Podium Entertainment, a publisher for independent authors, was acquired in PE deal that layers in employee incentives via Ownership Works (paywalled). Podium’s claim to fame is audio-first publishing—i.e., skip the silly print stuff and go straight to audiobooks and creator-driven content.

This one caught my eye because the audio-first publishing industry is somewhere between its infancy and adolescence. Decades ago, sociologist Arthur Stinchcombe noticed that companies in new industries set the example for later entrants to follow.

Mark and I found out that’s exactly what happens with ESOPs: when more companies in an industry (or a place) are employee-owned, new entrants are more likely to use the same blueprint and adopt employee ownership themselves.

So, the question is, will this transaction make other audio-first publishers more likely to adopt a form of employee ownership? For proponents of private equity’s version of employee ownership, Podium’s acquisition is good news because it makes similar deals more likely. For opponents of the PE form of employee ownership, it’s bad news for the same reason, unless they can persuade potential imitators to consider other forms of employee ownership.

Subscribe now

👉 In This Issue

If you’re new here, friend, welcome! You may want to start with Stories & Dealflow.

• Events and Opportunities

• News

• Stories & Dealflow

• Research and Insights

🏙️ Events and Opportunities

Events This Week

• Sep 26 | Center for Community Wealth’s satellite USFWC conference in Denver

• Sep 28 | The EO Capital Roadmap Roadshow hits Seattle // Platform Coops’ Worker Co-ops & The Long History of Labour // Lafayette Square Institute’s Working Class Insights Forum in Middleburg, VA

• Sep 29 | The ESOP Association’s Great Lakes Regional Conference in Indianapolis

• Sep 30 | Employee Ownership Canada’s Life After the Sale // ICA Group’s LevelUp Conversations in NYC // Centre for Climate Psychology’s An Economy of Right Relationship // Cooperatives Europe’s From Aid to Ownership

• Oct 1 | The Ownership Economy Summit in NYC and Barcelona // Iowa Center for Employee Ownership’s Annual Conference // B Corp Postlethwaite’s Ownership Matters webinar

• Oct 2 | People’s Economy Lab’s Making Our Economy Work for Us webinar

For even more events, see our main Events page.

Opportunities

• Prairie Capital Advisors | Associate - ESOP Consulting

For more jobs, including at employee-owned companies, visit our Jobs page.

🗞️ Ownership News

Employee Ownership

• A Las Vegas casino gave ~10,000 $70 million in company stock (ht Conscious Capitalism’s The Briefing)

• ESCA honors Senator Steve Daines as their 2026 ESOP Champion

• Ownership Works receives Citi Foundation’s 2026 Community Finance Initiative

• A task force launches in Vermont to expand employee ownership

• Project Equity welcomes Alison Boess as Capital Deployment Manager of their EO Catalyst Fund. Congrats!

• 🇬🇧 Oct 12 Deadline: Wellington HR calls for news stories of 200 words or less for their first-ever EO Annual, celebrating the year’s employee ownership milestones

Ownership on Purpose

• 🇳🇱 Dutch Parliament is pursuing a new steward ownership structure to reduce administrative and legal costs for mission-driven companies

• Laurie Lane-Zucker contends that mission and values must go beyond legal contracts and be built into the company structure itself (ht )

• ICYMI: After passing 47% of customer service calls to AI, IKEA upskills their workforce to build new revenue streams instead of laying off employees

The Ownership Economy

• Agricultural co-op Ocean Spray expands its executive suite

Ownership Stories & Dealflow

Employee Ownership | 6D Health and Wellness Cooperative (🇨🇦) offers ownership to care providers and mental health services to clients (ht GEO) // Jolly CEO Dean Zimberg spotlights the employee retention at QuikTrip, a convenience store whose employees own 20% via ESOP and where Mark drinks 20% more slushies than he should // Neilcott Construction (🇬🇧) pays off its buyout loan 5 years ahead of schedule

• Dealflow | Philadelphia’s Celsius Companies combines ETA with ESOPs // New Hampshire publisher Earth Sky + Water transitions to worker co-op // New Jersey manufacturer James Alexander, Wisconsin’s Ellis Construction, Minnesota’s Cafe Imports, and Michigan construction firm Rockford all become 100% ESOP-owned

• For more, check out our Dealflow page.

Ownership Economy | Members of Park Slope Food Co-op in NYC provide 75% of labor to keep prices low // @Robert Geline contrasts fan engagement with community-owned Green Bay Packers vs. other NFL teams (paywalled, ht Peter Dorman) // 📺 Linday Harris shares how Propolis Housing Co-op raised $1.1 million in community bonds (ht GEO)

Ownership on Purpose | ICYMI: This week’s Conscious Capitalism The Briefing newsletter recapped a January podcast with Dusan Vujovic, CEO of Tony’s Chocolonely:

🌲🌲 Trivia | Have you noticed a preponderance of pines in co-op branding?

Research & Insights

The latest arguments, analysis, and academic research (📚). Go deeper with our other topic-specific, spillover newsletters.

Employee Ownership | Project Equity’s Zarin Kresge calls for advisors to include employee ownership as an exit option // In Newsweek, CCA’s Howard Brodsky asserts employee ownership builds economic participation in ways that government assistance cannot // ICMYI: ’s LinkedIn newsletter Employee Ownership launched around this time last year

• ESOPs | The CLEI proposes a new financial vehicle to fund employee ownership, drawing inspiration from the mortgage market // 🎙️ The Ownership Effect’s new episode exploring what sets ESOPs apart from other employee ownership structures // BDO Advisors analyzes legal and cultural dynamics when unions meet ESOPs

• Worker Cooperatives | 📚 Fordham’s Gowri Krishna examines how the franchise model could be adapted to scale worker ownership

Ownership on Purpose | 🎙️ On Purpose 360, interviews Benevity CEO Sona Khosla about their recent State of Corporate Purpose report // In HBR, Nick Hobson and ask Will Your Organization Stand By Its Values—Even When It’s Hard? (paywalled) Our guess? Only if you have already locked those values into your structure or culture (ht Conscious Capitalism)

The Ownership Economy | 🇨🇦 MP Ryan Turnbull advocates for collective ownership in Canadian Parliament // Sustainable Economies Law Center ponders Cooperatives as Incubators of Democracy (ht GEO) // ICA positions co-ops as tool for international development and peace

• Community Ownership | Katie Deal confronts the tension of communities depending on workers who can no longer afford to rent there // Ground Works Consulting shares its latest insights on campaigning for community ownership policy change // argues that community ownership structures are tools for economic development // Lyn Jardine of the Scottish National Party connects ownership to community wealth

• Digital Ownership | 📚 Landemore and Tang consider democratic ownership of AI through game theory’s stag hunt framework

• Workplace Democracy | The ICA Group reacts to HBS findings on building ownership culture // Aspen EOP helpfully collated the ownership culture conversations from their June event

You’ve stumbled across a spinoff newsletter of The Stakehold, our newsletter for the ownership economy. This is a deeper cut on employee ownership than we include in our free weekly newsletter.

If you’re an employee ownership junkie and you want it all shot straight into your inbox once we launch, you can toggle on emails for Ownership at Work here:

Subscribe to Ownership at Work

If you haven’t already, you should start with the Top Shelf News in our main newsletter. Below is the rest!

🗞️ The News

Employee Ownership

• 🇬🇧 I-COM, a marketing agency and employee ownership trust, is building a UK employee ownership map

• 🇫🇷 France considers new policy (Pacte Papin) designed to incentivize employee ownership with reduced taxes and registration duties

• 21 Hats announces its 2027 workshop series, designed to give business owners access to founders with a wide range of succession experiences and employee ownership models

• Durham, NC officially joins DAWI’s Employee Ownership Cities program with the launch of their Keep It Durham-Owned initiative (ht Steve Storkan)

ESOPs

• Rutgers Institute researchers find that full-time workers without 4-year degrees but in ESOP jobs earn 15% more each year than their counterparts in non-ESOP jobs (ht Adria Scharf)

• Stout reports ESOPs generated an 18.1% return in 2025, compared with 16.4% for the S&P 500—and that performance gap widens over a 5-year time horizon

• Expanding ESOPs features its newest member, Christensen Group Insurance

• Ulteig, a consulting engineering firm and 100% ESOP, adds employee ownership expertise to its board with Susan Conner

• Congrats to OwnersEdge as 2026 Waukesha County Large Business of the Year

• An NCEO task force report calls on the Department of Labor to factor repurchase obligations into upcoming valuation rules to protect long-term ESOP sustainability

Employee Ownership Trusts

• ICYMI: According to EOT Advisors, recently converted employee ownership trusts include environmental services firm Heumann Environmental (IN), software company Katapult Engineering (PA), Allied Foundation Repair (TX), DCW Cost Management (WA), logistics firm Marshall Fine Arts (NY) , and consulting firm SEI (NV)

• NCEO releases four new case studies in their EOT Toolkit, featuring Ocaquatics Swim School, Guidon, ShopBot Tools and Mainscape (members-only)

Worker Cooperatives

• ICYMI: The ICA Group looks far and wide for all the worker co-ops on LinkedIn

• Two national organizations rebrand to clearer, simpler names: NCBA CLUSA will be U.S. Co-ops and Co-operatives and Mutuals Canada is now Canada Co-op

• Cincinnati’s Topia Coffee Copperative rebrands as Radical Bean Cooperative, restructuring the business to reconnect with the community

• 🎙️ ICA Group’s LevelUp Coops announces new podcast premiere on Sep 30

• Oct 1 Deadline: Apply for Cooperative Education Fund grants of $1,000-10,000

• Congratulations to ICA Global Board President Dr. Ariel Guarco and the 15 new At-Large Directors — including U.S. Co-Ops’ Doug O’Brien

• The Fund for International Cooperative Development invites global co-ops to apply for grants for crisis response, rebuilding or long-term co-op development

• Cooperative Development Fund released their quarterly updates, including upcoming events, their 2025 Annual Report, and a new 5-year strategy plan

• Cooperative Fund of the Northeast announces newest Co-op Navigator Fellows

The Stories

• Paramount Plastics, a 100% employee owned manufacturing ESOP under Empowered Ventures, achieves one year without any OSHA injuries

• EV launches their Season 5 podcast by spotlighting their 5 companies

• NCEO spotlights how employee ownership completely changed how Jaime Garcia and his wife thought about retirement

• Grassroots Economic Organizing (GEO) profiles an employee-owned newsroom, a bakery worker co-op and more in their latest newsletter

• 🎙️ Construction ESOP Collective interviews Harkins Builders’ Ben Nichols

• 🎙️ Counterpoint: Kevin Donnelly shares the story of selling his telecoms company to private equity with the 21 Hats podcast:

Research & Insights

• Project Equity shares their Annual Report, including data on company resilience and national initiatives to scale employee ownership

• 🇬🇧 The eoa launches a new series of employee ownership guides for businesses

• 🎙️ ESOP Exit Podcast breaks down Section 1042 and its tax benefits

• U.S. Co-Ops pilot tests new Learning Hub tools for coffee co-ops in Adjuntas, PR

• Cooperatives Europe releases From Aid to Ownership: The Cooperative Approach to International Development while the International Cooperative Alliance and UN COPAC publish 17 briefs on cooperatives and sustainable development goals

• 🇨🇦 Lucie Moncion and Andrew Pakes argue for employee ownership to be core to Canada’s economy, noting the challenge is one of scale rather than public support

• Starting Oct 7: Rocky Mountain Employee Ownership Center announces The The People’s Economy Academy

• Rutgers proposes innovative structures for licensed professionals seeking more broad-based equity for staff

✌️ See you next week!

If you made it this far, you’re a real one. We’d love to talk with you about sponsoring this newsletter so that we can keep it free for other Stakehold readers.

You’ve stumbled across a test: a spinoff of The Stakehold, a newsletter for the ownership economy. This is a deeper cut on the ownership economy than our free weekly newsletter.

If you’re an ownership economy junkie and you want it all shot straight into your inbox once we launch, you can toggle on emails for The Ownership Economy here:

Subscribe to The Ownership Economy

If you haven’t already, you should start with the Top Shelf News in our main newsletter. Below is the rest!

🗞️ Ownership Economy News

Community Ownership

• From her new book, shares a story about a county in England that build a community-controlled endowment fund; Katie Boland posts about Patton Power’s book, Brave New Capital

• Headwaters Community Trust in Vermont purchased one of Sterling College’s campuses last month

• Congrats to Jerome Nikolai Warren as the new Faculty Fellow and Mentor at the Rutgers Institute for the Study of Employee Ownership and Profit Sharing!

• Helen Leung of LA Más receives Innovator of the Year award from Connect CRE for using community ownership to preserve affordable housing

Digital Ownership

• As Tech Policy Press synthesizes the latest AI news and the calls for developmental pacing, an unresolved question lingers: Who gets to set that pace?

  • Pacing the frontier is the theme of the week: AI for Non-Profits Network examines how to scale expertise and impact via AI, with a solid shout out to Project Equity

  • And The Owner’s Box delves into ownership and governance

  • In TIME, Sarah Polcz and argue that the idea of publicly owning AI has become bipartisan, positioning a public-benefit tax as an alternative to government equity

Producer Ownership

• 🎙️ The Ownership Economy profiles Austin Robey of music platform Subvert

• Hoffman Green partners with Terrena, a French agricultural co-op

Research & Insights

• A pastor in Goergia recounts why their church worked with Urban Recipe to set up food co-ops for its food-insecure neighbors

• Community Land Trust Network releases new impact report and 5-year plan, noting that in the last three years 26 CLTs have built 333 affordable homes

• A new HBS case study analyzes emerging framework options for democratic governance and shared stewardship of AI

• 📺 Oxford Professor Jonathan Michie fames employee ownership as a resilient response to global pressures and inequalities (video below)

  • 📚 Great minds: Oliver Browne and Graeme Nuttall recently published similar findings from local Scottish economies

  • Project Equity’s Amanda Calder also sees business succession as an economic development issue

✌️ See you next week!

If you made it this far, you’re a real one. We’d love to talk with you about sponsoring this newsletter so that we can keep it free for other Stakehold readers.

Each week The Stakehold posts a free newsletter for the ownership economy. This newsletter is a deeper cut on organizational purpose than we include in that free weekly newsletter.

If you’re an organizational purpose junkie and you want it all shot straight into your inbox, you can toggle on emails for Ownership on Purpose here:

Subscribe to Ownership on Purpose

If you haven’t already, you should start with the Top Shelf News in our main newsletter. Below is the rest!

🗞️ News on Purpose

• Jim Sorenson and Alan Eagle’s new book The Impact Capitalist launches Oct 6

• HBS published the agenda and speakers for its TOP26: Steward Ownership Conference

• 🤓 The Purpose Trust Ownership Network has a new Data Dashboard

Purpose Stories

• 🎙️ Alternative Exit interviews Sam Boustred, Chair of the Global Members’ Board for Scott Bader, on the employee ownership trust’s history, financial structures and governance:

• 🫧 Purpose Pledge member Dr. Bronner’s was featured by two podcasts, Shelfsense: Stories Behind Our Stuff; and The Checkout: Grocery Nerds, with Les Szabo (The Purpose Pledge & Dr. Bronner’s) and Seth Goldman (Beyond Meat and JUST Ice Tea)

• 📺 P. Terry’s Burger Stand chose an employee ownership trust over a $100M exit:

✌️ See you next week!

If you made it this far, you’re a real one. We’d love to talk with you about sponsoring this newsletter so we can keep it free for other Stakehold readers.

• Bloomberg reports on US House’s passage of the Retire Through Ownership Act, a bill which gives ESOP trustees a clearer path to determining fair market value

  • See analysis from NCEO, TEA, and Menke, which calls it “the most consequential ESOP legislation in a generation”

  • Striking to us is just how bipartisan this legislation is—during an election year in a historically polarized country. This bill pulled in the bootleggers, the Baptists and everyone in between

• Rutgers Institute researchers find that full-time workers without 4-year degrees but in ESOP jobs earn 15% more each year than their counterparts in non-ESOP jobs (ht Adria Scharf)

• 🇬🇧 John Lewis, the UK’s largest employee ownership trust, detailed the next phase of its multi-year turnaround plan, focusing on retail investments and cost discipline

Subscribe now

👉 In This Issue

If you’re new here, friend, welcome! You may want to start with Stories & Dealflow.

• Events and Opportunities

• News

• Stories & Dealflow

• Research and Insights

🏙️ Events and Opportunities

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

• Sep 22 | Common Trust interviews P. Terry’s Co-Founder Kathy Terry on scaling a people-first business // The Great Game of Business Conference in St. Louis // The ESOP Association’s Midwest Regional Conference in Des Moines

• Sep 23 | UWFWC’s Union Co-Ops Council meeting // ESCA’s Federal Policy Conference & Lobby Day in DC // eoa online panel, How to Become Employee Owned // Movement Politics Accelerator’s Public Dollars, Private Capture: How Co-ops Might Change the Landscape of Childcare

• Sep 24 | Kent State’s Ohio Employee Ownership Center’s ESOP Contribution and Allocation Mechanics // Project Equity and Silicon Valley SBDC’s Succession Planning Through Employee Ownership for Silicon Valley Businesses

• Sep 25 | USFWC and DAWI’s Worker Cooperative Conference in Boston (y en español también)

• Sep 26 | Center for Community Wealth’s satellite USFWC conference in Denver

• Sep 28 | Platform Coops’ Worker Co-ops & The Long History of Labour // 2026 Working Class Insights Forum in Middleburg, VA // The EO Capital Roadmap Roadshow hits Seattle

Opportunities

For more, including for jobs *at* employee-owned companies, visit our Jobs page.

• Vermont Employee Ownership Center is hiring a Communications and Program Coordinator

• ESOP Partners is hiring three new Assistant Administrators (ht Matt Licina)

• Texas Impact Capital Alliance is hiring a founding Executive Director

🗞️ Ownership News

Employee Ownership

For even more employee ownership news, see Ownership at Work, a spinoff newsletter we’re testing.

• Expanding ESOPs and pollster released a new survey on Americans’ perceptions of employee ownership

  • “Amidst all the negative headlines about young people and the economy, employee ownership offers a path to rebuilding their faith in our system,” said Echelon’s

• Two national organizations rebrand to clearer, simpler names: NCBA CLUSA will be U.S. Co-ops and Co-operatives and Mutuals Canada is now Canada Co-op

• Ownership Capital Lab announces inaugural cohort of their Employee Ownership Fund Accelerator

Ownership on Purpose

For even more news on organizational purpose, see Ownership on Purpose, a spinoff newsletter we’re testing.

• HBS updates the agenda and speakers for TOP26: Steward Ownership Conference

• 🇳🇱 Netherlands bookseller BoekenBalie becomes steward-owned

The Ownership Economy

For even more ownership economy news, see The Ownership Economy, a spinoff newsletter we’re testing.

• Newly launched Thriving Communities Fund went live with their website this week

• David Cobb, whose work ranged from cooperatives to tribally-owned community land trusts to workplace democracy, passed away on Labor Day

• Next City analyzes why this fall is critical for mission-driven lenders, from pending distribution of CDFI funds to the impact of proposed CRA changes; Shelterforce has more helpful context

Ownership Stories & Dealflow

• 🍻 Unions + employee ownership = ? Cambridge, MA brewery Lamplighter founders surprised employees with a transition to employee ownership trust after labor voted to unionize earlier this year

• OEOC’s Michael Palmieri publishes new case study for Rutgers on Web Industries

• A pastor recounts why their church in Georgia worked with Urban Recipe to set up food co-ops for its food-insecure neighbors

• 📺 Rachel Eva Merfalen and Shawn Saint Michael debut their first Good Future film, featuring John Hannah of Tennessee’s Inline Electric & Lighting:

• Dealflow | Kentucky’s Lark Electric merged with American Gridwork Partners as it builds out an employee ownership program to attract and retain more workers // Tropical Foods sells to its employees in an ESOP deal backed by Apis & Heritage (paywalled) // Netherlands bookseller BoekenBalie became steward-owned // Headwaters Community Trust in Vermont purchased one of Sterling College’s campuses last month

  • ICYMI: According to EOT Advisors, recently converted employee ownership trusts include environmental services firm Heumann Environmental (IN), software company Katapult Engineering (PA), Allied Foundation Repair (TX), DCW Cost Management (WA), logistics firm Marshall Fine Arts (NY) , and consulting firm SEI (NV)

For more, check out our Dealflow page.

Research & Insights

The latest arguments, analysis, and academic research (📚). Go deeper with our other topic-specific newsletters.

Employee Ownership | Rutgers’ Employee Ownership Hub compiles their latest research and action briefs // Fellowship applications open for dissertation-stage PhD students at the Center for Engaged Scholarship (ht Melissa H) // 📚 Albanese et al. examine the relationship between employee ownership and sustainability (paywalled)

• ESOPs | Stout reports ESOPs generated an 18.1% return in 2025, compared with 16.4% for the S&P 500—and that performance gap widens over a 5-year time horizon

• Worker Cooperatives | Movement Politics Accelerator posts The Mondragon Playbook (ht Just Economy Institute) // Nonkululeko Tabata of Nexus Community Partners considers the importance of education to co-op success

Workplace Democracy | HBS’s Karasik, Rouen and Whillans argue that clearly communicating behavioral norms increases retention and sense of belonging for employee-owners // College presidents are pushing to redesign university governance

The Ownership Economy | The UN released their 2026 Report on the Social and Solidarity Economy

See you next week!

One final thanks to 100% for Purpose, Zoe Schlag, IA-CEO, Cool Hardware Company, OEOC, and new Stakehold Advisory Board member Tim Garbinsky for the LinkedIn shoutouts this week.

Why distribute control?

Here is one way to think about why owners might decide to share power:

1. Owner-focused reasons, like making more money or distributing the stress of leadership

2. Business-focused reasons, e.g. aligning incentives or recruiting/retaining workers, to strengthen business performance

3. Others-focused reasons, like helping develop workers’ personal agency or autonomy

…as well as a final section on why they might not.

Human motivations are tricky.1 We don’t always know why we’re doing things, and we often have multiple reasons for doing them. That double-barreled ambiguity means the three categories above often overlap.

But they don’t always overlap. An owner might distribute control because it will make the company perform better but then distribute that cash flow to their employees. Or they could choose to sell the company to private equity to maximize their sale price, knowing there’s a good chance it will mean the end of the business they built. Or they might distribute control because they want to engender an “owner’s mindset” in their workers, even if they worry it could lower productivity and performance.2

A quick note before we get in it: some of the claims below are well-studied. Some are derived from arguments about distributing cash flow. Others I’m just riffing on. I try to be clear about which are which and welcome pointers to more reasons or evidence!

1. Owner-focused reasons to distribute control

Start with where your 20th century Economics 101 class ended: people are motivated by self-interest. So if we see owners sharing power, we should first ask what’s in it for them. Some self-interested reasons owners might want to share power:

• Cementing their legacy as a transformational leader, a corporate rebel, an against-the-mediocre-grain businessperson.

• Preserving what they built and care deeply about, including the people and culture that helped build it.

• Distributing the stress of leadership among an expanded group of owners.

• Making more money for themselves by improving firm performance through shared control.

2. Business-focused reasons to distribute control

If a business owner wants their business to do well to maximize their own profit, that’s an instrumental reason. But it could also be that seeing their business succeed, regardless of whether they are in control anymore, is a business owner’s end goal. Either way, there are multiple pathways through which distributed control might boost performance.

• Boosting worker productivity. Recent employee ownership research suggests that the 3-5% productivity benefits of employee ownership depend less on profit-sharing than on employee-owned companies’ management approaches. This lines up with research from the nineties arguing that productivity gains come primarily from giving workers control rather than cash flow rights.

• Building trust, loyalty, and a sense of ownership among stakeholders. Earlier this year Trevor Young-Hyman presented to the Purpose Trust Ownership Network’s academic working group (cc ) a paper arguing that firms make commitments to the French equivalents of benefit corporations so that their stakeholders have more confidence in the company’s commitment to its purpose. Optimax Systems, we discovered, solidified relationships with some of its customers once they learned the company could never be sold. That’s about legally locking in a purpose, but the same might be true of sharing control, too. Customers might appreciate that decisions affecting them will be internally legislated, rather than made by the whim of a single CEO. Employees may be more likely to trust their careers to a company where they have some power and feel like owners. The result is what employee ownership advocates call an “ownership culture” or “ownership mindset,” and nerds call collective psychological ownership.

• Improving the odds of firm survival. Employee-owned firms are more likely to survive economic downturns, but it isn’t clear to me why, and I suspect it has more to do with loyalty to/identification with the firm than workers thinking “if I stick this out, I’ll get my bag.”

• Lowering transaction costs. Henry Hansmann argues that firms choose ownership structures that cumulatively lower two transaction costs: contracting costs and ownership costs. You want to give control to stakeholders that can work together effectively; you want to transact at a distance with stakeholders you can easily contract with. Hansmann predicts (and I think we see) more distributed control in industries like law and architecture, where similarly trained partners know how to operate together and would be expensive to contract with if they were external to the firm.3

• Recruiting and retaining employees. Hiring, retaining, and firing workers are a real time suck for most businesses. Employee owners are better off than the rest of us—they get paid more, build more wealth, and stick around longer.

• Aligning incentives, vision, and accountability. The most common understanding of a firm is as is a collection of contracts, which results in a cat-and-mouse game between “principals” and their “agents”—think investors v. bosses, bosses v. managers, managers v. workers. Distributed control can interrupt that pattern in multiple ways: (1) it collapses some of those categories; the agents (workers) become principals (owners), too; (2) it means that there are more owners making sure all those other principals (coworkers) don’t shirk; (3) it inspires prosocial behavior: As Colin Birkhead, Noah Gibson and I argue, it also sets the stage for a “pay-it-forward” flywheel within an organization. When we see one coworker stepping up to help another, we’re then more likely to help another one; (4) it can lead to more aligned incentives: if the direction of the company is commonly determined, individuals can make sure they and others benefit from its growth; and (5) it can lead to greater alignment around a common purpose: a commonly determined purpose is more likely to be commonly protected.

• Unlocking innovation and better decision-making. Corey Rosen’s excellent book Beyond Engagement argues that a primary pathway to improved performance is employee-owned firms’ tendency to build structures reward workers for frontline innovation. To me, this is connected to the power paradox, which is that when we have more power, we see things less clearly. Owners might want to give away power so that more people in the organization are seeing and thinking strategically. When owners set up more transparent, inclusive decision-making systems, they’ll get more participation, higher-quality deliberation, and better problem-solving.

3. Others-focused reasons to distribute control

Armchair economists tend to dismiss the possibility that people might do things out of actual altruism. If something looks like altruism, what they were really doing was making themselves feel good by being altruistic. But scholars today take seriously insights from psychology and evolutionary biology that humans are wired for both competition and collaboration. Reciprocity and generosity are as human as self-interest and pleasure-seeking. So while stipulating that some of these can be used as instrumental smokescreens, here are some altruistic reasons owners might choose to distribute control:

• Rewarding and protecting the builders of the company. Employee owners are safer, more financially secure, and happier with their jobs. An owner that cares about their people might be interested in those as goals in themselves, rather than just a means to higher productivity or lower turnover.

• Protecting the company’s mission and reducing externalized harms. By expanding the number of people who can monitor how a company behaves, a company might be more likely to deliver on its mission or purpose. It might also be less likely to behave badly—if a company could otherwise get away with doing something that negatively affects the community (say, dumping toxic waste), there are more jiminy crickets around to call foul.

• Extending dignity, freedom, and self-reliance. These are all core democratic principles, that distributed control can help protect. It is harder for an owner to mistreat another owner poorly than it is for a boss to mistreat a direct report, for example. And inside of an organization that treats us as equal citizens, rather than subjects or resources, people may be more likely to fight for their freedom to express a contrary opinion. As citizens/owners, they may be more likely to develop a sense of self-reliance or autonomy, as political theorists argue democracy writ large does.

  • These are also moral principles: I heard that one business owner in Texas, for example, converted to employee ownership because he realized that all his employees were children of God, and should be treated accordingly. For him, that meant distributing profits to the tune of $30-35k per construction worker in one year, according to a recent filing—but it could also mean treating them as “created equal” in a political sense.

Reasons not to distribute control

I’ve long been puzzled by the reaction I get from business owners when I ask about sharing power. You can see their spidey-sense tingling, their minds wondering what kind of squish they’re talking to. Some of this might be branding; I haven’t used the phrase workplace democracy in this series yet for that reason.

What is puzzling to me is that particular phrase elicits skepticism even with business owners who are already sharing power. Power-sharing—even its scariest element, voting—is present in some degree all over the place: in college clubs, churches (including the Vatican!), and professional firms, codetermined German companies, not to mention university departments and pirate ships.

So why the resistance? Here are some things I’ve heard, some that have been tested and some that have not:

• It makes businesses less competitive. Big if true, but the balance of research (see above) suggests that this isn’t the case—and that the opposite might even be true. So why aren’t there more cooperatives and the like? The most compelling answer to me is that despite being effective (enough), these organizations struggle to gain credibility in markets dominated by an ethos of shareholder value maximization. That would help explain two difficulties firms with distributed control tend face:

• It introduces capital constraints. It’s tough to raise money from bankers not trained on or familiar with these organizations. It doesn’t matter if they tend to do just as well as hierarchically managed companies, if providers of finance are biased against them or consider getting educated about them too time-consuming.

• It sacrifices speed. Deliberation takes time, and distributing control (usually) demands deliberation. But most organizational decisions don’t require speed. Imagine a fire department: yes, during a fire you need someone to lead and others to follow. But 99% of the decisions made about fire departments are made in the firehouse, not on the site; the upsides of deliberation might outweigh the time required for those.4

• It devolves into a tyranny of the of the majority. As democracy spread during the Enlightenment, one major source of pushback was the belief that that most people were not capable of self-governance. If given power, they would run roughshod over the propertied, educated elites trained to govern. This argument is resonant with the “degeneration thesis” of workplace democracy scholarship, which is that democratic firms will eventually revert back to centralized power, either via market pressures or internal politicking.

• It means rule by the mediocre middle. A softer version of the tyranny-of-the-majority thesis is not that popular rule will be cataclysmic, but it will just be…meh. If you distribute control, he said, decisions will be made by the average worker, meaning probably poorly. Instead, you should give all the power to the most capable.5

• It misaligns incentives between current and future owners. This is known as the “horizon problem,” which is that employee owners might be less likely to make long-term investments than to extract today what value they can. This is puzzling to me, though: I don’t see why ten owners would be more subject to the horizon problem than one; in either case, the important variable would seem to be the owners’ estimation of whether they can maximize value by investing long-term v. taking dividends out today.

• It incentivizes free riding. When a company is shared and managed collectively, people have an incentive to take more and contribute less. This is a version of the classic “tragedy of the commons” argument. But there’s a funny thing about that tragedy: it’s just not always true. In fact, Elinor Ostrom won a Nobel prize for showing examples of places communities managed common pool resources without privatization or nationalization. Many of the features that enable that (and discourage free riding) are found in more democratic firms. Institutions shape incentives, norms, and behavior.

• It could negatively impact their family. Some owners see sharing control with workers as precluding sharing control with their family members, their heirs to the business. Or they might think that sharing control and economic rights happens all at once. In reality, sharing control can take many forms and levels, and it does not necessarily have to be bundled together.

Next: From Why → How

In our next episode in this miniseries, we’ll tackle our second question of how owners can distribute control more broadly. Don’t touch that dial! Between now and then:

• What are we missing here? What other motivations for distributing control have you heard business owners voice or seen researchers poke at? What other reasons have you heard for why an owner might not want to share control?

• How have you seen control-sharing done well? Or done poorly?

Here at The Stakehold, we’re convinced that advocates of employee ownership and social innovation should hang out more. As we argue in a Skoll Centre white paper coming out this fall, both groups of people are asking the same question: What is this organization for?

So I was excited to see that longtime employee ownership advocate Mary Josephs has joined the board of Conscious Capitalism, a group of business leaders committed to four tenets:

1. Higher purpose

2. Stakeholder orientation

3. Conscious leadership

4. Conscious culture

When I attended Conscious Capitalism Dallas’s event last month (see back left!) it struck me that employee ownership and steward ownership lock those personal commitments in. They can variably:

1. Lock in an organization’s purpose

2. Give stakeholders (employees, sometimes others) a financial stake

3. Distribute leadership throughout the organization

4. Build a culture of ownership and mutual commitment, and even a flywheel of generosity in a company.

Partly as a way to pull these two communities closer together, we’re testing out a new newsletter, Ownership on Purpose, which will aggregate news and stories about the different ways leaders lock in their organization’s purpose, including through steward, purpose trust, foundation, and nonprofit ownership; certifications from groups like B Lab, The Purpose Pledge, and Tugboat; affinity groups like conscious capitalism and 100% for Purpose; and legal structures like benefit corporations and sociétés à mission. Below is what you’ll get each week as a free subscriber, if this takes off!

Subscribe now

Top Shelf News

• B Lab is deploying its recently updated standards and considering stripping certification from Havas Media over its work with Shell

• The Purpose Pledge, launched as a more stringent alternative to B Corp certification, appointed Mountain Rose Herbs CEO Cameron Stearns to its board

  • Purpose Pledge’s Executive Director Les Szabo will join CEOs from Newman’s Own, Grace Farms Foundation, and 100% for Purpose at Fast Company’s Innovation Festival

Events This Week

For more, see our running list of (mostly employee ownership) events here.

• Sep 14: BKLYN STUDIOS’ panel on Jeffrey Hollender’s new book, Built for a Better World: How Seventh Generation Pioneered a Movement That Changed the Purpose of Business

• Sep 15: Tompkins Bank & Trust Power Breakfast: The Power of Purpose in White Plains, NY

• Sep 16: Good Together’s Talking Shift: Is the answer to tough times taking back the economy?

• Sep 16: 6th Annual BLD Southeast Conference in DC

In Other News

• Politico’s Joseph Schatz examines how government equity stakes in companies are shifting from temporary bailout mechanisms to long-term governance levers

• Tom Powdrill delves into the UK’s government consultation on corporate reporting, where attempts at modernizing raise questions around stewardship

• Newly certified B Corporations: ShipIn Systems, L-Acoustics, Cleanology, Sea to Summit, Birketts LLP, and Just Salad

• In a new paper, David S. Lucas and company find that benefit corporations that also have B Corporation status have longer and higher-quality benefit reports

• B Lab Africa is launching its latest Resilient Sustainable Business program

• Employee-owned B Corporation King Arthur Baking was named a Casella Sustainable Leader

• ICYMI: Check out Vital Farms’ appearance earlier this year on the How I Built This podcast:

• 🎙️ Last week we teased a new partnership with Owners at Work. The podcast is the latest incarnation of an employee ownership newsletter in operation since 1991. This week…we’re on it! Don’t miss it:

• 🧌 Calling all trolls: The fine folks of Reddit have questions for us about employee ownership. Pop over and see if you can help

• Thanks to , the , Ownership Works, the Employee Ownership Expansion Network, Margot Kane, Menke, and the Iowa Center for Employee Ownership, for all the shout-outs on LinkedIn this week 🫶

Subscribe now

🥃 Top Shelf News

• Employee ownership education just leveled up: UC San Diego’s Rady School of Management announced Alissa Orlando as their inaugural Beyster Executive in Residence for Innovation (ht Mary Ann Beyster)

• 📺 Tedx drops a new Talk: North Dakota Lieutenant Governor Tammy Miller on why America needs more owners

• Christmas is coming! Start shopping for your loved-and-tolerated-ones on the new Market Place of worker-owned companies

👉 In This Issue

If you’re new here, friend, welcome! You may want to start with Ownership Stories.

• Events and Opportunities
  Does what it says on the tin

• News
  Dealflow, ESOPs, Co-ops, Community Ownership, and the Ownership Economy

• Ownership Stories
  Profiles of employees, owners, and companies

• Research and Insights
  ESOPs, Co-ops, Community Ownership, Workplace Democracy, and the Ownership Economy

🏙️ Events and Opportunities

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

• Sep 14

  • BKLYN STUDIOS’ panel on Jeffrey Hollender’s new book about Seventh Generation, Built for a Better World

  • Day one of the Ohio Center for Employee Ownership’s 2026 National Employee-Owner Summit in Chicago

• Sep 15

  • Tompkins Bank & Trust Power Breakfast on The Power of Purpose in White Plains, NY

  • The Center for Inclusive Growth’s Inclusive Growth Summit in New Haven, CT

  • NCEO’s Busting the Benefit Level Myth

  • Day one of Neighborhood Economics Galveston 2026 in Texas

  • The International Cooperative Alliance’s General Assembly begins, in Panama

  • The Asset Funders Network’s Invested in the South: CDFIs Building Assets, Strengthening Communities

  • Deadline to register for the Vermont Employee Ownership Center’s next cohort of Taking Ownership, a series for new board members

• Sep 16

  • The Follett Foundation hosts Bernadette Wesley for a conversation on sociocracy

  • Good Together’s Talking Shift: Is the answer to tough times taking back the economy?

  • Center for Sustainable Finance & Private Wealth hosts Integrating Philanthropy and Investing to Build Community Ownership

  • B Lab’s BLD Southeast Conference in DC begins

• Sep 17

  • Júlia Martins Rodrigues hosts Jessica Gordon Nembhard for a conversation on collective courage in Boulder, CO

  • Les Szabo, Executive Director of Purpose Pledge, will join CEOs from Newman’s Own and Grace Farms Foundation at Fast Company’s Innovation Festival

• Sep 18

  • Asset Funders Network’s The Shared Ownership Economy virtual learning session

Opportunities

For more, visit our Jobs page. If you’re interested in working *at* an employee-owned company, check out Deanalytics’ job board, too!

🇬🇧 The British are hiring:

• Shared Assets is hiring a new executive leader (UK-based)

• Digital Commons Cooperative is hiring a Product Lead (UK-based)

• Chartered Governance Institute UK & Ireland is hiring for Head of ProShare

Ownership News

Dealflow

For more, check out our Dealflow page.

• California commercial contractor Mason Builders transfers 100% ownership to their new ESOP

• Technology platform ESOP One was acquired by BPAS, a leading provider of retirement plans, employee benefits and institutional trust services in the US

• Infinity Today, a New Jersey agency serving families with intellectual and developmental disabilities, partners with IPMG Holdings as they transition to 100% employee ownership

Employee Ownership

• 🇰🇷 South Korea’s SME Agency visits UK manufacturer PB Design to study their EOT model as a blueprint for succession planning in the same week South Korea passes new laws on “social solidarity finance”

• The Nasdaq Entrepreneurial Center just graduated their Summer 2026 Cohort for Ethical AI — and Zolidar put employee ownership on a billboard in Times Square

Employee Stock Ownership Plans (ESOPs)

• The ESOP Association reports the US House is expected to vote on Retire Through Ownership Act next week; the org also released their latest edition ESOP Report

• Norm Kurland, colleague of Louis Kelso and cofounder of the Center for Economic and Social Justice, died this week. His is the latest passing of some of the earliest supporters of ESOPs.

Worker Cooperatives

• 🇨🇦 Congratulations to Christine Clarke, CWCF’s new Co-Executive Director

• 🎙️ New Podcast Alert: CooperationWorks! launches Co-op Developer Stories

Community Ownership

• 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 Scotland names employee ownership in its new social economy investment strategy for community development

• Shelterforce assesses what the ROAD to Housing Act—the first federal housing overhaul in 30 years—means for community land trusts

The Ownership Economy

• Mamdani established the first-in-class Mayor’s Office of Worker Power, naming union and community organizer Tony Perlstein as Executive Director

• At the Paris Space Summit, French President Emmanuel Macron called for the shared governance of outer space as a cooperative, global commons

Before You Scroll On By

As you can see, we’re testing a new format this week. All the same content, curated by real-life humans (and Mark), streamlined.

Ownership Stories

• Expanding ESOPs published a raft of new employee-owner stories, including: Pennsylvania’s Aimée Deraco and Nick Wee; Wisconsin’s Marcease Warren; Ohio’s Rebecca Moix and Patrick Brewer; Montana’s Eva Villasana; California’s Lana Smith, and—here on The Stakehold!—DC’s Ashley Bell.

• Imagine Early Learning Centers, the first early childhood education ESOP in the US, opens a free child care center for City of NY employees and their families

• A chapter from Prairie Capital Advisors’ new book, The Journey to ESOP: Stories from Business Owners, investigates how owners use ESOPs to anchor culture, share wealth and drive growth

• 🇨🇦 Canadian EOT Taproot Community Support Services cuts its first dividend checks

• 🇬🇧 eoa released a new case study on Scott Bader, a chemical manufacturing company which the owner gave away to a charitable trust structure in 1951

• 🇮🇹 Sicilian agricultural co-op helps seasonal migrant workers escape exploitation

• 🎙️ Co-Op News spotlights Punchcard, a British workers.coop podcast featuring the stories of co-ops from all sectors and countries

Research & Insights

Arguments, analysis, and (📚) academic research

Employee Ownership

• 📚 Yaun-Ling Chen argues employee ownership makes top-down training programs more effective

• ICYMI: Writing for Newsweek, CCA’s Howard Brodsky positions employee ownership as a vital defense for family businesses facing corporate consolidation

Employee Stock Ownership Plans

• NCEO’s Corey Rosen analyzes why higher ESOP contributions could result in lower long-term maintenance costs

• Verit Advisors’ Mary Josephs sees ESOPs as a tool to build community wealth when the bottom 50% of Americans currently only holds 1% of US equities

• 🎙️ Construction ESOP Collective’s latest podcast discusses building ownership culture

• 📚 John Anderson and team examine the relationship between ESOP firms and foreign direct investment (preprint)

• ⏪ ICYMI: A report by Stout, an advisory firm, claims that the valuations of its ESOP clients grew 17.3% from 2021–2024, compared to 12% growth in the S&P 500 over the same period

Worker Cooperatives

• Shout out to the gig workers: Aaron Ross Coleman traces worker co-ops back to Reconstruction-era abolitionist strategies for escaping wage slavery

• Authority Magazine interviews NCBA CLUSA’s Doug O’Brien, who addresses information asymmetry and how to measure the impact of co-ops

• The Alberta Community and Cooperative Association ponders why co-ops aren’t more mainstream in Canada

• 📚 Begoña Echaburu Mulet et al. explore the role of social management directors at Mondragón (preprint)

Community Ownership

• Co-Op News’ Miles Hadfield quotes US NRECA’s Jim Matheson: The Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment initiative is failing rural America

• In Shelterforce, Steve Dobbs reports on housing co-ops, NORCs and what happens when long-term residents age

• Using Northern Ireland as a case study, Jan Kellett links co-ops with economic resilience against conflict, arguing for co-operative coordination at scale

• In AIA Architect, Patrick Sisson examines how some developers are reframing affordable housing to integrate healthcare, childcare and public infrastructure

Workplace Democracy

• For Jacobin, economist Peter Dorman outlines three strategic pillars to improve job quality: autonomy, democratic participation and worker representation

• Looking back at US history, C.G. Matteini pushes for worker solidarity to counter “divide and conquer labor tactics” (ht )

The Ownership Economy

• Politico’s Joseph Schatz examines how government equity stakes in companies are shifting from temporary bailout mechanisms to long-term governance levers

• 🇬🇧 British ownership stakeholders call for new Prime Minister Andy Burnham to leverage co-operatives and mutuals in place-based economic development

• Tom Powdrill delves into the UK’s government consultation on corporate reporting, where attempts at modernizing raise questions around stewardship

• In a recent interview, the editor of The Economist pressed Elon Musk on two of The Stakehold’s central questions: Who should have a stake in AI’s growth? And who should have a say?

  • Start at the 39 minute mark but don’t keep watching long after that, unless you need more evidence for why we don’t want the world’s fate decided by half a dozen coders. When the conversation shifts to politics, Musk transmogrifies from entrepreneurial savant to the cousin whose politics you avoid at Christmas

  • A fun connection: Minton Beddoes’ phrasing about giving people a “sense of a share” in the upside evokes ’s famous “sense of lunch“

In 2026 Hacker News user IESAI_ski announced their creation of Market Place, a search tool for. Check it out and let us know what you find!

Then, in my first phone interview, the manager said, “I noticed you have a degree in mathematics. One of our locations, near Logan Circle, actually needs an inventory coordinator. Are you interested in that role?” I said yes, though I still imagined this would be short-term.

At the time, I had no idea The Cool Hardware Company was employee owned. But when I started, I saw a culture completely different from what I’d experienced before.

There are tons of studies about young people entering the workforce right now. We want to be engaged and challenged by our jobs, and that’s not happening for most people. We want to make a positive difference, while managers are struggling to carve out the time to train us. And, we have little confidence that retirement is in our cards.

As a relatively recent graduate, I understand the cynicism. I think one of the reasons it persists is because a proven antidote, employee ownership, remains vastly underused.

Since 2021, The Cool Hardware Company has been employee owned through a retirement plan that lets companies share ownership with workers. It’s called an employee stock ownership plan, or ESOP.

Quickly, I saw how an ownership mindset changes the way everyone works. Whether we’re on the registers or stocking supplies or in the back office, everyone’s voice matters. From the start, if I had an idea on how we could improve something, my proposal was taken seriously. As I grew into the job, I learned more about how the ESOP impacts our personal finances. It’s a retirement plan that doesn’t require you to pay anything. In the simplest terms, the better work you do, the better the company does, the better financially you and everybody around you become.

In those early days, I was probably asking our former inventory manager a new question every five minutes. Like other co-owners, he thought about how day-to-day decisions will impact us years from now, and so he was incredibly patient. Over time, that approach paid off. Over four and a half years, I grew to be an assistant store manager and am now inventory manager, stepping into my former boss’s role when he moved on. I’m always working to make things better, and so our inventory record is more fine-tuned every year, a critical need as more and more people purchase their hardware supplies online.

Our customers see the difference too. Our store staff are super knowledgeable about our inventory, can recommend how to solve both common and obscure problems, and keep up to date on our regulars’ ongoing projects. We know that if you have a bad experience with us, you’re probably going to turn to Amazon for your next purchase, which in turn will take money out of all of our pockets. People keep coming to us because we make sure our customers have an awesome experience every time, and that the products in each store are tailored to their neighborhoods. If you go to the Logan store, you’ll see queer-themed novelty socks, while the Takoma Park store carries local neighborhood t-shirts. The same is true whether it’s the Petworth or Union Market store.

Among my peers, I imagine few people are thinking about retirement, but I already feel well set up. Between my traditional 401(k) and my ESOP account, I’m building something that can transform my life decades from now. And most importantly, this same opportunity is available to everyone in our company--cashiers and managers alike.

With Labor Day upon us, I imagine we’ll start to see more dire headlines and politicians wringing their hands about my generation’s uncertain future. There are only 18 ESOPs in DC, just 110 in Maryland and fewer than 6,500 across the country. But we can change that. Expanding ESOPs, a coalition of more than 100 organizations, is building a movement to grow employee ownership in the DMV region and beyond.

Turning things around in this economy will take more than hoping the status quo delivers different results. This Labor Day, let’s try something new and commit to making more workers employee owners. You can trust my experience. After all, my job is all about delivering tools that fix things.

Ashley Bell is the inventory manager at The Cool Hardware Company, a group of fifteen employee-owned hardware stores in the DC, Northern Virginia, and Baltimore metro areas.

For more stories from employee-owners, check out Voices of Ownership from Expanding ESOPs, a promotional partner in our ongoing subscriber campaign.

Expanding ESOPs is celebrating Labor Day with a series of employee-owner op-eds:

• In Pennsylvania, Karrie Ravert still holds her “temporary” job twenty-two years later

• In Connecticut, Heidi Lavigne considers the impact of an ESOP on employees at Web Industries from the perspective of HR

• Keep an eye on The Stakehold next week—we’ll be running an op-ed from an employee owner on Labor Day, too, in partnership with Expanding ESOPs ✊

U.S. political and popular support for labor unions approaches record numbers, even as only 11% of workers report being union members.

• Earlier this summer, The United Steelworkers union outlined its strategy for union- cooperatives, framing worker-driven leadership as a tool for long-term job preservation.

• USWFC hosts its next virtual Union Co-Ops Council meeting on Sept 23

This week, guest contributor Andrea Steffes-Tuttle examines how employee ownership models can offer a competitive alternative to private equity buyouts in the childcare industry

🎙️ And...keep an eye out for next week’s episode of Owners at Work, featuring a new segment powered by The Stakehold 👀

Subscribe now

🥃 Top Shelf News

• IBT Media, parent company of International Business Times, transferred ownership to a perpetual purpose trust in Delaware.

  • IBT says the trust will protect its editorial mission. What could have been if Paramount/CBS and the WaPo had done the same many years ago...1

• 🚨 The New Jersey Governor’s signed a bill that will let the state’s Economic Development Authority subsidize EO feasibility studies, give financing to newly transitioned EO firms, and encourage EO proliferation in other ways. EO roots are growing deeper in the Garden State

• @Antony Bugg-Levine argues that Mark Cuban's new tax proposal is essentially a rebrand of ESOP incentives that have been on the books for fifty years

👉 In This Issue

• Events, Etc.
  Upcoming Events + Opportunities

• Employee Ownership
  ESOPs + Employee Ownership Trusts + Worker Cooperatives

• The Ownership Economy
  Community Ownership & Wealth + Ownership on Purpose + Workplace & Economic Democracy

• Academic News

🏙️ Events + Jobs

Events This Week

For more, see our Events page.

• 🆕 Sep 6: A Better Model for Data Centres: A Community Counter Offer, a community-led Southern Highlands initiative

• Sep 9: EOT Advisors is hosting a webinar to help business owners learn about EOTs

• Sep 10: Steward Market hosts The Next Steward, an online discussion with Hannah Sandmeyer and Kate Williams

• 🆕 Sep 10: MCM Collaborative shares their journey to becoming a psychotherapy cooperative

• Sep 14-15: Ohio Center for Employee Ownership’s 2026 National Employee-Owner Summit in Chicago (check out their webinar schedule too)

Opportunities

For more, visit our Ownership Jobs Board.

• Francesco Collaborative is hiring a Director of Investor Relationships

• JPMorganChase is hiring a VP of US Governance, Global Philanthropy

• Project Equity is hiring a Director of Communications & Public Relations

• Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta is hiring a Community and Economic Development (CED) Advisor/Sr. Advisor

• Trust Neighborhoods is hiring a Director of Capital Partnerships

• Common Future is hiring a Chief External Affairs Officer

Employee Ownership

• Deadlines:

  • Oct 1: MOCEO calls for employee ownership ambassadors in Missouri

  • Oct 9: Submissions for the 2027 Mid-Year Fellows Workshop in honor of Louis O. Kelso are due. Get them in and we’ll see you in New Brunswick in January

  • Oct 19: In the latest edition of The Ownership Constellation, NCEO calls for speakers at their 2027 Annual Conference in Pittsburgh

• Congrats to Nathan Stuck for his appointment to Georgia Center for Employee Ownership board. Build those bridges between EO Land and B Corp Land, Nathan!

• 🍕 Data suggests employees may want more than just another pizza party (and no, a ping pong table in the break room probably isn’t sufficient either. Ht )

• 💡 Project Equity’s Evan Edwards proposes a mash-up of entrepreneurship through acquisition (ETA) with employee ownership in Forbes

📈 Employee Stock Ownership Plans (ESOPs)

• Rise & Shine Social Enterprise, an Oregon-based care agency, surprised 250 employees with the chance to become owners in their new ESOP

• The ESOP Association released their framework to evaluate new ESOP policy proposals through five guiding principles

• 📚 Mike Mallaro released his new book, VGM: Stories & Lessons of a Great American ESOP Company. Congratulations!

• NCEO’s Corey Rosen opines on how AI will —and will not— impact ESOP transactions

• Harbor founder/CEO Andrew Dunlap sparks conversation around buying Virginia companies to keep them local vs. converting into ESOPs

• 🎙️ ESOP Radio drops a new episode on how ESOPs defer capital gains tax

  • ESOP Exit Podcast interviews Tenor partner Gary Gray on his journey from ESOP client to advisor (ht ESOP for Contractors)

  • 🎙️ The Ownership Effect podcast, hosted by The ESOP Association, premieres Season 2:

🤝 Employee Ownership Trusts (EOTs)

• 🇨🇦 For Canadian Senator Tony Loffreda, EOTs represent a market-based strategy against foreign buyouts of Canadian firms

• NCEO launched their new EOT Toolkit

• TXCEO profiles LiveOak Living Community, an established EOT in the long-term care industry

• Common Trust is now hosting The Ownership Upside on LinkedIn

• Knox & Wells, a building contractor company established in 1888, transitions to Employee Ownership Trust with fds, an employee-owned corporate finance firm

• 🎙️ The latest Beyond the B episode hosts two CEOs who chose employee ownership structures over a conventional exit, including challenges faced in the transitions:

✊ Worker Cooperatives

• Cooperative Development Foundation spotlights Cooperative Hall of Fame inductee Fannie Lou Hamer's journey from voting rights to collective ownership

• 🎬 Filmmaker Sarah Maria released a new documentary, After Capitalism: A Cooperative Economy

• Drivers Cooperative Colorado might be getting tired of imposters and imitators…

• Jaya Saxena of Ravenous, a worker-owned food magazine, details the ins and outs of worker-owned restaurants

• Author Nathan Schneider cautions co-ops against overextended social agendas, arguing that bounded operational focus protects democratic governance from member burnout.

• 📺 ICYMI: This TedEd throwback features companies thriving without CEOs

• Sep 20 Deadline: Apply to join the Food Co-Op Initiative’s 2027 Peer Learning Groups

• 🎙️ Who should Everything.Coop host on their podcast? Let them know!

The Ownership Economy

• 🛒 In Michigan, board members of the People’s Food Co-Op filed legal injunctions to successfully reclaim their store after another member’s allegedly unauthorized takeover

• 📺 A recording of the Urban Institute’s Who Owns the Future panel on locally-owned economies is now available

• Martin O’Neill reviews Mariana Mazzucato’s The Common Good Economy for Stanford Social Innovation Review

• New analysis by Prospect Law examines the legal and capital barriers facing UK mutuals and co-ops

• Common Good Journal launches an initiative ahead of Neighborhood Economics 2027, gathering stories of the ownership economy in Cincinnati—early shout out to Co-op Cincy. Go get ‘em

• ImpactAlpha debuts Edge, their new Claude tool to help analyze sustainable investment opportunities

• Digitals Commons Collective released a cool new tool to investigate historical land ownership in the UK. Bless them for obviating the need to learn ArcGIS. Grad students across the world rejoice!

Community Ownership & Wealth

• Farmer-owned co-op CHS partners with OCP North America to bolster fertilizer production supply chains

• 🏠 NCBA CLUSA spotlights Michigan Community Land Cooperative as leaders in the cooperative housing movement

• Transform Finance publishes a new briefing on Capital Needs for Community-Owned Real Estate

• Predistribution Initiative predicts worker participation in corporate governance will increase with British Steel converting to public ownership

• The city of Seattle, the Duwamish Tribe and Shared Spaces Foundation work together to rematriate 3.56 acres to the Tribe for community stewardship

Ownership on Purpose

• Dave Whorton of Tugboat Institute asserts that separating ownership and control is the most underrated benefit of building an “Evergreen company”

• Wallowa Resources, a Rural Development Hub, releases their new Stewardship Economy Community Guide (ht Aspen Institute)

• The Impact Explorers Club Fieldbook features a chapter on Steward Ownership (ht Steward-owned)

• Elisa Achterberg’s essay analyzes the psychology of ownership, stewardship and belonging

• Peter Dorman argues for purpose trust ownership of AI

• Think tank Purpose introduces Stuart, their AI-assistant built on steward ownership knowledge

Workplace & Economic Democracy

• OpenAI’s Hugging Face breach revealed 1,200 rogue AI agents formed an organizational hierarchy, managing task delegation and compute budget without human prompts or financial compensation

• 🍑 Ari Weinzwieg of Zingerman’s (a purpose trust) is raising money for Democracy Now through his Apricots for Dignity and Democracy store

• Corporate Rebels curates a reading list on alternative management cultures

• offers his own reading list, plus an argument that cooperatives must build low-stakes voting habits to be prepared for high-stakes crises

📚 Academic News

• The Center for Community Investment posts the New Economy Project case study on “ecosystem stewardship,” including Transform Finance’s analysis of the Arlington Ave acquisition

• 🏄🏾‍♂️ Larry Wigger publishes “Silver Surfers: Employee-Ownership Conversions for Retiring Entrepreneurs” in the Journal of Economic Issues this week

• Morehouse College releases the latest issue of The Collective from the International Comparative Labor Studies program

• 🎙️ The Institute for Economic Democracy drops a new podcast, a companion to their 2026 textbook, Global Cooperative Economics and Movements

• Ryan Claassen argues for a social ownership democracy as a third just arrangement of society, in addition to Rawls’ market socialism and property-owning democracy

Bright Horizons is a corporate childcare chain owned by Bain Capital, a private investment firm, before it went public in 2013. Imagine is a privately owned childcare organization with centers across New York City. It is also the only childcare organization in the country that is a 100% employee-owned company. Private equity investors approached the founder of Imagine with acquisition offers, CEO Laura Tulchin shared with me, but Imagine founder Holly Saltzman chose to sell the company to its employees through an Employee Stock Ownership Plan (ESOP).

Imagine is growing, expanding from 12 to 14 centers in 2026, with 81% of its teachers saying they plan to be at Imagine in two years. But if employee-owned daycares like Imagine are going to compete with private equity, which today operates 10-12% of all daycares, they need support: expanded access to capital, creative real estate solutions, and shared back-end infrastructure.

“A textbook example of a broken market”

Former Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen has described the childcare industry as “a textbook example of a broken market.” Part of the problem, she argues, is that the price families pay doesn’t reflect the full value childcare creates. Research shows kids with access to quality care go on to more schooling and higher earnings, and underinvesting in care now means giving up a more productive workforce later. Childcare is critical to the health and future of people and communities.

But childcare is also labor-intensive and low-margin. Labor makes up 70 to 80% of the cost to run a childcare business, making the service unaffordable for many: in 2024, a family needed an income of at least $187,000 to cover the $13,128 average national price for one child. Families in areas across the country spend more on childcare than on housing. To make care even remotely affordable for families, providers pay low wages, and highly trained staff often make less per hour than workers at McDonald’s.

Financializing a broken market

Thirty percent of childcare centers are independent for-profits, and for owners who want to retire, private equity can seem like the only option. Today, of the 10 largest childcare companies in the U.S., eight are currently owned by private equity investors, and private equity has steadily claimed roughly 10% of the American market since 2010.

One driver has been the allocation of public funds to the sector in states including New York, New Mexico, Massachusetts, and Colorado. This increase in public funding has attracted investors seeking buyout targets with guaranteed revenue. The situation mirrors the conditions known to draw investors to healthcare and elder care businesses: consistent, high demand paired with federal and state funding.

Community Change, National Women’s Law Center, Open Markets Institute, and Americans for Financial Reform Education Fund compiled a recent report on private equity and childcare. While the report is focused on childcare, its authors look to outcomes in other industries like elder care and health care that have seen heavy private equity investment as a warning sign for where childcare is headed: “well-documented experiences from the other industries that have seen significant private equity investment … show that private equity-owned businesses are more likely to push down the quality of the services they provide, the wellbeing of their customers and workers, and the competitive health of local markets.”

The possibility of employee ownership

That gap between what families can afford and what the people providing the care are paid is where employee ownership can be most powerful. In a market where families have limited choice and many businesses are privately run, employee ownership not only protects the business, but it gives the people doing the work a stake. Instead of handing ownership to investors far away from the communities where their portfolio companies are based, employee-owned companies also keep jobs and assets local.

All this was true for Imagine. The ESOP model was a way for the founder to reward the people who made the company successful while ensuring the business remains a resilient, stable childcare company rather than one focused on short-term profits and external shareholders.

Workers’ experiences at the company have been positive as it has transitioned to 100% employee ownership. Educator salaries range from $37,000 to $90,000 depending on seniority and tenure. While the wages are similar (in some cases higher) to pay at other centers, the ESOP layers a wealth asset on top of that pay. According to Imagine leadership, employees at Imagine have ESOP account balances ranging from $1,484 to $167,000. The shares increase with tenure and company growth. As of right now, the company is performing well, expanding from 12 to 14 centers in 2026. Specifically, Imagine was recently awarded a contract for The Little Apple, New York City’s first free, full-day, year-round childcare pilot program for municipal workers.

Imagine employees report that the ESOP education programs the company implemented have helped staff actually understand what ownership means in practice. In an interview, one teacher described going from “whatever, I don’t own anything” to feeling like “you’re the CEO of the place you’re at” after going through training. And workers report that they're given more control over their work, that they have a voice in the direction of the company, feel trusted in curriculum development, and are given a credit card to make direct purchasing decisions for classroom supplies.

According to Imagine’s annual employee survey, 83% of staff report being satisfied with their jobs, and 81% of staff say they see themselves working at Imagine in two years. All of these outcomes align with the benefits that employee ownership advocates and researchers promote.

What the industry needs from donors, investors, and policymakers

Imagine’s employee ownership success story didn’t come easy. If advocates want employee ownership to become a viable alternative to private equity ownership, especially in childcare, the industry needs more support, starting with access to financing that doesn’t depend on the original owner absorbing the risk alone. In the case of Imagine, the founder is holding the majority of the debt so as not to overload the business with high-interest loans.

To advance employee ownership in human services industries like childcare, employee ownership advocates and developers need to work in tandem with the government to make more shared ownership possible. Three solutions would support that expansion across the childcare industry:

Access to Capital. Investor-backed childcare providers have access to large amounts of financial capital, especially from debt. Private and employee-owned centers can’t easily compete for that same capital, in part because traditional lenders require personal guarantees that low-wage childcare workers are poorly positioned to offer, and because thin margins make these deals less attractive to lenders weighing them against higher-yield loans. To create a level playing field, community development financial institutions and other mission-driven lenders need to originate more debt for childcare conversions. Impact investors are already showing they’ll supply that kind of capital: Impact Charitable’s Catalytic Capital Partners, established in 2023 in partnership with Mission Driven Finance, has deployed over $16 million in impact-first investments, integrated capital funds, and flexible grants. These funds haven’t gone toward an employee ownership conversion yet, but they have supported the childcare space and provide an example of how mission-driven capital is already moving through structures that could support an employee-ownership conversion.

Additionally, de-risking tools could make lenders willing to say yes: loan loss reserve funds that spread default risk across a lending pool, collateral support programs that offset the guarantee gap like those the State of Colorado offers, and revenue-based financing structures that convert to worker ownership over time instead of requiring debt upfront.

A Solution to the Real Estate Problem. Childcare providers name real estate as one of the biggest barriers to growth. To make it easier for providers to access space for their businesses, groups like Mission Driven Finance are standing up programs like Care Access Real Estate (CARE). CARE acquires and develops child care facilities, then leases them to experienced operators through long-term agreements. This establishes and protects purpose-built facilities for providers that enable stable occupancy and predictable income.

Shared Infrastructure. Investor-backed childcare benefits from centralized business operations like accounting, marketing, procurement, and human resources. More shared services platforms need to be developed to limit overhead on childcare providers. CoRise is a great example of what this could look like. CoRise Cooperative helps home-based child care providers form cooperative networks for shared purchasing. The core project, CoRise Illinois, is a partnership between The ICA Group and SEIU-HCII (a union representing 35,000+ child care providers in the Midwest). More investment needs to be made to fully build out large-scale shared services that multiple childcare centers can leverage across the employee ownership types, and more work could be done to take advantage of the scale that unions offer to expand this work.

Imagine’s success shows the model works, but it worked because the founder absorbed the debt herself, sparing the business from high-interest loans. That’s not a repeatable condition; most retiring owners don’t have the option to finance their own employees’ buyout. Access to capital, real estate solutions, and shared services infrastructure are what make that choice available to the next owner, and the one after that.

Employee ownership can be a viable option for the childcare industry, but only if they have the financial infrastructure to compete on the same terms. Imagine is proof of concept. The test is whether the field can build the infrastructure to repeat it.

This story builds on earlier reporting for The74 that examined how employee ownership could improve worker retention in childcare in New York City.

Dolly Parton was all over our algorithms last week, even before her sad passing:

• 🦋 Mark’s daughter requested Dolly-themed pancake mix at the grocery store

• Her book-donation efforts came to mind amid last month’s high-born handwringing about post-literacy (thanks for reading, Stakeholders)

• Ken Pomeroy recently released a cover of Woody Guthrie’s “Deportee,” which Parton covered on her 1980 album 9-to-5 and Odd Jobs (ht Ben M)

Dolly wasn’t an employee ownership advocate. But she probably would have been if she’d known much about it. Like us, she worked in pragmatic, bipartisan ways to make life a little easier for her neighbors just getting by on odd jobs, whether at her home in Tennessee or on a plane over Los Gatos. Let’s all pour ourselves a cup of ambition.

Hasta pronto, Gabriel!

This week we also give a less final farewell to Gabriel Gray, who starts college (!) next month. He:

• Managed three different bosses (Mark, Colin, Michael) in the span of three months

• Helped train our new Research Fellow

• Handled most of the back-end of our ongoing summer subscription drive

  • (Thanks, btw, to , Jason Wiener|p.c., Christine Clarke, and David Gray for the shout-outs last week 🫶)

Gabriel has been a valuable thought partner and is working on some really interesting employee ownership content ideas. Watch this space!

Subscribe now

🥃 Top Shelf News

Curated by Colin

• Department of Treasury designated Chris Miller as the new CDFI Fund Director

• Big congrats to:

  • The Expanding ESOPs coalition for growing to more than 100 members

  • OwnersEdge, named to Inc. Magazine’s annual list of America’s fastest growing private companies

• A 1-2 combo from Transform Finance on community ownership (need a refresher on the topic? We’ve got you covered)

  • What community-owned real estate actually needs to get financed, and why conventional capital stacks keep stalling these projects

  • How to operationalize and reinforce values in a company

• 📖 Sep 19 Deadline: Submit your nominations for the Institute for the Study for Employee Ownership and Profit Sharing’s 2027 William Foote Whyte and Kathleen King White Book Prize

👉 In This Issue

• Events, Etc.
  Upcoming Events + Opportunities

• Employee Ownership
  ESOPs + Employee Ownership Trusts + Worker Cooperatives

• The Ownership Economy
  Community Ownership & Wealth + Ownership on Purpose + Workplace & Economic Democracy

• Academic News

🏙️ Events + Jobs

Events This Week

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

• Aug 29-Sep 3: The Economics of Fraternity summer school hosted by The Economics of Francesco in Germany

• Sep 1-3: The Great Game of Business’ 2026 conference in St. Louis, Missouri

  • On the same days EO Equals is hosting its 2026 Summit in Chicago, IL

• Sep 1-4: The Royal Geographical Society’s Democratizing the Economy conference in London

Opportunities

For more, visit our Ownership Jobs Board.

• W.K. Kellogg Foundation seeks an inaugural Vice President for Community Investment

• Canadian Worker Co-operative Federation is hiring an intern

Employee Ownership

• JWPC’s August newsletter delves into the advantages of blended capital of deal structures

  • Counterpoint: Holland & Hart warns that some legal templates can inflate transaction costs and risk long-term failure in ESOP and EOT conversions

• Ahead of their EO Equals Summit, Project Equity teases the five questions they’ll be asking + a link to sign up for the Summit report

• North Dakota Center for Employee Ownership was granted 501(c)(3) status

• UC Berkeley’s David I. Levine argues that California’s SB 1174 puts state research into action, funding local infrastructure for employee ownership transitions

• 🇬🇧 Kellogg College recaps its fourth annual employee ownership research conference with Rutgers

  • Torana Group outlines key findings, including how M&A by established ESOPs adds ~20,000 employee-owners annually

• 🎙️ Harvard Business School’s Worker Ownership Conference shares its keynote with Rutgers’ Joseph Blasi, and other employee ownership leaders

📈 Employee Stock Ownership Plans

• EPS Group, an Arizona-based civil engineering and infrastructure firm, transitions to 100% employee-owned through East West Bank’s ESOP debt financing

• An Arizona federal court rejected Wilson Electric’s bid to decertify a class action after ESOP participants argued the internal fiduciaries failed to properly invest a chunk of cash reserves (paywalled)

• Mary Josephs breaks down M&A for ESOPs with a shout-out to NCEO’s newly updated manual

• Project Equity presents Black Employee Ownership: A Pathway to Wealth Building and Economic Opportunity (Downloadable)

• U.S. Senator Chris Murphy visits employee-owned Flow Tech as he considers cosponsoring the American Ownership and Resilience Act (AORA)

• Mike Mallaro has a new book with stories and lessons from three decades at the Iowa firm VGM, which has been 100% employee-owned since 2008

🤝 Employee Ownership Trusts (EOTs)

• Pennsylvania software company LockData converted to an employee-owned trust for its 13 employees, as reported by Roodgally Senatus for ImpactAlpha (paywalled)

• From Project Equity, Courtney Kemp publishes an in-depth white paper explaining Employee Ownership Trusts (ht David Gray)

• Luxury travel company Black Tomato converts to EOT, with founders retaining 25% ownership and decision-making control

• Founder Miren Oca shares how converting to an EOT resolved her exit strategy concerns with the women of Entrepreneurs’ Organization

• 🇬🇧 Scottish electronics firm Lisle Design completes its transition to 100% employee ownership after paying off the founder’s five-year seller note

✊ Worker Cooperatives

• Igalia, a Spanish software consulting firm, acquired Bocoup, a tech consultancy, merging two open-source worker co-ops into one collective

• NCBA CLUSA’s Doug O’Brien asks an age-old question about the paucity of co-ops in the US: Why do mainstream advisors and policymakers often overlook the co-op model when addressing regional economic challenges?

• Last week, we mentioned a paper by Christine Clarke. This week, we celebrate her new role as Co-Executive Director of the Canadian Worker Co-op Federation

• This week’s Venn Diagram: Debt financing and co-ops

  • Texas Energy Fund closes its first co-op loan to Rayburn Electric, a not-for-profit electric utility owned by four cooperatives

  • Shared Capital Cooperative underwrote H&H Builders’ conversion to worker co-op in Denver

• Did You Know? There’s a Cooperative World Map! (ht Digital Commons Co-op)

• Vox’s Rachel Cohen Booth investigates private equity’s impact on child care

  • 🎙️ University of Wisconsin’s Kristin Forde Hurckes examines what co-ops can —and can’t— do for the child care crisis.

The Ownership Economy

• ICYMI: In May, Swiss cloud provider Infomaniak transferred majority voting rights to a public-interest foundation with employee-shareholders voting unanimously to protect against future buyouts

Ownership on Purpose

• Steward Market releases their monthly brief, outlining how legal and financial infrastructure is evolving to support steward ownership

• OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman reflected on their shift away from nonprofit governance as traditional capital demands usurped soft mission locks

• LA Weekly spotlights Susana Cabrera’s story, who shares how Everytable’s social equity program trains frontline restaurant workers to become business owners

Community Ownership & Wealth

• The Lower Sioux Indian Community launched a tribal-owned hempcrete manufacturing facility in Minnesota to address the need for sustainable building materials and housing shortages

• 🏠 Brick by Brick Housing Corp combines community partners with creative capital to expand home-ownership in Minnesota

• In Chicago, The South Side Collective formed to purchase real estate near transit stations, locking in community ownership and affordable commercial space

• Miles Hadfield of Co-Op News reports on developments in co-op banking:

  • 🇬🇧 The UK launches its first regional co-op bank

  • US credit unions and co-op banks continue to consolidate with M&A activity from Massachusetts to the Pacific Northwest, including Willamette Valley Bank in Colin’s neck of the woods

• 🛒 LaDonna Sanders-Redmond refocuses questions about food access to questioning business models of the grocery industry

• Brooklyn Org’s Jocelynne Rainey urges foundations to replace top-down grantmaking with funding structures that build local decision-making power. Some guy named Friedrich Hayek made similar points about the importance of local information

• Cooperative Fund of the Northeast joined a new statewide steering committee to coordinate CDFI capital deployment across Massachusetts

• Community Land Trust (CLT) updates:

  • Lake Trust Credit Union and nonprofit Community Catalysts build Michigan’s first CLT

  • Northwest Florida CLT set up Pensacola’s first permanent affordable housing

  • Fort Worth CLT deploys a similar strategy in Texas

  • East New York CLT acquires historic commercial property. It’s the first time a NYC land trust purchased off the open market without public subsidies or nonprofit transfers

Workplace & Economic Democracy

• 🇪🇺 Inspired by Yugoslav history, O.U.R. COOP tests how blockchain can underpin an international cooperative that can’t rely on one single national banking system

• David Ellerman positions worker-owned businesses as moral and legal necessities (more from David below)

• Political theorist Tim Christiaens strategizes how democratic workplaces scale without concentrating power in the C-suite

📚 New Research

• Outgoing Rutgers Institute Director Bill Castellano has a new book out, Managing the Future of Work, on how organizations should think about the evolving nature of work

• Ulf Johanson and Emmanual Aboagye publish a chapter on economic democracy in the newly released Pluralistic Economics (paywalled)

Academic News

• 🏆 David Ellerman was awarded by Fourth Annual Rutgers-Oxford Employee Ownership Research Conference for his paper on why fair market valuation breaks employee ownership. The upshot: because goodwill inflates repurchase obligations, “it will always be profitable for the current members of an ESOP to terminate the ESOP in a sellout”

• Harvard’s Graduate School of Design brings in Nikishka Iyengar, founder of The Guild, to co-teach a new course on community ownership with Toni L. Griffin

• NCBA CLUSA launches Foundations of Cooperative Enterprise Professional Certificate through Arizona State’s W.P. Carey School of Business

You’ve stumbled across an experiment: an effort to see what a newsletter might look like that covers all the ways owners commit their businesses to a purpose, from nonbinding public statements all the way to irrevocable purpose lock-in.

Each week we’ll share news on all the things we’ve spotted. For more, subscribe here:

Subscribe now

One Big Thing

• Luxury travel company Black Tomato converted to an employee ownership trust, with founders retaining 25% ownership and decision-making control

Upcoming Events

• Aug 25: Institute for Family Governance’s lunch presentation with Newman’s Own Foundation in Miami

• Aug 26: NCEO’s 2026 NCEO Forum starts in Phoenix; day one features an intensive workshop on employee ownership trusts

News this week

• Pennsylvania software company LockData converted to an employee ownership trust for its 13 employees, as reported by Roodgally Senatus for ImpactAlpha (paywalled)

• Founder Miren Oca shares how converting to an employee ownership trust resolved her exit strategy concerns with the women of Entrepreneurs’ Organization

• From Project Equity, Courtney Kemp publishes an in-depth white paper explaining Employee Ownership Trusts (ht David Gray)

• Steward Market releases their monthly brief, outlining how legal and financial infrastructure is evolving to support steward ownership

• OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman reflected on their shift away from nonprofit governance as traditional capital demands usurped soft mission locks

• LA Weekly spotlights Susana Cabrera’s story on Everytable’s social equity program trains frontline restaurant workers to become business owners

• ICYMI: In May, Swiss cloud provider Infomaniak transferred majority voting rights to a public-interest foundation with employee-shareholders voting unanimously to protect against future buyouts

⬆️ Homer Simpson had a clear stance on the relationship between economic and political power, the latter of which Mark wrote about this week.

• Reading an anti-union judge’s take from 1909—that enough sugar would inoculate workers against seeking power—helped us understand the historical tension between employee ownership and the labor movement (ht )

• John Case argues that a century ago many US companies experimented with sharing both the sugar and the power, before the Wagner Act of 1935 limited them to the former

• 🎙️ On Hasan Minhaj’s podcast, John Russell of More Perfect Union highlights how worker-owned businesses in Italy share both (ht Taylor Knickel)

Thank you to the Purpose Trust Ownership Network, , , Isabella Steichen, , , and OEOC for the shout-outs last week 🫶

• And please welcome to The Stakehold team Kate Tully, who joins us as a research fellow this fall!

Subscribe now

🥃 Top Shelf News

• A double shot of the good stuff from the NCEO:

  • Corey Rosen reports new SBA rules requiring all individual plan participants to meet non-citizen restrictions have effectively shut down SBA financing for ESOPs

  • NCEO merged The Bulletin and Member Memo into a new monthly newsletter: The Ownership Constellation

• The Department of Treasury permanently exempted small businesses, including cooperatives, from Beneficial Ownership Information reporting requirements under the Corporate Transparency Act

👉 In This Issue

• Events, Etc.
  Upcoming Events + Opportunities

• Employee Ownership
  ESOPs + Employee Ownership Trusts + Worker Cooperatives

• The Ownership Economy
  Community Ownership & Wealth + Ownership on Purpose + Workplace & Economic Democracy

• Academic News

🏙️ Events + Jobs

Events This Week

For more, see our Events page.

• Aug 23-25: ESOP Association’s CEO Summit in Rancho Palos Verdes

• 🆕 Aug 25: Asset Funders Network California and TFN’s Smart Growth California are hosting a webinar on community ownership and control of assets in California (ht DAWI)

• Aug 25: Institute for Family Governance hosts a lunch presentation with Newman’s Own Foundation CEO Alex Amouyel in Miami, FL

  • The Center for Community Wealth’s Employee Ownership Skills: Shared Leadership virtual workshop

• Aug 26-28: NCEO’s 2026 NCEO Forum is taking place in Phoenix, AZ

  • Day one features an intensive Employee Ownership Trust workshop hosted by NCEO

  • Aug 26 marks the start of the Northwest Cooperative Development Center’s 6-week Co-op Conversion Academy

• Aug 27-28: The Rutgers-Oxford Employee Ownership Research Conference at Kellogg College, UK

  • Kellogg College hosts a lecture by Professor Jonathan Michie on The Role of Employee Ownership in Oxford, England

  • Also: Who Owns the Future? An Idea Showcase in Washington, DC hosted by the Urban Institute

Opportunities

For more, visit our Ownership Jobs Board.

• The Right to the City Alliance is looking for a new National Organizer of Capital Strategies to lead deployment of their RTTC Loan Fund

• Trust Neighborhoods is hiring a Director of Finance

Employee Ownership

• ImpactAlpha features SunCulture’s recent employee ownership initiative, which gives all full-time employees an equity share (paywalled)

• Over the next 7 weeks, David Owen will reveal the 7 businesses featured in his upcoming book, ‘Employee Ownership: Passing the Baton - Seven Success Stories,’ about employee ownership in the UK

  • The first is Riverford Organic Farmers, an employee-owned trust in Devon, UK, that earns an A+ on locked-in purpose, distributed decision making, and financial participation

📈 Employee Stock Ownership Plans

• Ohio’s Roppe Holding Company, a family of flooring brands, transitioned to 100% employee-owned via ESOP

• OwnersEdge proposes ready-made ESOP holding companies as a streamlined alternative to structuring ESOPs from scratch

• David Solomon and Anthony Dolan break down the challenges, opportunities, and key players when selling an ESOP-owned company

• 🎙️ ESOP Radio talks with Joe Belsterling, CEO of Certified EO, about the difference between being an ESOP on paper and having employee owners

• Isabelle Steichen shares Torana's takeaways from the Oxford Symposium: ESOP plan counts are falling while participants climb toward 15 million, driven by acquisitive ESOPs adding ~20,000 newly employee-owned workers a year through M&A

• Shoppe Black profiles Apis & Heritage and their goal of “transitioning more and larger companies to employee ownership”

🤝 Employee Ownership Trusts (EOTs)

• UK trend: Veterinary practices transitioning to employee ownership

• John Lewis Partnership, the UK’s largest employee-owned business, announces board member Will Kernan as new managing director

• ICA Group cofounder Steven Dawson published Help Wanted, a new co-authored book. Case studies include purpose trust-owned Optimax and Zingerman's; ESOP-owned Messer Construction and SRC; and Cooperative Home Care Associates

✊ Worker Cooperatives

• The Center for Community Wealth releases the inaugural State of the Denver Worker Cooperative Sector Report. Congrats!

  • 💁🏽‍♀️ Fun fact: 83% of Colorado’s worker-owners are women

• A report from Canada.Coop by Christine Clarke details strategies to strengthen equity, access, and support for underrepresented co-op entrepreneurs

• On Sept 15, the International Cooperative Alliance (ICA) will meet in Panama to elect a new President and 15 Directors for their 30-member global Board

• Anurag Dang questions the relationship between cooperatives and capitalism

  and calls on co-op leaders to revive the core values of 1844

• Senate lawmakers stalled the Farm Bill over party lines before recess, but key funding wins for rural co-ops remain locked into the draft as talks continue.

• The Platform Cooperativism Consortium is running a workshop series on cooperative tech futures geared toward building toward a collaborative zine of utopian, democratically-owned technology

• 🎙️ Strange Birds shares the story of worker co-op, EMMA Technology

The Ownership Economy

• Alexander William Salter examines J.D. Vance’s economic perspective, framing his advocacy for state-influenced market policies as a shift toward rebalancing traditional conservative economic ideas

• 🚚 NY Mayor Mamdani’s Delivery Protection Act enters the ownership economy chat, challenging Amazon’s subcontracting practices (paywalled)

• The Aspen Ideas: Economy Conference is set for early Oct; this week they announced a first set of speakers

• ⚾️ UMKC’s CLEI asks what if public-private deals treated cities as investors, like Kansas City/Royals negotiations. (Update: Kansas City would get 5% of non-baseball profits)

• Mark is going to check out the Conscious Capitalism Dallas chapter next week; come say hello!

Community Ownership & Wealth

• Two Canadian credit unions pursue a merger after unanimous approval from both boards

• The National Cooperative Bank returns $44.79M to 1,636 shareholders

• shares a reading list on how cooperative ownership and community capital can keep local businesses locally owned

• Rupal Patel observes that community ownership funding already exists but is difficult to access due to the lack of coordination between capital stacks and funders

• Built to Last suggests a “shift in the rights, power, and benefits of ownership into community hands, held there by design” to better define community ownership

• The Center for Community Investment published a report of what they learned after working in five major US cities

• From Co-operative News, the Mayday Saxonvale project states its share offer targets of £1.2m to create a community-owned town center

• Susana Cabrera went from street vending to owning an Everytable franchise through a social equity program that finances 100% of franchise costs and guarantees salary during the transition

• Roodgally Senatus and Amy Cortese report that Paul Bradley and the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy are building out new financing strategies for affordable housing acquisitions (paywalled)

Ownership on Purpose

• Hannah Sandmeyer of Steward Market and Elizabeth Limbach of 1% for the Planet will get into the nitty gritty of what needs preserved during ownership transitions in their September webinar

• 🎙️ Lift Economy’s Beyond the B talks with Tony Chocolonely’s CEO, Douglas Lamont about their steward-influenced governance structure and gets another shout-out during their conversation with Chris Marquis about systems change and transforming industries

Workplace & Economic Democracy

• The Democracy Collaborative launches its new From Our Archives series, drawing from over 50 years of resources

• “Discipline vs. Extraction”: With P&G acquiring Thorne, Pure Synergy’s CEO argues that who owns the company matters

📚 New academic research

• Julian M. Hill of Georgia State University’s College of Law explores strategies to address procedural, structural, and cultural barriers to Black employee ownership, building on a new Atlanta-based study

• New Research from Saïd Business School’s Ownership Project finds public companies led by a founding-family-member outperformed all other firms on ESG

• Simone M. Müller and co-authors examine whether shareholders’ nonfinancial motivations are reflected in corporate governance, suggesting stakeholder governance as a more inclusive alternative (paywalled)

• Not new, but newly more available: Nathan Schneider’s co-edited book on solidarity economies is now a free online toolbox

You’ve stumbled across an experiment: an effort to see what a newsletter might look like that covers all the ways owners commit their businesses to a purpose, from nonbinding public statements all the way to irrevocable purpose lock-in.

Each week we’ll share news on all the things we’ve spotted. For more, subscribe here:

Subscribe now

One Big Thing

• Matt Pardieck of The 21 Hats Morning Report examines Grady-White’s transition to purpose trust ownership and asks: Have You Considered Giving Away Your Business?

Upcoming Events

• Aug 25: Institute for Family Governance’s lunch presentation with Newman’s Own Foundation in Miami

• Aug 26: NCEO’s 2026 NCEO Forum starts in Phoenix; day one features an intensive workshop on employee ownership trusts

Job Openings

• Trust Neighborhoods is hiring a Director of Finance

News this week

• ICA Group cofounder Steven Dawson published Help Wanted, a new co-authored book. Case studies include purpose trust-owned Optimax and Zingerman’s; ESOP-owned Messer Construction and SRC; and Cooperative Home Care Associates

• Hannah Sandmeyer of Steward Market and Elizabeth Limbach of 1% for the Planet will get into the nitty gritty of what needs preserved during ownership transitions in their September webinar

• 🎙️ Lift Economy’s Beyond the B talks with Tony Chocolonely’s CEO, Douglas Lamont about their steward-influenced governance structure and gets another shout-out during their conversation with Chris Marquis about systems change and transforming industries:

1. Economic rights: Where the money goes. Who has a stake? Who benefits?1

2. Control rights: Where the power lies. Who has a say? Who decides?

Corporate lawyers get paid to split control and economic rights apart, then frack them into a slurry of deal terms (share classes, board seats, information rights, etc.).

• Splitting control and economic rights is how Mark Zuckerberg controls Meta despite owning less than half its stock. Many other family-controlled, publicly traded companies do the same.

• Silicon Valley-style employee stock options offer economic rights without control.

• Novo Nordisk is controlled by a foundation which owns less than a third of its stock but over two-thirds of its voting rights.

• In the beginning, labor unions fought for both control and economic rights. But faced with pushback on the former and policy support for the latter, they tend to focus on economic rights.

Generally, the splitting of ownership rights among owners and investors lets both parties negotiate for what is most important to them. Employee ownership broadens who is considered in those negotiations happen, in different ways:

• Employee stock ownership plans (ESOPs) give employees government-protected economic rights and a modicum of control over some major decisions, mediated through the ESOP trust. Some ESOPs share more control via participatory management practices.

• Worker cooperatives give each worker-owner an equal vote in determining how economic rights are distributed.2

• German-style codetermination gives workers voting representation in the boardroom.

• Employee ownership trusts (in the US) typically codify economic rights into profit-sharing plans protected by a trust enforcer. Some share control through representation on the company board and/or trustee committee.3

These are structural ways to distribute control and economic rights. But as and I argue in a forthcoming white paper, organizations don’t have to go full co-op ✊ to distribute decision-making power more broadly. There are informal and cultural ways to do this, too.

Why (and How) Should Owners Distribute Control?

We have spilled ink before identifying the different labels for broad-based distribution of control rights, and we’ve noticed two things:4

1. Existing labels and concepts don’t communicate how to share control well in practice.

2. Most of the labels—including and especially workplace democracy—make business owners squirm or infer something other than what we mean.

So in this series of posts I ditch the labels in favor of answering two questions:

• Why do business owners choose to distribute control?

• How do business owners distribute control in practice?

In the interim, I’m curious to hear from you by email/comment/Facebook poke about where power, control, and decision-making are concentrated in your organization. Why did (or would) you decide to distribute them?

You’ve stumbled across an experiment: an effort to see what a newsletter might look like that covers all the ways owners commit their businesses to a purpose, from nonbinding public statements all the way to irrevocable purpose lock-in.

Each week we’ll share news on all the things we’ve spotted. For more, subscribe here:

Subscribe now

One Big Thing

• Matt Pardieck of examines Grady-White’s transition to purpose trust ownership and asks: Have You Considered Giving Away Your Business?

Upcoming Events

• Aug 25: Institute for Family Governance’s lunch presentation with Newman’s Own Foundation in Miami

• Aug 26: NCEO’s 2026 NCEO Forum starts in Phoenix; day one features an intensive workshop on employee ownership trusts

News this week

• Southern Shade Tree (NC) raised equity from Mosaic Capital Partners, acquired Atlantic Coast Landscaping (NC), and established an employee ownership trust

• John Abrams reflects on Yvon Chouinard’s biography and his reasons for giving his company to a purpose trust

• Ari Weinzweig reflects on how perpetual purpose trusts force long-term thinking at Zingerman’s

• A new Harvard report reveals that 79% of Gen Z seek jobs that positively influence others’ lives, yet many are concerned about their low pay (ht Daphne Berry)

• Nina de Korte analyzes a new report from EY, a consultancy, on extractivism

• The Impact Track analyzes the governance conflict at Indian conglomerate Tata Sons, highlighting the tensions between mission-driven trust ownership and market oversight (ht Daniela G.)

• The steward-owned collective CO_ recently structured a loan for açaí harvesters in Colombia around harvest cycles rather than quarterly cycles

• 🎙️ Journey to Regeneration talks with We are Stewards cofounder Esther Welles about steward ownership:

… and welcome to all fifty-one new subscribers! Thank you for supporting EOX by subscribing and for telling your colleagues about us.

Last week we introduced our Ownership Economy Jobs board. You loved it; thanks for the feedback. This week we published an Ownership Economy Deals tracker covering mergers, acquisitions, transitions, conversions, and foundings of companies by employees and other stakeholders.

• Why another database? Other “deals” databases tend to cover (1) mergers and acquisitions in a particular sector or (2) a specific investment type. But ownership economy deals cut across industries, and financing is not always central to or necessary for ownership deals.

Check out the Ownership Economy Deals tracker and tell us how to make it most useful!

Subscribe now

🥃 Top Shelf News

• Adria Scharf is the newly announced Director of the Rutgers Institute for the Study of Employee Ownership and Profit Sharing. Congrats Adria!

• Business Insider’s Alex Nicoll shares how employees at an Ownership Works company used their profits from the company’s sale

  • 💭 Is anyone doing this for employee owners? We can imagine the TikTok campaign now…

• New York Times’ Maureen Farrell reports that US private equity firms own more companies than they can sell (paywalled; ht )

  • 🤔 What if their LPs, as a condition of investment in future funds, put pressure on them to sell those companies to employees or other stakeholders?

• Why isn’t there more employee ownership activity on Reddit, the front page of the internet?

  • 🥸 We reached out to the mod of r/Employee Ownership this week; stay tuned

👉 In This Issue

• Events, Etc.
  Upcoming Events + Ownership Deals

• Employee Ownership
  ESOPs + Worker Cooperatives + Employee Ownership Trusts

• The Ownership Economy
  Ownership on Purpose + AI at Work + Community Ownership + Member-Owned Finance

• Academic News

📅 Events and Deals

Events This (and Next) Week

For more, check out our Events page.

• Aug 20: The Wisconsin Center for Employee Ownership’s free lunch for business owners in Milwaukee

  • NC Center for Employee Ownership hosts a Business Succession Planning and Employee Ownership event in Raleigh, NC

• Aug 23: The first day of The ESOP Association’s CEO Summit in Rancho Palos Verdes

• Aug 25: Institute for Family Governance’s lunch presentation with Newman’s Own Foundation in Miami

  • Plus the Center for Community Wealth’s Employee Ownership Skills: Shared Leadership virtual workshop

• Aug 26: NCEO’s 2026 NCEO Forum starts in Phoenix

  • Day one features an intensive workshop on employee ownership trusts

  • Also: The Northwest Cooperative Development Center’s 6-week Co-op Conversion Academy begins

• Aug 27: Kellogg College’s Jonathan Michie’s lecture on the role of employee ownership in England

  • And the Urban Institute’s panel Who Owns the Future? in DC

Ownership Deals

For more, check out our Ownership Deals page.

• Southern Shade Tree (NC) raised equity from Mosaic Capital Partners, acquired Atlantic Coast Landscaping (NC), and established an employee ownership trust

• Former employees of a Pittsburgh newspaper founded their own cooperative news organization, the Pittsburgh Progress

• Herbalists in Rhode Island launched Gentle Strength Herbal Co-op

Employee Ownership

• The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics just released data showing the labor share of economic output hit 52.9 percent last quarter, lowest in recorded history

  • Ownership Works re-shared The Aspen Institute’s report on essential wealth, or the level at which you can withstand a financial setback

• In The Nation, Courtney Martin argues for employee-owned elder care (paywalled)

📈 Employee Stock Ownership Plans

• NCEO posted a framework for navigating ESOP mergers and explains why they’re becoming more common

• ESOP holding company OwnersEdge welcomed Robert Dillon as its new CEO. Congrats!

• 🎙️ For Basic Bananas, Tim Rettig of InTrust IT advocates for selling to employees rather than private equity:

Worker Cooperatives

• Co-Op News is looking for reader feedback

• 🎙️ Strange Birds reflects on their experience transitioning to a co-op, why they did it, and how it’s going:

Employee Ownership Trusts

• 🏊 Miren Oca, founder of Ocaquatics, explains how an employee ownership trust works and why she chose it over an ESOP

• Jon Shell spills the tea on how Employee Ownership Trusts were established in Canadian law

• Beth Nedrow highlights the importance of having a dedicated brain trust to effectively carry out employee ownership trust transactions

The Ownership Economy

• SXSW’s PanelPicker is open for voting, and the ownership-related panels cover tokenized ownership of real assets; ownership of media; audience ownership of creator work; and Ownership Works’ broad-based employee incentive plans

• Paula D’Ambrosa argues that shared ownership is a driver of social connection that binds people together through shared governance

• In ImpactAlpha, and Alison Lingane argue for a new economy (paywalled)

• Debbie White has stepped down as chair of the UK-based, consumer-owned retailer Co-op Group, replaced with Moni Mannings as interim chair

Ownership on Purpose

• Matt Pardieck of 21 Hats examines Grady-White’s transition to purpose trust ownership and asks Have You Considered Giving Away Your Business?

  • reflects on Yvon Chouinard’s biography and his reasons for giving his company to a purpose trust

  • Ari Weinzweig reflects on how perpetual purpose trusts force long-term thinking at Zingerman’s

• A new Harvard report reveals that 79% of Gen Z seek jobs that positively influence others’ lives, yet many are concerned about their low pay (ht )

• Nina de Korte analyzes a new report from EY, a consultancy, on extractivism

• analyzes the governance conflict at Indian conglomerate Tata Sons, hlighting the tensions between mission-driven trust ownership and market oversight (ht Daniela G.)

• The steward-owned collective CO_ recently structured a loan for açaí harvesters in Colombia around harvest cycles rather than quarterly cycles

• 🎙️ Journey to Regeneration talks with We are Stewards cofounder Esther Welles about steward ownership:

AI at Work

• 🎙️ In this week’s “when someone shows you who they are, believe them,” here are two quotes that grossed us out—and help make the case for more broadly distributed ownership:

  • The head of Y Combinator, a startup accelerator, thinks “those people” displaced by AI at work just “need to start companies.” Easy peasy!

  • WSJ journalist Tim Martin says that manufacturers love the idea of humanoid robots because “all of the sort of human elements that can make life complicated for a company go away with robots.” 🤮

• Venture capitalist David Perez-Hernandez published a manifesto about the ownership of AI

🏘️ Community Ownership

• New Growth Innovation Network published a field guide comparing five community-owned real estate models

• The Hidden Circle Residents Cooperative in Maine purchased the land beneath their mobile homes

• The East Colfax Community Collective acquired a complex that was accused of links to Venezuelan gangs by Donald Trump, and renovating it into affordable housing

• The South Tower Community Land Trust in Fresno (where was born!) acquired its first commercial building to house an indie bookstore

• Rupal Patel’s ownership stack suggests that resilient community ownership requires a blend of capital, structure, policy, and community engagement

• Ground Works Consulting outlines lessons for advocates on how to properly sequence policy campaigns for community ownership

🏦 Member-Owned Finance

• In the UK, Nationwide Building Society creates communication cards to help customers communicate their needs and report problems

• The Australian Labor Party has committed to doubling the cooperatives and mutuals sector

• Co-operatives UK launched a new investment fund for community shares, building on its Booster Fund

• In Nepal, victims of co-op fraud staged demonstrations demanding their funds back

📚 New Academic Research

• Chi Kwok gives five epistemic arguments for why democratic workplace structures are better than republican alternatives at protecting worker agency

• Worker wage concessions in the 1980s yielded a 10.6% annual return over twenty years. The study argues the ESOP succeeded because workers acted collectively to preserve their long-term interests

• Research by McGovern et al. reframes open-book management as a voluntary substitute for statutory disclosure rights dismantled by neoliberal policies

We are also experimenting with a paywall for the first time. Upgrading your subscription will get you access to prior deals—so far, through 2026. We will add more months and/or more detail as we learn from you what is useful.

If you see a deal missing, let us know!

Ownership Economy Deals

September 2026

• Celsius Companies (PA) combines ETA with ESOPs

• Earth Sky + Water (NH), publisher → worker co-op

• James Alexander (NJ), manufacturer → ESOP

• Ellis Construction (WI) → ESOP

• Cafe Imports (MN) → ESOP

• Rockford (MI), construction firm → ESOP

• Lark Electric (KY) merges with American Gridwork Partners (TN)

• Tropical Foods (MA), grocery store → ESOP

• BoekenBalie, Netherlands bookshop → steward-owned

• DCW Cost Management (WA), logistics firm → EOT

• Mason Builders (CA) → ESOP

• BPAS (NY), national provider of retirement and benefit plans, acquired ESOP One (NY), a technology platform

• Infinity Today (NJ) → ESOP caregiving agency

• Rise & Shine Social Enterprise (OR) → ESOP caregiving agency

• Knox & Wells (UK), building contractor → EOT

Read more