latest guest post is by , who makes the case for building a Zillow for small business ownership transfers, 6 million of which may occur in the US in the next ten years

• Alison Lingane made New Private Markets’ list of influencers shaping the sustainable private markets ecosystem. Congrats!

• wants impact investors to take mutual aid seriously. We agree! On the same wavelenth:

  • Kellogg College at Oxford hosts an event on Impacting Investing with Mutuality this month

  • In , argues that companies are more likely to serve the public interest when values are built into structure, not just left to leadership

  • For , Tom Powdrill draws on Ashby’s Law of Requisite Variety to make a cybernetic case for broadening governance participation

• Scott Romney argues for apprenticeships as a path to ownership

📚 Academic Updates

• 📢 Calls

  • Platform Cooperativism Consortium posted its Call for Submissions for the 2026 Solidarity AI conference

  • The Economy of Francesco’s call for research proposals on spiritual and narrative capital closes April 30

• 📜 Papers

  • Sebastian Martinez Hickey, Jennifer Sherer, and Emma Cohn on how community benefits agreements turn manufacturing investments into shared prosperity

  • Erik K. Olsen on opportunities in employee ownership research

  • Jeremy Bennett on the impact on innovation of shared-risk culture

Six million American businesses will change hands in the next decade. But they are happening one business at a time, in a market that still relies on fragmented networks, personal introductions, and limited visibility.

What’s missing: infrastructure to connect small business buyers and sellers. Real estate has Zillow. Investors have AngelList. Job seekers have LinkedIn. But when it comes to the largest ownership transition in modern economic history, the market connecting buyers and sellers barely exists.

The Great Ownership Transfer

Over the next decade, roughly six million businesses employing nearly 30 million workers may change hands, representing about $5 trillion in enterprise value, according to research from the McKinsey Institute for Economic Mobility.

Economists have begun referring to this demographic shift as the Great Ownership Transfer, or the “Silver Tsunami.” The scale of the transition is widely understood. How those transitions will actually happen is far less clear.

The United States has built extraordinary infrastructure for starting companies and increasingly sophisticated systems for acquiring large ones. Venture capital firms, accelerators, and startup ecosystems help founders launch businesses. Private equity firms, investment banks, and strategic acquirers facilitate acquisitions at the upper end of the market.

But the middle of the economy—where most small businesses operate—works very differently.

Where the System Breaks Down

Most ownership transitions still depend on fragmented broker networks, personal introductions, and localized advisory relationships. Buyers struggle to discover opportunities. Founders struggle to identify successors. Advisors, lenders, and governance experts often operate in parallel rather than together.

Markets fail when participants cannot find one another. In 2022 alone, according to McKinsey, roughly 510,000 small businesses exited the market, and 92 percent of those exits occurred through closure rather than ownership transfer.

When businesses close, the effects ripple outward: jobs disappear, suppliers lose customers, and pieces of local economic infrastructure vanish. When businesses are absorbed into distant portfolios, profits and strategic decisions often move elsewhere. Communities that helped those companies grow frequently lose influence over their future. This outcome is rarely malicious; the system is simply designed to produce it.

Even owners who care deeply about the future of their companies can struggle to identify aligned successors or navigate the mechanics of a sale. “I think a lot of people close their businesses because they’re just exhausted,” Alex Gamboa Grand, a Portland small business owner, said to me. “And the idea of figuring out how to sell your business can feel exhausting too.”

What’s Already Working

Yet the same moment that threatens widespread business closures also presents an opportunity to shape how economic value flows through communities for a generation. McKinsey estimates that improving the ownership transition ecosystem could help preserve up to twelve million jobs and roughly $250 billion in annual local economic activity.

The people, capital, and ideas required for this shift already exist:

• Organizations like Project Equity and ICA Group help founders transition businesses to employee ownership

• Governance innovators including the Purpose Foundation and the Purpose Trust Ownership Network are developing models designed to preserve mission and independence after a sale

• Investment firms such as New Majority Capital are supporting a new generation of acquisition entrepreneurs from historically excluded backgrounds

• Researchers at The Democracy Collaborative and Transform Finance document how ownership structure shapes whether wealth remains rooted in communities or flows elsewhere

• AllHold Capital is developing a trust-based approach that combines catalytic capital with alternative valuation methods that account for the place-based value of businesses beyond traditional EBITDA

• Roll-up models and ESOP M&A are potential avenues to scale, and the UK’s support for employee ownership has demonstrated the systems-level effect of good policy

Missed Connections

Despite the growth of this ecosystem, many of the actors involved still operate in separate networks and are often difficult to find at the moment they are needed. As ownership transitions shift from occasional events to a systemic economic flow, infrastructure that reduces search costs and coordinates participants across the ecosystem will become increasingly important. These are the conditions under which new platforms tend to emerge:

• Before Zillow, residential real estate markets were largely navigated through fragmented broker networks and opaque listing systems. Zillow introduced centralized discovery and standardized property information, dramatically reducing search costs for buyers and sellers.

• Before LinkedIn, professional opportunities moved primarily through personal networks and informal introductions. LinkedIn created structured professional identities and searchable networks that allowed employers and workers to find one another at scale.

Similarly, AngelList organized discovery between startups and investors.

In each of these markets, platforms emerged once discovery became fragmented, information opaque, and search costs high. The ownership transition market exhibits those same characteristics today.

The Platform Solution

Steward Market is our attempt to build that connective layer. The idea is straightforward: give founders, buyers, advisors, and mission-aligned capital a way to find each other before succession is limited to the capacity of their existing networks. Founders can signal their motivations for a transition. Buyers can articulate their long-term stewardship intentions. Advisors, governance experts, and capital providers can make their expertise visible long before a deal is formally underway.

Traditional marketplaces help people find companies to buy. Platforms like Steward Market take a different approach and help people find the right future for those companies.

What Happens Next

Even shifting a modest share of ownership transitions toward employee ownership, stewardship-oriented buyers, or community-rooted operators could redirect hundreds of billions of dollars in economic influence. The effects will show up where people live and work. They will shape whether businesses remain rooted in the communities that built them, whether workers share in the value they help create, and whether this wave of ownership transitions strengthens local economies or slowly drains them.

The last generation of entrepreneurs reshaped the economy by building companies. The next generation will be shaped by whether we build pathways for others to inherit them.

Hannah Sandmeyer is the founder of Up & Over Advisors, a Certified B Corp focused on mission-aligned acquisitions and ethical ownership transitions. She is also the host of the Ethical Exits podcast and the creator of Steward Market, a platform designed to support stewardship-minded business succession, launching this month!

Dr. Hand will be at the NCEO conference in Milwaukee next week, TSA willing. Say hello! You can have one of The Stakehold’s first business cards.

🥃 Top Shelf News

Do you have news? Share here or to news@thestakehold.com.

• Fortune’s 2026 list of the 100 Best Companies to Work For includes eight employee-owned firms

• New York State Senator April Baskin introduced a bill to consider employee-owned enterprises and worker cooperatives as preferred state contractors

• 📚 Bob Whalen’s new book, Beyond Your Ownership: How Employee Ownership Can Align Your Purpose, People, and Profit, just dropped

• B Lab and PTON released a new resource, Purpose Trust Ownership & B Corps: Aligning Business Ownership & Operations for Broad Benefit1

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👉 In This Issue

1. Events + job opportunities

2. Employee stock ownership plans

3. Purpose trusts + steward ownership

4. Employee ownership + the ownership economy

5. Academic updates

🏙️ Events

For a full list of upcoming events, see our events page. Coming up:

• April 4: Trent-Towne Market’s Reimagining Your Community and Its Future panel in Trenton, NJ

• Apr 6-9: NCEO’s Employee Ownership Conference in Milwaukee

• April 9: ImpactPHL’s Employee Ownership as a Community-Anchored Alternative to Extractive Capital webinar

• April 17: St. Mary’s University’s Making Sense of AI with the Cooperative Movement webinar

• April 23: Common Trust’s Owners Session: Turning Culture Into Ownership webinar with Cypress Valley Meat Company

Jobs + opportunities

Some other best places to work:

• Director of Business Lending Outreach & Pipeline Development at Employee Ownership Expansion Network

• Summer Associates at Ownership Capital Lab

• Program & Operations Associate at Transform Finance

• Financial Services Provider at the The LA County Department of Economic Opportunity

Employee stock ownership plans

• Western Beef of Queen, NY is now 100% employee-owned. Congrats all!

• NCEO released the 6th edition of its book ESOPs and Corporate Governance

• Corey Rosen reports on a recent ruling that ESOP releveraging is not a fiduciary violation

• Expanding ESOPs interviews Kathleen McInerney Kane of Praxis Consulting Group on how to build true ownership culture

• 🎧 The Ownership Effect’s Season 1 finale answers audience questions on business succession, ESOP-related policy, and more:

Purpose trusts + steward ownership

• RainTech of Colorado is now 100% owned by an employee ownership trust. Congrats!

• 🇪🇺 PURPOSE breaks down the European Commission’s “EU Inc.” framework

  • Andrius Juozapaitis at Startups Magazine argues that it must include employee ownership

• 🎧 Alternative Exit hosts Kevin Clegg of Clegg Auto, an employee ownership trust

  • The Future for Work Institute podcast hosts Sandra Castañeda-Elena of Somos Stewards on “ownership on purpose”:

Employee ownership, broadly speaking

• The Open Co-op is relaunching to build a “trust-based internet”

• Ethan Rouen builds on Larry Fink’s warning that AI will widen wealth inequality to argue that broad-based ownership is essential to ensure workers share in the value AI creates

  • says that if scapegoating offers the illusion of control, ownership offers the real thing

• CNBC interviews KKR partner Pete Stavros on their recent sale of Ownership Works company CoolIT

  • Fortune highlights the $240,000 average employee bonus from the sale

  • Brian and Katie Boland argue this is “not better than nothing”

• David Ellerman’s latest lesser-known supporter of employee ownership is economist William Stanley Jevons

The ownership economy

• Maryam Mohiuddin Ahmed and Samantha Matters published A Playbook for Community-Based Budgeting, outlining how communities can directly shape public spending decisions

• 🎧 On Boardroom Governance, The Lean Startup author Eric Ries discusses Incorruptible, his forthcoming book on how most corporate structures fall short on long-term thinking

📚 Academic updates

• ⭐️ The University of Rhode Island is hiring an endowed Assistant Professor of Human Resources

• Neil Warner asks what it will take to revive economic democracy 50 years after the Meidner plan

• Nigel Forrest and Simon Parker published Sustainability and alternative organising: worker cooperatives, local communities and radical democracy, a chapter in the new Research Handbook on Sustainability and Governance

• Hyunmin Choi and Jungook Kim compare employee stock ownership in South Korea, Japan, the UK, and the US

• Craig Borowiak et al. review Jason Spicer’s recent book, Co-operative Enterprise in Comparative Perspective: Exceptionally Un-American

• Congrats to our 1000th Stakeholder, Andrew Farrell!! Enjoy the bookshop.org gift card, buddy.

• Did you miss us last week? Dr. Hand was on Spring Break, relaxing by learning about common good capitalism. Here’s Marco Rubio on it in 2019:

🥃 Top Shelf News

Do you have news? Share here or to news@thestakehold.com.

• KKR says its sale of Ownership Works-affiliated CoolIT Systems resulted in 1-8x salary payouts to employees (paywalled). Katie Boland is not impressed, but the photos are pretty great

• 🇺🇸 Corey Rosen and Jim Bonham cover the U.S. House Education and Workforce Committee’s passage of ERISA litigation reform

• Erinch Sahan & co published a new book, Doughnut Economics for Regenerative Business Design

• Shared ownership of attention? MrBeast may be considering shared ownership of his $5.2 billion company. Says his business partner:

I imagine at some point we want to be able to give the 1.4 billion unique people around the world who [have] watched Jimmy’s content in the last 90 days a chance to be owners of the company…sounds fun.

Subscribe now

👉 In This Issue

1. Events + job opportunities

2. Employee stock ownership plans

3. Worker cooperatives

4. Purpose trusts + steward ownership

5. Employee ownership, broadly speaking

6. The ownership economy

7. Academic updates

🏙️ Events

For a full list of upcoming events, see our events page. Coming up quick:

• March 27: Cooperative Development Foundation’s How to Move Shared Equity Housing Forward with Better Data webinar

• March 30: LSE’s in-person event on economic democracy

• April 4: The Kensington Corridor Trust is hosting an in-depth discussion about development and shared ownership

Jobs + opportunities

• The Industrial Commons is hiring a Senior Director of Community Engagement

• NCEO is looking for speakers for their 2026 NCEO Forum in August

Employee stock ownership plans

• Me-n-Ed’s Pizzeria of California and EmbedTek of Wisconsin are now 100% employee-owned. Congrats!

• Colorado’s Employee Ownership Tax Credit now covers 75% of ESOP conversion costs; in 2027 a state capital gains tax kicks in, too

• 🎧 On David Jaeger and Craig Hettrich share how they use the Entrepreneurial Operating System on ESOP Radio

  • Trevor Gilmore and Benjamin Spadt share 10 predictions for 2026 on the ESOP landscape

  • On Journey to an ESOP & Beyond, Jason W. Miller and Makenzie Wirth highlight the role of frontline managers in employee ownership transitions

• In Medical Economics, Michael Bannon and Gary Herschman argue for ESOPs as an exit option for medical private practices

• Chris Mazzanti and Blake Head + Richard A. Glassman Financier Worldwide discuss ESOPs as an M&A strategy

• For even more ESOP news, check out the ESOP Association’s March newsletter

Worker cooperatives

• Subvert says it is on track to become the world’s largest cooperative of artists and creatives

• The Cooperative Development Foundation highlights how cooperatives emerge where traditional systems fall short

• 📺 The Industrial Commons of North Carolina posted a new video on their cooperative learning journey

  • International Cooperative Alliance posted their most recent Co-Op Snack Break, Enacting Transformative Solidarity

Purpose trusts + steward ownership

• Matthew Licina of NCEO interviews Graeme Nuttall and Maike Kauffmann on the relationship between employee ownership and steward ownership

• In Main Street Journal, profiles Zingerman’s ownership via perpetual purpose trust

• 🎧 hosts Vincent Stanley of purpose trust-owned Patagonia

  • On the Sound of Economics podcast, Rebecca Christie unpacks the EU’s 28th regime legislation

• Purpose Foundation shared two new research resources: a curated literature database and an updated white paper on the effects of steward-ownership

  • Triodos Bank published an analysis of steward ownership, too

• Dennis Price at ImpactAlpha reported out on the last month’s Purpose Trust Ownership Conference

  • Brad Herrmann shared at the conference how an employee ownership trust allowed him to prioritize and protect his company’s culture

Employee ownership, broadly speaking

• Chris Cooper’s framing of succession planning as an entrepreneur’s “last act” caught our eye

• Common Trust outlines key tax considerations in employee ownership transitions

• Project Equity’s newly launched Ownership Opportunity Map uses economic and demographic data to identify geographic areas of opportunity for employee ownership

  • They also posted video from their recent webinar, Why Boutique Consultancies are Ideal for Employee Ownership Transitions

• Jason Blevins covers Outdoor Rec Collective’s plan for an employee-owned collective of outdoor companies

• Smitha Das argues for broadening governance alongside economic rights

  • The Predistribution Initiative similarly argues that worker voice fails without structure

• The Center for Social Capital interviews Mike Brady on employee ownership as a path to access, fairness, and economic empowerment

• 🇨🇦 Jon Shell had a busy week talking about Canadian employee ownership trusts, including on the Do Not Pass Go podcast, in Canadian Business, and The Future Economy

• David Ellerman’s latest spotlights of lesser-know historical supporters of employee ownership are Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis and economist Jane Jacobs

The ownership economy

• Antony Bugg-Levine announces his upcoming book Investing in America, on how to make financial opportunity more accessible across the U.S.

  • Neil McInroy argues for local ownership and control of capital, land, and labor

• On shared ownership of land:

  • Roody Senatus of ImpactAlpha writes about Brick by Brick’s restoring home-ownership in the Twin Cities and tenant equity models as a tool for wealth-building and housing stability (both paywalled)

  • profiles Farmers Land Trust, which helps communities own their farmland

  • Amanda Abrams from The Hustle highlights the Kensington Corridor Trust’s community ownership strategy

• On shared ownership of capital:

  • Aspen Institute’s Maya Smith examines how some CDFIs understand and act on workers’ perspectives

  • Community Development Finance Institution (CDFI) assets fell for the first time in years, writes Oscar Perry Abello in Next City

  • Jessica David argues for community investments funds (including in Rhode Island) as a way for “communities impacted by investment to own that investment”

📚 Academic updates + opportunities

• The Rutgers Institute has extended its deadline to April 3 for proposals to the June 2026 Future of Equity Symposium. RSVP here; submit your proposal here; and review the 2025 program here

  • Trebor Scholz also invites submissions for this year’s Platform Cooperativism Consortium conference

• New papers!

  • Michael Zimmer on AI adoption in ESOP firms

  • Trevor Young-Hyman et al. on how organizations resist centralization pressures and manage stakeholder governance over time

  • Tee Malleson & Yang-Yang Cheng on the tradeoffs of hierarchical and democratic management

  • Valerie Wincomb on the use of learning management in employee-owned companies

  • Jason Kerr & Maxim Polonsky on employee ownership’s association with quality culture

  • Yifat Aran on equity compensation and bargaining power

  • Vijay Sathe et al. on the best practices trap in family business succession (cc )

  • Eric Shone on common good-oriented corporate governance of real estate

🥳 We are spitting distance from having 1000 Stakehold subscribers. To celebrate, we’re offering $25 Bookshop.org gifts cards to our 1000th Stakeholder and the reader that recommends them. Get yours!

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🥃 Top Shelf News

• Dr. Hand spent last weekend reading ’s latest book, Why Democracy Matters, a resource-rich and a powerful justification of workplace democracy. Order yours today

• The Bipartisan Policy Center’s new report, A Nation at Risk to A Nation at Work: The Case for a National Talent Strategy, urges Congress to improve incentives for employee ownership, writes Corey Rosen

• Lolita Nunn is the new Director of Unlock Ownership, an investor. Congrats!

• Check out fresh newsletters from the International Cooperative Alliance, Aspen Institute’s Economic Opportunities Program, and Empowered Ventures

👉 In This Issue

1. Events + job opportunities

2. Employee stock ownership plans

3. Worker cooperatives

4. Purpose trusts + steward ownership

5. Employee ownership + the ownership economy

6. Academic updates

🏙️ Events

For a full list of upcoming events, see our events page. Share your conference recaps with us, too!

• March 16: USFWC’s webinar on labor neutrality as the new standard for cooperatives

• March 17: NCEO’s Candid Conversation with HFA Leadership

• March 17: Rebuild by Design’s How Communities and Banks Can Invest in Community-Wide Infrastructure webinar

• March 18-19: New Private Markets’ Responsible Investment Forum in NYC includes a panel with Alison Lingane (Ownership Capital Lab) and Delilah Rothenberg (Predistribution Initiative)

• March 18: Grounded Solutions Network’s webinar on innovative models for the real estate market

• March 19: NCEO’s webinar ESOP accounting for service providers

• March 25-26: The TX/OK Chapter of The ESOP Association’s Regional Conference in Austin, TX

• March 26: Ownership Capital Lab’s EO Fund Spotlight webinar

• March 27: Cooperative Development Foundation’s How to Move Shared Equity Housing Forward with Better Data webinar

Newly announced

• March 25: PTON’s Purpose Trust Research Group’s first research webinar, featuring and Nien-hê Hsieh. Email for details!

• March 30: LSE’s in-person event on economic democracy

• April 9: ImpactPHL’s Employee Ownership as a Community-Anchored Alternative to Extractive Capital webinar

• May 5: Great Game of Business’ Financial Literacy Workshop in Columbus, OH

• May 19-21: ICA’s symposium on cooperative identity and energizing the cooperative brand

• Aug 29-Sep 3: Economy of Francesco’s Economics of Fraternity summer school in Germany

Jobs + opportunities

• ICA is looking for speakers for their May cooperative symposium

• Start.coop x Defector Media are building a pool of service providers to support independent, worker-friendly media organizations

• Trust Neighborhoods is hiring an Asset Manager for their Fresno neighborhood trust

Employee stock ownership plans

• Apis & Heritage Capital Partners has Legacy II Fund has now reached more than $250M in AUM (paywalled). DimaondBack Covers is Pennsylvania’s newest ESOP. Congrats all!

• NCEO’s Corey Rosen’s latest paper examines how ESOP companies share profits with employees. NCEO also released a new framework for CEOs navigating an ESOP transition

• The Journey to an ESOP podcast hosts Makenzie Wirth on how ESOPs and owners can develop a strategic direction

Worker cooperatives

• explores how child care cooperatives can increase economic power and democratic governance

• Moshi Co-operative University in Tanzania hosted the Fifth International Forum on Cooperative Law in February

• The International Cooperative Alliance posted the video of its February webinar, Launching the Legal Framework Analysis 2.0 (LFA) for Cooperatives

Purpose trusts + steward ownership

• Music Box Supper Club of Ohio is now an employee ownership trust. Congrats all!

• Julie Menter and and Andrea Steffes-Tuttle reflect on last month’s Purpose Trust Ownership Conference

  • Purpose Foundation also shares highlights from their Steward-Ownership Gathering in NYC last month

• On the heels of Anthropic’s jettisoning their model safety pledge, ImpactAlpha’s David Bank writes about investors’ hunt for ways to fund responsible AI (paywalled)

• A new research report from Clarasys and A Blueprint for Better Business explores how market pressure undermines corporate purpose

Employee ownership + the ownership economy

• In impactAlpha, Julie Menter and Sean-Tamba Matthew explore the intersection of entrepreneurship-through-acquisition and employee ownership (paywalled)

  • Menter also announced Transform Finance’s hiring of Fernanda Sesto to head its Values-Led Business Project

• ✊ In Nonprofit Quarterly, Shivank Pandey reflects on efforts to build workplace democracy in a newsroom, describing how practices like rotating meeting facilitators and creating space for all voices helped shift decision-making power

  • David Ellerman’s latest lesser-known supporter of workplace democracy is Edwin G. Nourse

• 🏡 A new case study from Transform Finance explores a community-owned real estate project in the Twin Cities

  • Catherine Toner from Gary Community Ventures released a new report on their Tenant Equity Vehicle for building wealth for renters

• Moolala, a YouTube Channel, hosted Jon Shell for a conversation on Employee Ownership Trusts in Canada: A New Succession Option for Business Owners

• Birmingham Business Journal highlighted the Alabama Center for Employee Ownership’s recent fundraising campaign (paywalled)

• Ownership Works’ Anna Lisa-Miller spoke on a Milken Institute panel on advancing economic mobility

• The Predistribution Initiative shared CorpGov’s post on shared capitalism

📚 Academic updates

• The Purpose Trust Research Group hosts its first research webinar this month, featuring and Nien-hê Hsieh. Respond to this email for details!

• Marina Albanese, Asia Guerreschi and Marco Lomuscio’s new paper examines worker cooperatives’ role in the circular economy

• Marc Levy’s chapter in the recently published Oxford Handbook of Social Purpose covers foundation ownership as a mechanism for protecting social purposes in business

🦞 Lagniappe

In the latest edition of “Who’s Going to Tell Them About Employee Ownership,” gets one heartbeat away from making the pitch for employee ownership in this podcast. Here is Hayes at 41m06s:

“I think one of the traps in center-left policy in the last, say, 30 years, is that we have this sort of pretax and transfer inequality, and then tax and transfers to change it. And we just keep getting more and more inequality in what the market does, and then the recipe is more and more redistribution… The problem is you can’t have a political economy that just keeps producing larger and larger forms of inequality that then have larger and larger amounts of redistribution to produce an equitable society. So the question then becomes: What is a vision for an equitable market economy or labor market or labor force or society that is genuinely middle class?

And later, at 58m40s:

Douthat: There’s a version that says you basically want to look at all the money that the people in the A.I. world are going to be making, and you want to tax it — just directly subsidize Americans out of that largess. Or, you need a politics that basically protects work. And it sounds to me like you are on the job side, not the U.B.I. side.

Hayes: I guess I haven’t thought it through enough to feel like I have a very fixed view on either.

The Stakehold and its readers can help, Chris!

• Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer is under fire; we’re watching for how and whether this impacts DOL’s pro-employee-ownership pivot

• The Financial Accounting Standards Board is considering requiring employee stock ownership plans to report repurchase obligations on their balance sheet, writes NCEO’s Corey Rosen

• Certified Employee Owned’s new EO Base “gives employee-owned companies a branded, centralized website to host all of their ownership resources in one place”

Subscribe now

👉 In This Issue

1. Events + job opportunities

2. Employee stock ownership plans

3. Worker cooperatives

4. Purpose trusts + steward ownership

5. Employee ownership + the ownership economy

6. Academic updates

🏙️ Events

For a full list of upcoming events, see our events page. Share your conference recaps with us, too!

• March 10: Clarasys’ event on governance and ownership for purpose-driven businesses, Locking in Purpose: From mindset to mandate

• March 10-11: In the UK, EOA’s Representing and Developing Employee Voices

• March 11: USFWC’‘s workshop on cooperative member engagement

• March 11: LevelUp Coops’ How Ownership Actually Works in a Worker Co-op: A Hands-On Introduction to Ownership Design webinar

• March 12: EOX and Deanalytics’ Beyond Retirement, The Real Story of ESOP Payouts

• March 13: The Institute for Economic Democracy’s Advancing Worker Ownership: Reclaiming Economic Sovereignty in the 21st Century event in London

• March 16: USFWC’s webinar on labor neutrality as the new standard for cooperatives

• March 17: NCEO’s Candid Conversation with HFA Leadership

• March 18: Grounded Solutions Network’s webinar on innovative models for the real estate market

• March 18-19: New Private Markets’ Responsible Investment Forum in NYC includes a panel with Alison Lingane (Ownership Capital Lab) and Delilah Rothenberg (Predistribution Initiative)

Job Opportunities

• Common Trust is hiring for two roles: Chief of Staff and Transaction Advisory Associate

• Blue Ridge Associates is hiring as ESOP Communication Consultant

Employee stock ownership plans

• The ESOP Association released their latest newsletter, including upcoming webinars and policy updates from Illinois and Rhode Island

• Shannon Litton was named of Ragan’s 2026 Top Women in Communications for her trailblazing work on employee ownership

• Alan Pierce plugs ESOPs in Specialty Fabrics Review; 40 Million Owners argues that ESOP companies are well-positioned for the growing buyer-led M&A market

• The new edition of the Journey to an ESOP podcast explores Monte Sano Research Cooperation’s transition to employee ownership

• Good Times USA of Florida and Gable of Maryland are now employee-owned; and Omni Family of Services, a Nashville-based ESOP, acquired JusticeWorks Youthcare of Pittsburgh. Congrats all!

Worker cooperatives

• The Cooperative Development Foundation named their 2026 Cooperative Leaders and Scholars Fellows and is accepting grant applications to their Cooperative Education Fund (applications close May 1st)

• First-of-its-kind AI cooperative Transkribus celebrated reaching 500,000 users

Purpose trusts + steward ownership

• ImpactAlpha‘s Dennis Price (paywalled, but summarized in their daily The Brief) reported out from last week’s Purpose Trust Ownership Conference

  • Ari Weinzweig of Zingerman’s Deli also reflected on the event in his latest piece, A Positive Look at Perpetual Purpose Trusts, Three Years In

• In FastCompany, Carol Cone says that in 2026, corporate purpose will come to a fork in the road. Somebody tell her about purpose trusts and steward ownership!

Employee ownership + the ownership economy

• HR Brew’s Kristen Parisi and National Association of Plan Advisors’ Paul Mulholland cover last week’s Department of Labor Employee Ownership Report to Congress

• Ownership Works-affiliated, Alabama-based Landscape Workshop rolled out its broad-based incentive plan

  • In ImpactAlpha, Roodgally Senatus asks: if sharing wealth with workers creates value for private equity buyout firms, why not share more? (paywalled)

• In Shelterforce, Steve Dubb explains the solidarity economy

• The latest newsletter from Beloved Economies includes tips for how to share decision-making power

📚 Academic updates

• Rutgers Institute plans to launch an Employee Ownership Research-To-Practice Resource Hub; sign up for updates

• The Cooperative Development Foundation is accepting grant applications, including on research, to their Cooperative Education Fund (applications close May 1st)

• ICYMI: In January, Jason Spicer won the 2026 Joyce Rothschild Book Prize for his book Co-operative Enterprise in Comparative Perspective and David Fitz-Gerald won the Popular Book Prize for If It’s the Last Thing I Do. Congrats!

• The Department of Labor published its first Employee Ownership Initiative Report to Congress. ESOP Association CEO Jim Bonham and PlanSponsor’s James van Bramer break it down

• Dr. Hand gave the closing keynote from the first Purpose Trust Ownership Conference (this is the titular apocalypse reference, btw)

• Rayan Semery-Palumbo and Andrew Stern are offering a $2,500 prize for ideas on worker-centered solutions for AI & autonomous vehicles. Applications due March 4

• In The Great Ownership Transfer, McKinsey describes the six million U.S. businesses that will face succession decisions by 2035; they also interview Philip Reeves of Apis & Heritage

• 🗞️ Check out recent newsletters from our friends at Predistribution Initiative, Ownership Capital Lab, Social Capital Partners, EOX, and Aspen’s Economic Opportunities Program

Subscribe now

👉 In This Issue

1. Events + job opportunities

2. Employee stock ownership plans

3. Worker cooperatives

4. Purpose trusts + steward ownership

5. Employee ownership + the ownership economy

6. Academic updates

🏙️ Events

For a full list of upcoming events, see our events page. Share your conference recaps with us, too!

• March 3: SV2’s Innovative Finance Spotlight 2026 ft. Alison Lingane

• March 3-24: The City of Minneapolis’s three-week Co-Op Startup Course

• March 4: eoa’s online EO Leadership Development Program

• March 4: PURPOSE’s steward-ownership gathering in NYC

• March 6: The Ownership Project’s seminar with Tej Gonza

• March 10: Clarasys’ event on governance and ownership for purpose-driven businesses, Locking in Purpose: From mindset to mandate

• March 10-11: eoa’s course on Representing and Developing Employee Voices

• March 11: USFWC'‘s workshop on cooperative member engagement

• March 11: LevelUp Coops’ How Ownership Actually Works in a Worker Co-op: A Hands-On Introduction to Ownership Design webinar

• March 12: EOX and Deanalytics’ Beyond Retirement, The Real Story of ESOP Payouts

Newly announced

• March 18: Grounded Solutions Network’s webinar on innovative models for the real estate market

• April 17: St. Mary’s University’s webinar on making sense of AI within the cooperative movement

Job Opportunities

• Associate Director of Investments at Apis & Heritage Capital Partners

• Director of Development and Ecosystem Director at The Center for Community Wealth

• Program Manager at the Democracy at Work Institute (deadline March 1)

Employee stock ownership plans

• Hoopaugh Grading (NC), R&A Enterprises (CO), and LandSouth Construction (FL) are now employee owned. Congrats!

• The Ownership Effect podcast explores the impact of employee ownership on individual owners’ lives

• Expanding ESOPs interviews Kathleen McInerney Kane, president of Praxis Consulting Group

• ⏪ ESOP event recaps: Chuck Mazzanti on ESCA’s recent Leadership Summit, Ramona Rodriguez-Brooks on NCEO’s Think Like an Owner webinar, and Maria Llanos on NCEO’s inaugural Women’s Summit

Worker cooperatives

• The Rural Cooperative Developer Scholarships extended its deadline to March 16

• India’s co-op minister launched Bharat Taxi, a national cooperative of taxi drivers

• Co-op Atlas released their Southern Edition 2026, an initiative that publishes research on cooperative statutes and their governance functions

• ICA highlights the women transforming the cooperative space

Purpose trusts + steward ownership

• PURPOSE writes about open source AI chatbot OpenClaw, recaps a recent German parliamentary event on steward ownership, and publishes a case study on Organically Grown Company’s journey from cooperative → ESOP → perpetual purpose trust, all ahead of their first US conference next week in New York

Employee ownership + the ownership economy

• 🛠️ New tools

  • Project Equity’s Ownership Opportunity Map is an interactive data tool that maps workforce demographics. They also put out a new report on employee ownership among Black business owners

  • Cooperative Development Foundation and the National Cooperative Business Association launched a catalog of shared equity housing models

• 🎧 Ears edition

  • Dr. Hand on Andy Farquharson’s A Better Monday podcast, on the values that drive ownership succession decisions

  • Nathan Schneider on the Democracy Innovators podcast, on the governance of online communities

• ✍️ Opinion

  • Tom Powdrill on why worker voice is often silenced without structure

  • Neil McInroy on the Scottish Community Wealth Building Bill (Bella Caledonia)

  • Julien Rosenbloom on how state governments can help finance business transitions to employee ownership (ImpactAlpha)

  • Seth Levine and Elizabeth MacBride on why America should embrace the shift from a shareholder economy to one that focuses on stakeholders (Fortune)

  • Corey Rosen on the growing gap between productivity and compensation (NCEO)

• 🦞 Lagniappe

  • A new Wall Street Journal reports on the growth of 401(k)s among small businesses

  • A new UN report explores the social and solidarity economy as a poverty-eradication tool

  • Hélène Landemore recaps a recent event, “Democratizing Corporate Governance”

📚 New Academic Papers

• Dr. Hand on the origin, defining characteristics, benefits, and challenges of EOTs in the United States

• Kelly O. Finnell’s Message Collision in the Employee Ownership Movement on the emergence of Ownership Works and Expanding ESOPs

• Zhenyang Zhang and Jinghui He on employee ownership and ESG performance in Chinese firms

• Jungook Kim and company on the impact of demographic characteristics on the perception of stewardship in employee-owned companies