🤖 AI Anxiety Week
The ownership economy newsletter, Vol. 134
Welcome back! Top shelf news:
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
🏙️ 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