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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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🥃 Top Shelf News

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

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

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

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

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

👉 In This Issue

• Events + Opportunities

  • Newly announced

  • This week

  • Opportunities

• Employee Ownership

  • Employee stock ownership plans

  • Worker cooperatives

• The Ownership Economy

  • Steward ownership + purpose trusts

  • Community ownership of real estate

  • Workplace democracy

• Academic News

📅 Events + Opportunities

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

Newly announced

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

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

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

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

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

This week

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

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

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

  • And Raymond James’s Business Exit Planning Workshop webinar

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

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

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

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

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

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

Opportunities

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

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

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

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

Employee Ownership

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

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

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

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

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

• Angi Krueger offers key takeaways from NCEO 2026

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

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

• Carlisle announced its latest employee stock option grant

Employee stock ownership plans (ESOPs)

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

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

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

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

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

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

Worker Coops

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Ownership Economy

Steward ownership + purpose trusts

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

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

Community-owned real estate

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

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

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

Workplace democracy

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

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

📚 Academic News

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More redistribution won’t fix what ails us

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

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

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

One last hopeful thing

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

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

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

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

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

• Created the first EO+WD newsletter three years ago

• Managed a team of student writers and event planners

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

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

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

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

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🥃 Top Shelf News

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

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

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

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

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

  • The revival of academic interest in common purpose

👉 In This Issue

• Events + Opportunities

• Employee Ownership

  • Employee Stock Ownership Plans

  • Worker cooperatives

  • Employee ownership trusts

• The Ownership Economy

  • Steward ownership + purpose trusts

  • Community-owned real estate

• Academic News

📅 Events + Opportunities

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Opportunities

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

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

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

Employee Ownership

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

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

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

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

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

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

📈 Employee stock ownership plans (ESOPs)

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

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

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

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

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

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

Worker cooperatives

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

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

Employee ownership trusts

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

  • Magenta Associates published a communications guide for employee ownership transitions

• CommonTrust recaps Cypress Valley’s transition to an EOT

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

The Ownership Economy

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

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

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

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

Steward ownership + purpose trusts

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

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

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

Community-owned real estate

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

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

📚 Academic News

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

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

• Chris Mackin reviews three recent employee ownership manuscripts

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

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

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

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

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

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🥃 Top Shelf News

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

👉 In This Issue

• Events + Jobs

• Employee Ownership

  • Employee stock ownership plans (ESOPs)

  • Worker cooperatives

  • Employee ownership trusts

• The Ownership Economy

  • Steward ownership + purpose trusts

  • Platform cooperatives + digital ownership

  • Community ownership + land trusts

  • Good jobs + fair wages

• Academic Updates

📅 Events + Jobs

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

⏪ Recaps

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

👷 Jobs

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

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

Employee Ownership

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

📈 Employee stock ownership plans (ESOPs)

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

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

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

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

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

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

✊ Worker cooperatives

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

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

🔒 Employee ownership trusts

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

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

The Ownership Economy

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

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

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

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

Steward ownership + purpose trusts

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

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

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

Platform cooperatives + digital ownership

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

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

Community ownership + land trusts

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

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

• Central Iowa Community Land Trust acquired its first homes

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

Good jobs + fair wages

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

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

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

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

📚 Academic News

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Operationally, Tiffany also helped us:

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

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

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

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

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

- Dr. Hand

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🥃 Top Shelf News

• NCEO’s ownership culture survey is back in action

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

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

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

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

👉 In This Issue

• Events + jobs

• Employee ownership

  • Employee stock ownership plans

  • Worker cooperatives

• The ownership economy

  • Steward ownership

  • Community wealth-building

  • Workplace + economic democracy

• New academic research

🏙️ Events + Jobs

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

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

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

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

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

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

👩‍💻 Jobs and Recaps

• The Cooperative Development Institute is hiring an Executive Director

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

Employee ownership

• In FastCompany, argues for new forms of ownership

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

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

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

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

📈 Employee stock ownership plans

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

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

• Building Indiana Business explores Indiana’s growing ESOP movement

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

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

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

✊ Worker cooperatives

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

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

The ownership economy

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

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

Steward ownership

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

Community wealth-building

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

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

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

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

Workplace + economic democracy

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

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

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

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

📚 New academic research

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

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

• Stan De Spiegelaere and Sigurt Vitols on worker participation

• Abhishek Sharma et al. on empowering employees through ownership

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Subscribe now

👉 In This Issue

1. Events + Jobs

2. Employee Ownership

   1. Employee stock ownership plans

   2. Worker cooperatives

3. The Ownership Economy

4. Academic Updates

🏙️ Events + Jobs

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

👩‍💻 Jobs

• KKR is hiring in London and Tokyo

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

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

Employee Ownership

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

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

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

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

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

📈 Employee stock ownership plans

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

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

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

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

✊ Worker cooperatives

• Nominations are open for the Cooperative Cultural Heritage List

• K2 Enterprises explains worker cooperatives for CPAs and tax advisors

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

The Ownership Economy

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Scott Romney argues for apprenticeships as a path to ownership

📚 Academic Updates

• 📢 Calls

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

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

• 📜 Papers

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

  • Erik K. Olsen on opportunities in employee ownership research

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

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

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

The Great Ownership Transfer

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

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

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

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

Where the System Breaks Down

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

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

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

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

What’s Already Working

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Missed Connections

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

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

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

Similarly, AngelList organized discovery between startups and investors.

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

The Platform Solution

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

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

What Happens Next

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

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

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

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

🥃 Top Shelf News

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

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

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

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

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

Subscribe now

👉 In This Issue

1. Events + job opportunities

2. Employee stock ownership plans

3. Purpose trusts + steward ownership

4. Employee ownership + the ownership economy

5. Academic updates

🏙️ Events

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jobs + opportunities

Some other best places to work:

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

• Summer Associates at Ownership Capital Lab

• Program & Operations Associate at Transform Finance

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

Employee stock ownership plans

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

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

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

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

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

Purpose trusts + steward ownership

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

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

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

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

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

Employee ownership, broadly speaking

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The ownership economy

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

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

📚 Academic updates

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

🥃 Top Shelf News

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

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

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

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

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

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

Subscribe now

👉 In This Issue

1. Events + job opportunities

2. Employee stock ownership plans

3. Worker cooperatives

4. Purpose trusts + steward ownership

5. Employee ownership, broadly speaking

6. The ownership economy

7. Academic updates

🏙️ Events

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

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

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

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

Jobs + opportunities

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

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

Employee stock ownership plans

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Worker cooperatives

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

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

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

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

Purpose trusts + steward ownership

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

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

• 🎧 hosts Vincent Stanley of purpose trust-owned Patagonia

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

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

  • Triodos Bank published an analysis of steward ownership, too

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

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

Employee ownership, broadly speaking

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

• Common Trust outlines key tax considerations in employee ownership transitions

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

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

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

• Smitha Das argues for broadening governance alongside economic rights

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

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

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

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

The ownership economy

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

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

• On shared ownership of land:

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

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

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

• On shared ownership of capital:

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

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

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

📚 Academic updates + opportunities

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

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

• New papers!

  • Michael Zimmer on AI adoption in ESOP firms

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

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

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

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

  • Yifat Aran on equity compensation and bargaining power

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

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

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

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🥃 Top Shelf News

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

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

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

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

👉 In This Issue

1. Events + job opportunities

2. Employee stock ownership plans

3. Worker cooperatives

4. Purpose trusts + steward ownership

5. Employee ownership + the ownership economy

6. Academic updates

🏙️ Events

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Newly announced

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jobs + opportunities

• ICA is looking for speakers for their May cooperative symposium

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

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

Employee stock ownership plans

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

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

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

Worker cooperatives

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

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

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

Purpose trusts + steward ownership

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

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

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

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

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

Employee ownership + the ownership economy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

📚 Academic updates

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

• Marina Albanese, Asia Guerreschi and Marco Lomuscio’s new paper examines worker cooperatives’ role in the circular economy

• Marc Levy’s chapter in the recently published Oxford Handbook of Social Purpose covers foundation ownership as a mechanism for protecting social purposes in business

🦞 Lagniappe

In the latest edition of “Who’s Going to Tell Them About Employee Ownership,” gets one heartbeat away from making the pitch for employee ownership in this podcast. Here is Hayes at 41m06s:

“I think one of the traps in center-left policy in the last, say, 30 years, is that we have this sort of pretax and transfer inequality, and then tax and transfers to change it. And we just keep getting more and more inequality in what the market does, and then the recipe is more and more redistribution… The problem is you can’t have a political economy that just keeps producing larger and larger forms of inequality that then have larger and larger amounts of redistribution to produce an equitable society. So the question then becomes: What is a vision for an equitable market economy or labor market or labor force or society that is genuinely middle class?

And later, at 58m40s:

Douthat: There’s a version that says you basically want to look at all the money that the people in the A.I. world are going to be making, and you want to tax it — just directly subsidize Americans out of that largess. Or, you need a politics that basically protects work. And it sounds to me like you are on the job side, not the U.B.I. side.

Hayes: I guess I haven’t thought it through enough to feel like I have a very fixed view on either.

The Stakehold and its readers can help, Chris!

• Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer is under fire; we’re watching for how and whether this impacts DOL’s pro-employee-ownership pivot

• The Financial Accounting Standards Board is considering requiring employee stock ownership plans to report repurchase obligations on their balance sheet, writes NCEO’s Corey Rosen

• Certified Employee Owned’s new EO Base “gives employee-owned companies a branded, centralized website to host all of their ownership resources in one place”

Subscribe now

👉 In This Issue

1. Events + job opportunities

2. Employee stock ownership plans

3. Worker cooperatives

4. Purpose trusts + steward ownership

5. Employee ownership + the ownership economy

6. Academic updates

🏙️ Events

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

• March 10: Clarasys’ event on governance and ownership for purpose-driven businesses, Locking in Purpose: From mindset to mandate

• March 10-11: In the UK, EOA’s Representing and Developing Employee Voices

• March 11: USFWC’‘s workshop on cooperative member engagement

• March 11: LevelUp Coops’ How Ownership Actually Works in a Worker Co-op: A Hands-On Introduction to Ownership Design webinar

• March 12: EOX and Deanalytics’ Beyond Retirement, The Real Story of ESOP Payouts

• March 13: The Institute for Economic Democracy’s Advancing Worker Ownership: Reclaiming Economic Sovereignty in the 21st Century event in London

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

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

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

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

Job Opportunities

• Common Trust is hiring for two roles: Chief of Staff and Transaction Advisory Associate

• Blue Ridge Associates is hiring as ESOP Communication Consultant

Employee stock ownership plans

• The ESOP Association released their latest newsletter, including upcoming webinars and policy updates from Illinois and Rhode Island

• Shannon Litton was named of Ragan’s 2026 Top Women in Communications for her trailblazing work on employee ownership

• Alan Pierce plugs ESOPs in Specialty Fabrics Review; 40 Million Owners argues that ESOP companies are well-positioned for the growing buyer-led M&A market

• The new edition of the Journey to an ESOP podcast explores Monte Sano Research Cooperation’s transition to employee ownership

• Good Times USA of Florida and Gable of Maryland are now employee-owned; and Omni Family of Services, a Nashville-based ESOP, acquired JusticeWorks Youthcare of Pittsburgh. Congrats all!

Worker cooperatives

• The Cooperative Development Foundation named their 2026 Cooperative Leaders and Scholars Fellows and is accepting grant applications to their Cooperative Education Fund (applications close May 1st)

• First-of-its-kind AI cooperative Transkribus celebrated reaching 500,000 users

Purpose trusts + steward ownership

• ImpactAlpha‘s Dennis Price (paywalled, but summarized in their daily The Brief) reported out from last week’s Purpose Trust Ownership Conference

  • Ari Weinzweig of Zingerman’s Deli also reflected on the event in his latest piece, A Positive Look at Perpetual Purpose Trusts, Three Years In

• In FastCompany, Carol Cone says that in 2026, corporate purpose will come to a fork in the road. Somebody tell her about purpose trusts and steward ownership!

Employee ownership + the ownership economy

• HR Brew’s Kristen Parisi and National Association of Plan Advisors’ Paul Mulholland cover last week’s Department of Labor Employee Ownership Report to Congress

• Ownership Works-affiliated, Alabama-based Landscape Workshop rolled out its broad-based incentive plan

  • In ImpactAlpha, Roodgally Senatus asks: if sharing wealth with workers creates value for private equity buyout firms, why not share more? (paywalled)

• In Shelterforce, Steve Dubb explains the solidarity economy

• The latest newsletter from Beloved Economies includes tips for how to share decision-making power

📚 Academic updates

• Rutgers Institute plans to launch an Employee Ownership Research-To-Practice Resource Hub; sign up for updates

• The Cooperative Development Foundation is accepting grant applications, including on research, to their Cooperative Education Fund (applications close May 1st)

• ICYMI: In January, Jason Spicer won the 2026 Joyce Rothschild Book Prize for his book Co-operative Enterprise in Comparative Perspective and David Fitz-Gerald won the Popular Book Prize for If It’s the Last Thing I Do. Congrats!

• The Department of Labor published its first Employee Ownership Initiative Report to Congress. ESOP Association CEO Jim Bonham and PlanSponsor’s James van Bramer break it down

• Dr. Hand gave the closing keynote from the first Purpose Trust Ownership Conference (this is the titular apocalypse reference, btw)

• Rayan Semery-Palumbo and Andrew Stern are offering a $2,500 prize for ideas on worker-centered solutions for AI & autonomous vehicles. Applications due March 4

• In The Great Ownership Transfer, McKinsey describes the six million U.S. businesses that will face succession decisions by 2035; they also interview Philip Reeves of Apis & Heritage

• 🗞️ Check out recent newsletters from our friends at Predistribution Initiative, Ownership Capital Lab, Social Capital Partners, EOX, and Aspen’s Economic Opportunities Program

Subscribe now

👉 In This Issue

1. Events + job opportunities

2. Employee stock ownership plans

3. Worker cooperatives

4. Purpose trusts + steward ownership

5. Employee ownership + the ownership economy

6. Academic updates

🏙️ Events

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

• March 3: SV2’s Innovative Finance Spotlight 2026 ft. Alison Lingane

• March 3-24: The City of Minneapolis’s three-week Co-Op Startup Course

• March 4: eoa’s online EO Leadership Development Program

• March 4: PURPOSE’s steward-ownership gathering in NYC

• March 6: The Ownership Project’s seminar with Tej Gonza

• March 10: Clarasys’ event on governance and ownership for purpose-driven businesses, Locking in Purpose: From mindset to mandate

• March 10-11: eoa’s course on Representing and Developing Employee Voices

• March 11: USFWC'‘s workshop on cooperative member engagement

• March 11: LevelUp Coops’ How Ownership Actually Works in a Worker Co-op: A Hands-On Introduction to Ownership Design webinar

• March 12: EOX and Deanalytics’ Beyond Retirement, The Real Story of ESOP Payouts

Newly announced

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

• April 17: St. Mary’s University’s webinar on making sense of AI within the cooperative movement

Job Opportunities

• Associate Director of Investments at Apis & Heritage Capital Partners

• Director of Development and Ecosystem Director at The Center for Community Wealth

• Program Manager at the Democracy at Work Institute (deadline March 1)

Employee stock ownership plans

• Hoopaugh Grading (NC), R&A Enterprises (CO), and LandSouth Construction (FL) are now employee owned. Congrats!

• The Ownership Effect podcast explores the impact of employee ownership on individual owners’ lives

• Expanding ESOPs interviews Kathleen McInerney Kane, president of Praxis Consulting Group

• ⏪ ESOP event recaps: Chuck Mazzanti on ESCA’s recent Leadership Summit, Ramona Rodriguez-Brooks on NCEO’s Think Like an Owner webinar, and Maria Llanos on NCEO’s inaugural Women’s Summit

Worker cooperatives

• The Rural Cooperative Developer Scholarships extended its deadline to March 16

• India’s co-op minister launched Bharat Taxi, a national cooperative of taxi drivers

• Co-op Atlas released their Southern Edition 2026, an initiative that publishes research on cooperative statutes and their governance functions

• ICA highlights the women transforming the cooperative space

Purpose trusts + steward ownership

• PURPOSE writes about open source AI chatbot OpenClaw, recaps a recent German parliamentary event on steward ownership, and publishes a case study on Organically Grown Company’s journey from cooperative → ESOP → perpetual purpose trust, all ahead of their first US conference next week in New York

Employee ownership + the ownership economy

• 🛠️ New tools

  • Project Equity’s Ownership Opportunity Map is an interactive data tool that maps workforce demographics. They also put out a new report on employee ownership among Black business owners

  • Cooperative Development Foundation and the National Cooperative Business Association launched a catalog of shared equity housing models

• 🎧 Ears edition

  • Dr. Hand on Andy Farquharson’s A Better Monday podcast, on the values that drive ownership succession decisions

  • Nathan Schneider on the Democracy Innovators podcast, on the governance of online communities

• ✍️ Opinion

  • Tom Powdrill on why worker voice is often silenced without structure

  • Neil McInroy on the Scottish Community Wealth Building Bill (Bella Caledonia)

  • Julien Rosenbloom on how state governments can help finance business transitions to employee ownership (ImpactAlpha)

  • Seth Levine and Elizabeth MacBride on why America should embrace the shift from a shareholder economy to one that focuses on stakeholders (Fortune)

  • Corey Rosen on the growing gap between productivity and compensation (NCEO)

• 🦞 Lagniappe

  • A new Wall Street Journal reports on the growth of 401(k)s among small businesses

  • A new UN report explores the social and solidarity economy as a poverty-eradication tool

  • Hélène Landemore recaps a recent event, “Democratizing Corporate Governance”

📚 New Academic Papers

• Dr. Hand on the origin, defining characteristics, benefits, and challenges of EOTs in the United States

• Kelly O. Finnell’s Message Collision in the Employee Ownership Movement on the emergence of Ownership Works and Expanding ESOPs

• Zhenyang Zhang and Jinghui He on employee ownership and ESG performance in Chinese firms

• Jungook Kim and company on the impact of demographic characteristics on the perception of stewardship in employee-owned companies

In a recent book, Native American author Steven Charleston chronicles the lives of four prophets who foresaw, and helped their communities survive, the apocalypse of European colonization. From their history, Charleston draws four lessons for dealing with times of radical, potentially apocalyptic change. I’ve been thinking about those this week, amid wars and rumors of wars, and especially how much this community of people embodies what Charleston hopes for.

First, Charleston says, radical change demands a radical response--turning the culture upside down. As Jason Weiner put it last night, the proximate cause for our gathering is a legal form. But the deeper cause is that all of you are doing just that--turning over culture.

Second, the crumbling of the world we know demands that we build prototypes, or lighthouses, of an alternative potential future. That is who you are. Patagonia may be a national lighthouse, sure--but it’s you, in your towns and in your industries--that are prototypes of alternate futures.

Third, it is imperative that we take into consideration the stakeholders that have historically had no voice or power in our economies. Smoholla, one of Charleston’s four prophets, asked during a negotiation with the Europeans “I wonder if this land has anything to say?” Surely you hear this and think of Organically Grown, or Local Ocean, or the other companies here that are taking their environment--our environment--seriously.

Fourth, building a future together means just that--building a future together. As you heard from Issie yesterday, this is built directly into PTON’s DNA, and it’s what I see in most corners of the wider world of alternative ownership. It is a collaborative vision that Natalie Reitman-White had a decade ago, that has finally taken root. And it is, as we talked about in our ecosystem panel yesterday, deeply pluralistic--I guarantee you there are companies here whose purposes you would disagree with. But I think we know that we are building an alternative future, together, and that has to happen, together.

I took a lot of comfort in the historical depth of Charleston’s We Survived the End of the World. As Ari reminded us yesterday, learning history keeps you from getting caught with your pants down. I’m paraphrasing — Ari may have said it with more dignity than that. Actually, knowing Ari, probably less.

I’d like to take one more historical detour, if you’ll allow it. Joseph Blasi told me last week about the New York company B. Altman and Company. Unless you’re of a certain age, you probably haven’t heard of it. But for over 100 years, the Manhattan-based retailer was a purpose-driven, charity-spawning, gender-bending high-end retailer in New York. When Benjamin Altman died in 1913, he left his stock in the stores to the Altman Foundation, creating what was essentially a purpose-driven ownership structure: the department store funded charitable and educational work in New York City, and everyone who shopped at Altman’s was also contributing to local charity efforts.

This arrangement worked for over seven decades. But then came the Tax Reform Act of 1969’s excess business holdings provisions, which restricted private foundations from owning active businesses. The Altman Foundation had to divest ownership, the company traded hands a few times, and then finally shut down in 1989.

This story stuck with me in part because it is representative of the fact that if we widen our aperture just a little bit, we can see history littered with examples of founders that were trying to do things differently, but ultimately failed.

For the Louisville Courier-Journal, a family feud with no succession structure handed one of the ten best newspapers in America to Gannett for $300 million, and was immediately enshittified. HealthTrust, A 104-hospital ESOP dissolved its employee ownership structure within four years, then sold to Columbia/HCA, which later pled guilty to 14 felonies and paid over $2 billion in fraud penalties. Three private equity firms bought Toys R Us, a profitable company holding 20% of the American toy market, loaded it with $5.3 billion in debt, collected $470 million in fees, and >30,000 people lost their jobs. At Cadbury, over the objections of the board, the employees, and the British government, shareholders ended 186 years of Quaker values in a Kraft Foods boardroom, and ruined Cadbury Creme Eggs for a generation.

These founders had all “built something worth protecting,” but did not have access to the architecture they needed to support their good intentions.

It’s that architecture that we are building today. And already, in just a few short years, look what we see: For every Louisville Courier-Journal, there is a Berrett-Koelher Publishing that shows how else publishing can be done. For every Healthtrust, there is a LiveOak Living. For every Polaroid, and Optimax. For every Toys R Us, an Entertainer — a British toy company whose founder just chose employee ownership over private equity last September. For every Cadbury, a Tony’s Cholonely. Each of these companies has built something worth protecting, and it is the people in this room that have helped them figure out how to protect it.

I first came to know about purpose trusts in 2021, thanks to a nudge from Zoe, a longtime friend of mine. Many of you had already been doing the work by then. But it was clear that many more hands were needed for this model to reach a scale proportional to the size of the problems we seek to solve. It was Jenny Everett who helped me understand this as an ecosystem problem, and it is what we set out to help solve.

In the academic literature — bear with me, this is the last time I’ll try to sound like a professor today — there are two camps on entrepreneurship. One camp says entrepreneurs discover opportunities. The other says they create them out of thin air, by putting out a quarter-baked idea and seeing who shows up to build it with you, and now you have a half-baked idea. PTON is firmly in that second camp. Natalie had had a quarter-formed idea. You showed up. And now look at this room. Ten years ago we could have held this gathering in a single booth at El Cockfight--a small one! But here we are, a room full of 150 people and 100 more we couldn’t pack in. We have gotten here in collaboration with you, and the vision of PTON is self-consciously a recombination of the skills, networks, knowledge, resources, and needs that you have shared with us.

The task moving forward, I believe, is the same: to find new friends, share with them our half-baked idea of what the future could be, and let their skills, networks, knowledge, resources, and needs reshape what we are building. As Charleston’s fourth Native American prophet demonstrated, the future can only be built together--co-created. We can’t do that without you, but with you, we are confident that we can co-create that better, alternative future.

I’d like to close with gratitude. Simone Weil said “attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.” I am grateful, we are grateful, for your generous attention these last few days. I’d also like to thank Issie and PTON, Taylor and TXCEO, and our funders and speakers. And a special thanks to the volunteers and staff at The Line who made this happen. So let’s get some lunch, and then let’s get to work.

• Aunnie Patton unleashed the helpful hounds of anxious commentary with her LinkedIn post on the concentration of power and wealth in AI companies

  • Separately, in SSIR, Beatrice Alain lays out how to build practical, community-owned alternatives to extractive AI systems, and Trebor Scholz is speaking at Yale this week on platform cooperatives as a solution

  • [Dr. Hand interjects: Longtime readers will know I believe shared ownership, rooted in something like John Rawls’s property-owning democracy or the Catholic social doctrine of distributism, should be part of our response. Send me an email and I’ll share the essay I wrote last summer about our polyconscious future—then help me figure out where to publish it?]

• Conscious Capitalism welcomed Mary Josephs to their Board of Directors, another example of the convergence of impact investing and employee ownership

• Lean Startup author Eric Ries’s new book, Incorruptible: Why good companies go bad and how great companies stay great, comes out in May. Ries’s book is part of a growing focus on how to protect a company’s purpose, including:

  • Transform Finance’s recent paper, Hiding in Plain Sight (report, webinar)

  • Clarasys and Blueprint for Better Business’s forthcoming white paper

  • Our very own, almost-final white paper with the Skoll Centre with on how organizations can balance locking in purpose, expanding financial participation, and distributing decision-making power

  • … not to mention the sold-out, inaugural Purpose Trust Ownership Conference next week in Austin, three years in the making

👉 In This Issue

1. Events + job opportunities

2. Employee stock ownership plans

3. Worker cooperatives

4. Purpose trusts + steward ownership

5. Employee ownership + the ownership economy

6. Academic updates

🏙️ Events

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

• Feb 23: Ohio Employee Ownership Center’s webinar on story telling and employee ownership

• Feb 24: North Carolina Employee Ownership Center’s NC Employee Ownership Ambassador Training Program

• Feb 25-26: NCEO and Ohio Center for Employee Ownership’s National Employee-Owner Summit in Mesa, Arizona

• Feb 26: Massachusetts Center for Employee Ownership and Common Trust’s webinar, Employee Ownership Trusts: Trusting You and Trusting Me

• Feb 26: Cooperative Business Alliance of Maine’s Leadership Foundations - A Participatory Management Intensive for Co-ops

• Feb 26: Project Equity’s event on Building Prosperity through Employee Ownership

• Feb 26: Project Equity and Strategic Inflection Advisory’s Why Boutique Consultancies are Ideal for Employee Ownership Transitions

• Feb 26: Rochester Institute of Technology’s The Future of Business - How Shared Ownership Drives Innovation and Performance

• Feb 26-27: The Purpose Trust Ownership Conference in Austin, TX

Newly announced

• June 28-30: The Rutgers Institute’s Future of Equity Symposium in Palo Alto, CA

• March 3-24: The City of Minneapolis’s three-week Co-Op Startup Course

• March 13: The Institute for Economic Democracy’s Advancing Worker Ownership: Reclaiming Economic Sovereignty in the 21st Century event in London

Jobs jobs jobs

• The Ohio Center for Employee Ownership is hiring a Marketing & Communications Specialist

• The Los Angeles County Department of Economic Opportunity (DEO) is hiring a Technical Assistance & Education Services Provider on employee ownership

Employee stock ownership plans

• Dimensional Innovations of Kansas City, Haverford Systems of Downingtown, PA, and Hometown Restyling of Hiawatha, Iowa are now 100% employee-owned. Congrats!

• Emma Vorfeld profiles Dave Ring on how Sentry Equipment stays agile and resilient amid market uncertainty

• 📺 RSM, a tax firm, released a recent webinar on how employee-owned companies evolve through different stages of growth and maturity

• Up and Over Advisors gives a more critical take on ESOPs

Worker cooperatives

• In celebration of Black History Month, CooperationWorks highlights the achievements of activist and cooperative leader W.E.B Du Bois

• Jason Wiener published a plain-language guide to worker cooperatives

• In Kentucky, the Old Louisville Coffee Co-op will close this spring

Purpose trusts + steward ownership

• Common Trust released a case study on Guidon, Indiana’s first employee ownership trust

• New (to us): Earth Regeneration Alliance is purpose trust-owned, and Heath Ceramics is on their way (h/t Issie C.)

• 🤖 The most random link of the week: Ervis Mellani wants to use purpose trusts as a mechanism for AI to own companies

Employee ownership + the ownership economy

• Isabella Ferreras’ op-ed argues that we must democratize firms to save democracy and the planet

• Tandem published an online resource hub on direct employee ownership

• A little history:

  • Elle Griffin tells the story of how Cadbury Chocolatiers built a city for their workers, then transferred ownership to the community

  • David Ellerman published the latest in his series on historical advocates of workplace democracy, on Brookings Institution founder Robert S. Brookings

• Hannah Sandmeyer began a new position as Founder and CEO at Steward Market. Congrats, Hannah!

• Ownership Works-affiliated company Groundworks announced the first-ever dividend to employees from its Employee Ownership Program, distributing $31 million dollars to 5,000 employees

• 🎧 The Empowered Owners podcast hosted Paramount Plastics President Curtis Elliott, and the Edge for Tomorrow podcast interviewed Ownership Capital Lab’s Alison Lingane on employees as built-in buyers:

📚 Academic updates

• The Rutgers Institute is now accepting research proposals for its Future of Equity conference in June

• Abstracts for the International Conference on Franciscan Economics are due Feb 28

• Two new edited volumes on cooperatives dropped this week: Bruno Roelants’ Cooperativism at Work and Jerome Nikolai Warren et al.’s Global Cooperative Economics and Movements

• The International Review of Applied Economics journal published a raft of new papers from its recent special issue, including by Jamil Hassounah on employee attitudes, Stanislav Jurčišin on macroeconomic democracy, Michael Grant Zimmer on AI adoption, Miguel de la Fuente-Cosgaya on organizational identity, Tej Gonza & co on succession-planning and sustainable development, Lorin Busaan & Simon Pek on Canadian employee ownership, and Oier Onaindia Romero on corporate financial literacy 😅

• Susan Gary’s published her latest article, Planning With Purpose: Purpose trusts, charitable gifts, and business succession planning

• Common Trust released the newest version of its Employee Ownership Trust Playbook, with new case studies on Cypress Valley Meat Company, Guidon, and The Ready

• Alden Global Capital, an infamous hedge fund, wants to buy the employee-owned Daily Herald

• Employee Ownership Canada and other advocates are working to extend the Employee Ownership Trust capital gains tax incentive; send their petition to your favorite Canadians!

👉 In This Issue

1. Events + job opportunities

2. Employee stock ownership plans

3. Worker cooperatives

4. Purpose trusts + steward ownership

5. Employee ownership + the ownership economy

6. Academic updates

🏙️ Events

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

Coming up quick

• Feb 17: EOF’s ESOP Accelerator one-day course in Rocky Mount, NC

• Feb 18-20: ESCA’s Leadership Summit in St. Petersburg

• Feb 19:

  • Aspen Institute Economic Opportunities Program’s Building New Narratives on Work and Opportunity in the US South, ft. TNCEO’s

  • Collective Action for Just Finance’s webinar on impact first funds, ft. Project Equity’s David Kenney

  • NCEO’s webinar on planning an ownership culture

  • Southwest Indiana SBDC’s ESOP 101 Webinar — Is Employee Ownership the Right Exit Strategy for Your Business?

• Feb 24: North Carolina Employee Ownership Center’s NC Employee Ownership Ambassador Training Program

• Feb 24: The ESOP Association’s webinar on leading an ESOP

Newly announced

• Mar 11: LevelUp Coops’ How Ownership Actually Works in a Worker Co-op: A Hands-On Introduction to Ownership Design webinar

• July 8-10: 2026 IAFEP Conference at the University of Mondragon University in Oñati, Spain

Job opportunities

• PURPOSE LatAm is hiring a remote communications specialist in Colombia, Argentina, or Mexico

• Mosaic Capital Partners is hiring an investment associate

Employee stock ownership plans

• BostonbeaN Coffee Company is now 100% employee-owned. Congrats!

• The ERISA Advisory Council that regulates ESOPs has quietly disappeared, writes Paul Mulholland

• 🎧 Journey to an ESOP podcast hosts Makenzie Wirth, and The Ownership Effect podcast hosts Brian Bowers from Bowers + Kubota Consulting, an ESOP

• NCEO shares insights from two executives on how to navigate an ESOP transition

• Representative Bill Foster shared his ESOP transition story at a House Financial Services Committee meeting

Worker cooperatives

• The National Cooperative Business Association’s Doug O’Brien shares his remarks at the U.N. on why cooperatives are a preferred strategy for tackling inequality and advancing inclusive economic development

• New data shows cooperatives are rapidly growing in the U.S., Karina Pacheco shares with Co-op News

• From the left: Trebor Scholz argues that socialist-oriented co-ops provide a counterweight to concentrated platform power in Silicon Valley, and John Flores chronicles worker cooperatives’ participation in recent strikes and mutual aid efforts in Minneapolis

• ICYMI: Last year John Abrams helped Platt Builders of Massachusetts become a worker cooperative

Purpose trusts + steward ownership

• The Purpose Foundation team reflects on the recent sales of Threema and Vimeo and published a new case study on Haferkater, a steward-owned company

• If you missed last week’s Philadelphia article on Kensington Corridor Trust, it’s worth a read. Roody Senatus from ImpactAlpha wrote about KCT this week, too (paywalled)

• 🎧 The New World in the Making podcast hosts Sandra Castañeda-Elena from Somos Stewards

Employee ownership + the ownership economy

• 🇨🇦 Canadian company Paradigm Transportation Solutions is now an employee ownership trust. Congrats all!

  • Radio Canada International explains why Canadian companies are turning their workers into owners instead of selling to U.S. companies

  • Natasha Goldstein shares a CTV News article that argues an EOT tax-incentive in Canada is a “no-brainer”

• 🇬🇧 In the UK, Mondaq questions whether EOTs are still worth considering as an exit strategy after recent budget changes. The UK’s Employee Share Ownership Centre also released its February employee ownership newsletter

• 🇦🇺 Employee Ownership Australia’s most recent webinar, Why is Australia missing out on the employee ownership success story?, features Graeme Nuttall

• 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 The Democracy Collaborative will host two sessions at Scotland’s Economics Festival, featuring Neil Mclnroy & Thomas Hanna; and the Scottish Parliament passed a Community Wealth Building Bill

• In Impact Entrepreneur, Noelle St.Clair Lentz argues that employee ownership investing is reaching an inflection point as private equity, share plans, and economic democracy conversations converge

• ICYMI: Check out Morehouse’s International Comparative Labor Studies’ Nov 2025 edition of its newsletter, The Collective

• SOCAP released recordings of its the 2025 panels, including:

  • Justice & Economic Prosperity for All, moderated by Impact Alpha’s Roody Senatus

  • Investing in Economic and Political Power: Innovative Models for Change, moderated by Transform Finance’s Julie Menter:

📚 Academic updates

• Kyoung Yong Kim and co-authors extended to March 15th the deadline for paper submissions to their forthcoming Research Handbook on Employee Ownership

• Abstract submissions for the July 2026 International Association for the Economics of Participation (IAFEP) Conference at the University of Mondragon are due March 27th

• Marie J Bouchard and Damien Rousselière published A Modern Guide to the Social and Solidarity Economy

First, a quick random note from Dr. Hand:

C. Thi Nguyen’s The Score is a fabulous new book on how games help us understand life. This struck me:

“For many of us, a core experience of life is the pain of being misunderstood… Metrics make you an offer: If you accept this prefabricated, public value system into your heart, you will become instantly comprehensible.

“This might explain why some people will endlessly seek more money, even when they already have far more than they could ever use. This is not just normal selfishness. Some people will wreak havoc on the world while driving themselves into misery-into stressed-out, overworked, friendless exhaustion-all in their pursuit of higher numbers in their bank account. Because money is the ultimate shared scoring system, the system that is maximally legible to the largest chunk of the world. They have been dominated by the clarity of the score.”

When and I wrote year about the complex motivations of selling owners, part of what we saw is that business owners play multiple roles—owner, mother, brother, elder, neighbor, coach—each with their own set of values. For owners to reduce that complexity to a single number (the maximum amount of cash I can extract from a sale) is to be “dominated by the clarity of the score.”

🥃 Top Shelf News

• Congress passed the Consolidated Appropriations Act, which includes $2 million in funding for the Employee Ownership Initiative at the Department of Labor

  • Sen. Lakesia Collins introduced a bill to the Illinois General Assembly that would fund the Illinois Center for Employee Ownership; Steve Concannon announced the California Employee Ownership Coalition

• The Democracy at Work Institute released their 2025 State of the Sector report on worker cooperatives and democratic workplaces (also in Spanish)

• Isabella Ferreras led the publication of a 400-page, landmark report on democracy at work in Spain

• Nine new employee-owned, worker-owned, and trust-owned companies in the US were announced this week, including the multi-billion-dollar maker of MyChart

👉 In This Issue

1. Events + job opportunities

2. Employee stock ownership plans

3. Worker cooperatives

4. Purpose trusts + steward ownership

5. Employee ownership + the ownership economy

6. Academic updates

🏙️ Events

For a full list of upcoming events, see our Events page. And share your conference recaps with us!

Coming up quick

• Feb 10-Mar 3: National Center for Employee Ownership’s Why ESOP Communication is Vital webinar series

• Feb 10: Center for Local Finance and Growth’s webcast celebrating their new launch

  • NCEO’s Think Like an Owner workshop with Matt Hancock

• Feb 11: Regenerative Social Finance’s virtual event on alternative ownership (ft. Jenny Everett!)

  • Transform Finance’s webinar offering key insights from their new report

  • Rocky Mountain Employee Ownership Center’s Employee Ownership 101 webinar

• Feb 11-13: Purposeful Planning Institute’s Transforming Trusts for Purposeful Impact

• Feb 17: Employee Ownership Foundation’s ESOP Employee Accelerator course in Rocky Mount, NC

  • NCEO’s Leading Through Change: A Strategic Roadmap for CEO Transition

• Feb 19: NCEO’s webinar on planning an ownership culture

  • Southwest Indiana SBDC’s ESOP 101 Webinar — Is Employee Ownership the Right Exit Strategy for Your Business?

Newly announced

• Feb 25-26: NCEO and Ohio Center for Employee Ownership’s National Employee-Owner Summit in Mesa, Arizona

• Feb 26: Massachusetts Center for Employee Ownership and Common Trust’s webinar, Employee Ownership Trusts: Trusting You and Trusting Me

• March 10: Clarasys’ private event on governance and ownership for purpose-driven businesses, Locking in Purpose: From mindset to mandate

• Mar 25-26: The Texas/Oklahoma Chapter of The ESOP Association’s Regional Conference in Austin, TX

• Sep 22-23: The Great Game of Business Conference in St. Louis

• Oct 19-21: ICA Group’s 10th Annual National Home Care Cooperative Conference in Tacoma, Washington

Job Postings

• The Democracy At Work Institute is hiring a Program Manager

• NCEO is hiring a Fundraising and Grant Development Contractor

Employee stock ownership plans

• North Carolina general contractor Harker, Preferred Beef Group of Booker, TX, Imagine Early Learning Centers of New York, G&C Foods of New York, and H&H Sheet Metal of Kentucky are now employee-owned. Congrats all!

• ESCA has a new Board Chair, SEL’s Joey Nestegard; Bob’s Red Mills’ CEO Trey Winthrop was recognized by as the Portland Business Journal Executive of the Year (paywalled)

• 3LS launched 3LS Solutions, offering HR, accounting, and payroll services; Blue Ridge Associates acquired AmbroseAdvisors’ ESOP practice

• 40 Million Owners outlines six practical steps ESOPs can take to prepare for acquisition, 40MO’s Michael Morosi appears on the latest Alternative Exit podcast, and the Journey to an ESOP & Beyond podcast explores fear and readiness in businesses transitions to employee ownership

Worker cooperatives

• The Brooklyn-based Bike Plant is now worker-owned. Congrats!

• The International Cooperative Alliance released their first newsletter of 2026

• Writing for Coop News, R. Trebor Scholz highlights the success of a Spanish food delivery cooperative. In Providence Journal, Wheeler Cowperthwaite goes inside one worker co-op’s struggle to open a cannabis dispensary in Rhode Island

Purpose trusts + steward ownership

• Common Trust published a case study of Indiana-based Guidon, now veteran- and employee ownership trust-owned; PURPOSE published the newest edition of their steward ownership 101 book

• NCEO updated their EOT peer network page with new topics and event dates

• Oregon’s Softstar Shoes converted to an employee ownership trust (h/t Issie C); Mainscape of Indiana and Epic Systems—the maker of MyChart—are now perpetual purpose trusts (h/t Meg A):

Employee ownership + the ownership economy

• From Canada: John Hardy advocates for employee ownership options in the succession planning process, and Christina Palassio covers employee ownership’s uncertain future in Canada

• Brad’s Service Center shares its employee ownership succession success story

• CommonFuture released part two of their discussion about how to build enduring ownership structures; Sam Butler discusses the obstacles to creating a solidarity economy in NPQ

• The Urban Institute published a new report by Rebecca Marx and Brett Theodos on shared and mutual ownership and launched the Center for Local Finance and Growth

• In Coop News, Alice Toomer-McAlpine celebrates the Dudley Street Neighbourhood Initiative, a community land trust in Boston; Ben Seal at Philadelphia magazine spotlights the Kensington Corridor Trust

📚 Academic updates

• The Rutgers J. Robert Breyster Professorship is accepting applications through February 28

• Kosta Juri, Jerome Nikolai Warren, Claudia Henke, and Tej Gonza published a book chapter on the global efforts to promote cooperative principles through modern employee‑buyout innovations

• Graeme Nutall and John Hoffmire explore employee profit-sharing in non-profits using employee ownership trusts (h/t Michael P.)

• Gangaram Singh explores employee ownership as an institutional problem of adoption, diffusion, and learning

• In COBSInsights, Trevor Young-Hyman challenges the assumption that workplace democracy is bad for business

• The newest installment in David Ellerman’s series on lesser-known workplace democracy voices features economist and professor Henry Carter Adams

• Ethan Rouen and Leigh M. Weiss write lay out the management practices that make employee ownership pay off

• The Wellbeing Economic Alliance (WEALL) launched its Reclaim the Economy Week, hosting multiple events and publishing a petition calling on political leaders to redesign economic systems for the wellbeing of people and the planet

• JPMorganChase announced a $250,000 investment in the Iowa Center for Employee Ownership to support education and transition assistance. Congrats AI-CEO!

• Incoming governments in Germany and the Netherlands plan to introduce steward-ownership legislation

• Daniel Gitterman and Sonal Shah are looking for chapter authors for a new book Brookings book, Catalyzing Impact: How Business and Philanthropy Spark Change; email Dr. Hand for details

👉 In This Issue

1. Events & job opportunities

2. Employee ownership

3. Employee stock ownership plans

4. Worker cooperatives

5. Purpose trusts and steward ownership

6. Academic updates

🏙️ Events

For a full list of upcoming events, see our Events page. And share your conference recaps with us!

Coming up quick

• Feb 2-3: NCEO’s 2026 Women’s Summit and ‘Is an ESOP Right for You?’ Conference in Fort Lauderdale, FL

• Feb 3: 2026 Employee Ownership Roundtable in Perth, AU (and Zoom!)

• Feb 4-6: The ESOP Association’s Professionals’ Forum in Charleston, SC

• Feb 5: Common Trust’s Owners Session: Passing the Torch Without Losing the Mission

• Feb 10-Mar 3: National Center for Employee Ownership’s Why ESOP Communication is Vital webinar series

• Feb 11: Regenerative Social Finance’s virtual event on alternative ownership (ft. Jenny Everett!)

• Feb 11: Transform Finance’s webinar offering key insights from their new report

• Feb 11: Rocky Mountain Employee Ownership Center’s Employee Ownership 101 webinar

• Feb 11-13: Purposeful Planning Institute’s Transforming Trusts for Purposeful Impact

Newly announced

• Feb 19: Collective Action for Just Finance’s webinar on impact first funds, ft. Project Equity’s David Kenney

• Feb 24: North Carolina Employee Ownership Center’s NC Employee Ownership Ambassador Training Program

• Feb 26: Project Equity and Strategic Inflection Advisory’s Why Boutique Consultancies are Ideal for Employee Ownership Transitions

• Feb 26: Rochester Institute of Technology’s The Future of Business - How Shared Ownership Drives Innovation and Performance

• March 3: SV2’s Innovative Finance Spotlight 2026 ft. Alison Lingane

• March 10-11: eoa’s course on Representing and Developing Employee Voices

• March 12: EOX and Deanalytics’ Beyond Retirement, The Real Story of ESOP Payouts

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

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

• May 15-16: California Co-op Conference; accepting speaker proposals through Feb 2nd!

• Aug 26-28: NCEO’s EOT Workshop 3.0 at the NCEO Forum in Phoenix. Sign up to stay updated

• Oct 1: Iowa Center for Employee Ownership’s Annual Conference in Ankeny, IA

Job Postings

• Ownership Capital Lab is hiring for a Senior Manager at their Innovations Lab and a part time Philanthropic Partnerships Lead

• Donuts Economic Action Lab is hiring a remote Business and Enterprise Lead

Employee ownership

• The latest edition of EOX’s Ownership Everywhere newsletter features new research from EOX and Deanalytics on ESOP distributions, news from North Dakota, Missouri, and a Stakehold shoutout (thanks y’all!)

• Common Trust published a resource for those considering a transition to employee ownership

• SV2 announced Alison Lingane as a speaker at their upcoming Innovative Finance Spotlight event

• Tandem Center for Shared Business Success announced the release of their guide to employee ownership, co-authored with NCEO’s Corey Rosen and other industry leaders

• An opinion piece from Logan Walters in Florida State University News asks whether worker cooperatives and employee ownership could work on-campus

• The Aspen Institute offers a look at the year ahead for employee ownership

• TeamShares founder Michael Sutherland Brown sits down with Loren Feldman and the 21 Hats podcast ahead of the company’s public offering

• Columbian energy company Ecopetrol has added a worker-director voice to their governing board

• The Alternative Exit podcast hosted Noelle St.Clair Lentz of Alleviate Impact Capital on the role of capital structures in employee ownership transitions

Employee stock ownership plans

• Journey to an ESOP’s most recent episode with Blue Ridge Associate Pete Shuler offers practical insights into each stage of an ESOP lifecycle

• Fourteen ESCA members were featured on Forbes’ 40th Annual List of America’s Top Private Companies

• The ESOP Association released its latest ESOP Report

  • The newest episode of TEA’s Ownership Effect podcast hosted Mindset’s Kendra Kosko Isaacson on ESOP policymaking

• Writing for NCEO, Chris Wingrad breaks down 80/20’s years-long ESOP dispute (paywalled)

Worker cooperatives

• A new piece from U.S. Federation of Worker Cooperatives highlights how midwest cooperatives came together to learn and share tips

• The International Cooperative Alliance released their recording of a webinar celebrating the year of the cooperative and analyzing recent movement trends

  • … and their regional and global teams met this week to prepare to launch the new Legal Framework Analysis and its accompanying workshop

  • ICYMI, checkout ICA’s interview series with cooperative leaders

• Co-op News’ Executive Editor Rebecca Harvey offers insights into how to use data to better understand impact in the cooperative movement

• The Cooperative Development Program launched a Cooperative Leaders and Scholars Fellowship for those looking to make an impact in the cooperative business community

• ICA Group’s Allison Curtis reflects on ICA’s first edition of their Worker Buyout Training Program

Purpose trusts and steward ownership

• Steward-owned highlights Pete Russell’s recent definition of steward ownership on James Reed CBE’s podcast, All About Business

• Jon Shell sat down with Alternative Exit’s Andy Farquharson to discuss the policy work that put EOTs on the national agenda in Canada

• Purpose Foundation finds (some) common ground with Donald Trump’s view of ownership

• ICYMI: We learned this week about Delaware’s new Well-Being Trusts

  • Though focused on families and individuals, it does broaden the idea well-being beyond purely financial considerations to include what researchers call socioemotional wealth

The ownership economy

• Alastair Colin-Jones of Economics of Mutuality Alliance announced a new fund

• NextCity’s latest podcast featured a new Urban Institute report on how new real estate models are building community ownership

• Common Future highlights five key lessons from their recent webinar on community ownership

• The Economy of Francesco released a video with highlights from their 2025 Global Event

📚 Academic updates

• Antony Bugg-Levine has joined the London School of Economics and Political Science as a Senior Fellow working on Capital Markets Shaping. Our congratulations, Antony!

• In Compensation and Benefits Review, Amer Morshed publishes a study comparing how workplace democracy and transparency shape performance in employee-owned firms

• In a paper published in the International Review of Applied Economics, Begoña Echaburu Mulet and co-authors Saioa Aranda Lasagabaster and Eva Gallardo-Gallardo examine talent and social construction in employee-owned organizations

• David Ellerman’s newest edition in his series highlighting lesser-known workplace democracy supporters covers 19th century Senator Leland Stanford

• N. Narimov published a brief connecting employee ownership to transformational leadership (PDF)

• Simon Kinsey published his master’s thesis, Collective Labour in a Capitalist Market: The Historical Struggle to Secure a Place for Worker Cooperatives in the Canadian Political Economy. Congrats Simon!

Watching the news out of Davos, we couldn’t help but notice the backpedalling of previous advocates of stakeholder capitalism. It reinforces for us that stakeholder consideration is only durable when stakeholders have ownership: a financial stake and/or decision-making power.

Meanwhile, some fun news: the National Center For Employee Ownership is now the second official sponsor of The Stakehold! We are grateful for their support and yours and look forward to sharing more from the NCEO team in the coming weeks.

🥃 Top Shelf News

• The House passed legislation with $2 million in funding for the Department of Labor’s Employee Ownership Initiative, led by Hilary Abell

• Anthropic, maker of Claude, updated its constitution—which, as we understand it, is enforced by Anthropic’s long-term benefit trust

• The European Parliament adopted a legal framework to make employee ownership easier across its borders

• TeamShares is increasing their acquisitions in anticipation of their NASDAQ listing

• Legacy Exit’s next Succession Planning Cohort is February 28th; info session today at 2pm MT

• Donovan Ervin explores how community investing works and how CDFIs can be harnessed to catalyze growth in high-impact and minority-owned businesses

👉 In This Issue

1. Events

2. Employee ownership and the ownership economy

3. Employee stock ownership plans

4. Worker cooperatives

5. Purpose trusts and steward ownership

6. Academic updates

🏙️ Events

For a full list of upcoming events, see our Events page. And share your conference recaps with us! Coming up:

• Jan 23: Legacy Exit’s next Succession Planning Cohort is February 28th; an info session is today at 2pm MT

• Jan 24: TPSS Co-Op hosts Jon Steinman at its Shaping Our Second Store event in Tacoma Park, near DC

• Jan 24: EoF’s Dutch Hub Launch Event

• Jan 27: Ownership Capital Lab’s unveiling of their annual State of the Employee Ownership Fund Marketplace

• Jan 27: NCEO’s primer on AI for employee-owned businesses

• Jan 27: EOA’s research update from their partnership with UNSW Business School

• Jan 28: ICA’s Co-op Women’s Voices conversation on cooperatives and leadership

• Jan 28: RMEOC’s webinar on Colorado’s cooperative workforce project

• Jan 29: Somos Stewards webinar on how property ownership can support people and the planet

• Feb 9: Steward-owned’s refresher on steward ownership’s background and legal framework

• Feb 18: Let’s Talk ESOPs event for ESOP HR professionals in Dallas

Employee ownership and the ownership economy

• Elspeth J. Murray, Simon Pek and Melissa Hoover offer four reasons employee ownership is necessary for the Canadian economy

• Transform Finance published Hiding in Plain Sight, a new report for business leaders navigating “the tension between their personal values and professional expectations”

  • TF’s Julia Parker is also launching a national survey on community-owned real estate projects

• Yifat Aran and Casimiro Nigro argue for a holistic approach to stock option policies in the European Union

• EO Sector analyses recent cuts to employee ownership trust tax incentives in the UK

• North Carolina Employee Ownership Center expounds on the “Aha!” moment that often leads owners to explore shared ownership

• Two opportunities for owners:

  • Legacy Exit’s Succession Planning Cohort Spring 2026 launches February 28th; info session today at 2pm MT

  • Applications are open for Shared Prosperity’s Leading for Shared Prosperity cohort

• David Ellerman’s second installment on lesser-known advocates of employee ownership highlights British economist and philosopher John Stuart Mill

• In ImpactAlpha (paywalled), Roody Senatus covers how capital and long term investments can work to keep housing affordable

• The Private Equity Stakeholder Project is hiring a Senior Healthcare Research and Campaign Coordinator (h/t Claire E)

• Leslie Wilson’s recent Ted Talk covers how ownership can make work better for everyone:

Employee stock ownership plans

• A Texas employee-owner shares how employee ownership impacted his sense of self-worth

• PSCA explains what last week’s enforcement changes at EBSA mean for ESOPs

• In Forbes, Evan Edwards argues we are entering ‘Generation ESOP’

Worker cooperatives

• A group of journalists are reviving Gourmet magazine as a worker cooperative, in line with media outlets like Defector, Hell Gate, and 404 Media (h/t Hudson B)

• In Nonprofit Quarterly, Andre Carter explores how agricultural cooperatives could help Alabama fully break free of its “plantation economy”

• In LSE Business Review, Gabriel Burdin and Fabio Landini ask why worker co-operatives aren’t more prevalent and provide ways to encourage their creation

• A report from Co-operative Housing International, ICA, and the International Legal Research and Analysis Initiative compares cooperative housing laws in 20 countries

• Atthowe Fine Arts Services reflects on their recent panel on cooperative ownership of museums space

Purpose trusts and steward ownership

• A recent RMEOC webinar shares a new report on the U.S. policy landscape for employee ownership trusts

• PURPOSE shares a timeline detailing the history of steward ownership

• Peter Koehler announced a new website and newsletter, The Stronghold Report

• ICYMI: The Financial Times highlighted The Good Store, John and Hank Green’s “100% for Purpose” business, last December (h/t Issie C)

📚 Academic updates

• The Rutgers Institute hosted a webinar this week on employee ownership policy initiatives; you can find briefs on each policy proposal here

• Four new books, nerds!

  • Matthew Maguire and Graham K. Wilson’s Elgar Encyclopedia of Business and Government, including an entry by Simon Pek, Lorin Busaan and

    Dr. Hand 🎉

  • Hanne S. Birkmose and Karsten Engsig Sørensen’s Stakeholder Engagement in European Countries: Company Law Perspectives

  • Franziska M. Renz and Richard A. Posthuma’s Research Handbook on Psychological Ownership and Management

  • Pavlos Vlachos’s Stakeholder Capitalism: A Guidebook of Research-Informed Questions and Answers

• Joram Scholten, Chris de Nijs, Slinger Jansen, and Sergio España-Cubillo published a book chapter on the democratization of work in the software industry

• Carlotta Luisa Kelber published her masters thesis on steward ownership as a pathway for de-growth oriented businesses. Congratulations, Carlotta!

• Cecile G. Betit published a case study on ESOP-owned Carris Reels’ corporate governance in Economic Transformations in Population Aging: Unlocking the Silver Economy

A newsletter injection from Dr. Hand:

👋 I went to my niece’s state cheerleading competition last night, where I learned that public school cheerleading across Texas is controlled by one company that has been owned by four different private equity firms and most recently sold for $4.75 billion. If private equity firms did their job, $2.5 billion was transferred from cheer parents to private equity investors in just one of those sales.

Because every economic nail looks like it needs a shared ownership hammer, I couldn’t help but wonder: What if there were another way? What if Texas cheerleading were cooperatively owned by Texas families? Or steward-owned? Or protected by a trust? There are many middle ways between public funding (which boys’ football has, btw) and the financifying of high school sports.

In any case, GO CATS!

Top shelf news

• The Department of Labor announced an end to its national enforcement project targeting employee stock ownership plans (ESOPs). Deputy Secretary of Labor Keith Sonderling breaks down the decision; PlanSponsor, NCEO, and ESOP Association offer their analysis

  • Also from DC, the House also included language in an appropriations bill directing the SBA to provide information on ESOPs to business owners

  • And President Trump’s newest economic proposal aims to prevent institutional investors from owning single-family housing

• Actors Ben Affleck and Matt Damon are sharing metric-based bonuses with all crew members on their recent project, The Rip

• Brett Theodos is heading a new Center for Local Finance and Growth at the Urban Institute. Congrats Brett!

• Responses to Kevin Starr’s December SSIR article There is No Such Thing as Impact Investing continue to dominate our feeds. Here is a startup founder’s perspective (paywalled) on the debate

• 👷‍♂️ Job openings:

  • Senior Manager, Business Engagement and Partnerships at Project Equity

  • Associate Director of investment at Apis & Heritage Capital Partners

In this edition

1. Events

2. Employee stock ownership plans

3. Worker cooperatives

4. Purpose trusts and steward ownership

5. Employee ownership analysis and opinion

6. The ownership economy

7. Academic updates

8. ICYMI

Events

See our full list of upcoming events and share your event recaps with us, too!

• Jan 19: U.S. Federation of Worker Cooperatives’ webinar on filing taxes as an LLC Cooperative

• 🆕 | Jan 20: NCEO’s Capital Planning webinar for ESOPs

• 🆕 | Jan 22: National Cooperative Business Association’s Advocacy Webinar

• Jan 24: TPSS Co-Op hosts Jon Steinman at its Shaping Our Second Store event in Tacoma Park, near DC

• 🆕 | Jan 27: Ownership Capital Lab’s State of the Employee Ownership Fund Marketplace webinar

• Feb 2-3: NCEO’s 2026 Women’s Summit and ‘Is an ESOP Right for You?’ Conference in Fort Lauderdale

• Feb 3: Employee Ownership Australia’s Employee Ownership Roundtable in Perth/on Zoom

• Feb 4-6: The ESOP Association’s Professionals’ Forum in Charleston

• Feb 5: Common Trust’s Owners Session: Passing the Torch Without Losing the Mission

Employee stock ownership plans

• New employee owners:

  • Apis & Heritage Capital Partners are financing their largest employee-led buyout to date, with more than 1,100 workers at B and B Maintenance in Illinois set to become owners

  • Texas-based Paragon Sports Constructors is now 100% employee-owned

  • Florida-based Advanced Roofing announced their transition to employee ownership as a means of protecting the company’s future

• 40 Million Owners argues that 2026 will be the year ESOP M&A goes mainstream

• David Ellerman and his co-authors take a deep dive into Slovenia’s new ESOP legislation

• A new episode from The Ownership Effect covers the history of ESOPs

• David Fitz-Gerald’s novel If It’s the Last Thing I Do was honored with the Popular Book Prize by the Rutgers Institute. Congratulations!

• In Forbes, Evan Edwards highlights to the scale of employee ownership, which now includes 10.8 million U.S. workers

• For Mazars, Cara Benningfield explores employee ownership of trucking

Worker cooperatives

• Cooperative Leaders and Scholars is hosting info sessions for their 8-month cooperative-focused fellowship opportunity

• The National Cooperative Business Association CLUSA International reflects on the cooperative movement’s 110th anniversary

• A recent UN Resolution calls for the proclamation of an International Year of the Cooperative every decade

• Taneli Vaskelainen argues co-operatives can play a significant role in sustainability transitions

Purpose trusts and steward ownership

• Purpose Foundation shares new data highlighting recent growth in steward ownership

• Rocky Mountain Employee Ownership Center shared a webinar on how EOTs enable succession plans that benefit employees

Employee ownership opinion and analysis

• Transform Finance is launching a project in 2026 on “the development of impact metrics for employee ownership investing,” per their most recent newsletter

• Texas’ Tempo Air reflects on employee ownership as a defining aspect of their company culture

• Andy Farquharson shares the lessons from Denmark’s employee ownership culture

• In Inc, Mandy Gilbert argues that the best ideas emerge from employee-led cultures

• Miles Mudzviti reviews Alli Gibbons’s new book, The Power of Ownership Culture

The ownership economy

• A recent ImpactAlpha newsletter included links to Mark Kelly’s call for a federal trust fund from AI profits, Martin Smith’s arguments for a citizen equity wallet, and Joseph Blasi’s case for citizens having a stake in AI companies (paywalled)

• Beth Gohl-Greenaway argues the next decade is primed for alternative forms of ownership

• Gary Community Ventures and their partners announced a wealth-building pilot designed to provide impoverished youth with asset accounts

• Erinch Sahan highlights the DECENT Alliance, a more collaborative and sustainable alternative to traditional food supply chains

• In Jacobin, Tej Gonza and Kosta Juri argue that commodified ownership hurts the small business owners democratic ownership could help

• A Texas woman’s career changed forever when she began to help her co-workers navigate complex 401(k) matching programs

📚 Academic updates

• A quick correction: last week, we mislinked the Rutgers Kelso Workshop program. Here is the right one. Check it out, especially the program overview on pp.5-6.

  • Tej Gonza, Gonzalo Hernandez, and Sneha Salgam posted recaps

• Purpose Foundation highlights academic reports and articles on steward ownership from the past decade

• CU Denver News shares how a professor’s single email connected Salvador Gonzalez to an employee-ownership–aligned internship, setting off a career pathway that culminated in his role as Director of the Rocky Mountain Employee Ownership Center

• Jason Spicer was honored with the Joyce Rothschild Book Award for his book “Co-operative Enterprise in Comparative Perspective: Exceptionally Un-American?” Congratulations Jason!

• David Ellerman launched a new series on lesser-known advocates of employee ownership, starting with Alexis de Tocqueville

ICYMI

• CEO of Radically Open Security Melanie Rieback gave the opening keynote at the Business as Mission conference in November: