🐈 An Epic Week for Ownership Transitions

The ownership economy newsletter (Vol. 132)

Welcome back!

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 Peter Boumgarden 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.”

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🥃 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

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The Stakehold is supported by NCEO and by readers like you ❤️

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👉 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

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🏙️ 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

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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

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📚 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

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