Welcome back!
⬆️ Homer Simpson had a clear stance on the relationship between economic and political power, the latter of which Mark wrote about this week.
Reading an anti-union judge’s take from 1909—that enough sugar would inoculate workers against seeking power—helped us understand the historical tension between employee ownership and the labor movement (ht Dawn Brohawn)
John Case argues that a century ago many US companies experimented with sharing both the sugar and the power, before the Wagner Act of 1935 limited them to the former
🎙️ On Hasan Minhaj’s podcast, John Russell of More Perfect Union highlights how worker-owned businesses in Italy share both (ht Taylor Knickel)
Thank you to the Purpose Trust Ownership Network, Melissa Hoover, Matthew Epperson, Isabella Steichen, Ellen G. Frank-Miller, PhD, Jenny Everett, and OEOC for the shout-outs last week 🫶
And please welcome to The Stakehold team Kate Tully, who joins us as a research fellow this fall!
🥃 Top Shelf News
A double shot of the good stuff from the NCEO:
Corey Rosen reports new SBA rules requiring all individual plan participants to meet non-citizen restrictions have effectively shut down SBA financing for ESOPs
NCEO merged The Bulletin and Member Memo into a new monthly newsletter: The Ownership Constellation
The Department of Treasury permanently exempted small businesses, including cooperatives, from Beneficial Ownership Information reporting requirements under the Corporate Transparency Act
👉 In This Issue
Events, Etc.
Upcoming Events + OpportunitiesEmployee Ownership
ESOPs + Employee Ownership Trusts + Worker CooperativesThe Ownership Economy
Community Ownership & Wealth + Ownership on Purpose + Workplace & Economic DemocracyAcademic News
🏙️ Events + Jobs
Events This Week
For more, see our Events page.
Aug 23-25: ESOP Association’s CEO Summit in Rancho Palos Verdes
🆕 Aug 25: Asset Funders Network California and TFN’s Smart Growth California are hosting a webinar on community ownership and control of assets in California (ht DAWI)
Aug 25: Institute for Family Governance hosts a lunch presentation with Newman’s Own Foundation CEO Alex Amouyel in Miami, FL
The Center for Community Wealth’s Employee Ownership Skills: Shared Leadership virtual workshop
Aug 26-28: NCEO’s 2026 NCEO Forum is taking place in Phoenix, AZ
Day one features an intensive Employee Ownership Trust workshop hosted by NCEO
Aug 26 marks the start of the Northwest Cooperative Development Center’s 6-week Co-op Conversion Academy
Aug 27-28: The Rutgers-Oxford Employee Ownership Research Conference at Kellogg College, UK
Kellogg College hosts a lecture by Professor Jonathan Michie on The Role of Employee Ownership in Oxford, England
Also: Who Owns the Future? An Idea Showcase in Washington, DC hosted by the Urban Institute
Opportunities
For more, visit our Ownership Jobs Board.
The Right to the City Alliance is looking for a new National Organizer of Capital Strategies to lead deployment of their RTTC Loan Fund
Trust Neighborhoods is hiring a Director of Finance
Employee Ownership
ImpactAlpha features SunCulture’s recent employee ownership initiative, which gives all full-time employees an equity share (paywalled)
Over the next 7 weeks, David Owen will reveal the 7 businesses featured in his upcoming book, ‘Employee Ownership: Passing the Baton - Seven Success Stories,’ about employee ownership in the UK
The first is Riverford Organic Farmers, an employee-owned trust in Devon, UK, that earns an A+ on locked-in purpose, distributed decision making, and financial participation
📈 Employee Stock Ownership Plans
Ohio’s Roppe Holding Company, a family of flooring brands, transitioned to 100% employee-owned via ESOP
OwnersEdge proposes ready-made ESOP holding companies as a streamlined alternative to structuring ESOPs from scratch
David Solomon and Anthony Dolan break down the challenges, opportunities, and key players when selling an ESOP-owned company
🎙️ESOP Radio talks with Joe Belsterling, CEO of Certified EO, about the difference between being an ESOP on paper and having employee owners
Isabelle Steichen shares Torana's takeaways from the Oxford Symposium: ESOP plan counts are falling while participants climb toward 15 million, driven by acquisitive ESOPs adding ~20,000 newly employee-owned workers a year through M&A
Shoppe Black profiles Apis & Heritage and their goal of “transitioning more and larger companies to employee ownership”
🤝 Employee Ownership Trusts (EOTs)
UK trend: Veterinary practices transitioning to employee ownership
John Lewis Partnership, the UK’s largest employee-owned business, announces board member Will Kernan as new managing director
ICA Group cofounder Steven Dawson published Help Wanted, a new co-authored book. Case studies include purpose trust-owned Optimax and Zingerman's; ESOP-owned Messer Construction and SRC; and Cooperative Home Care Associates
✊ Worker Cooperatives
The Center for Community Wealth releases the inaugural State of the Denver Worker Cooperative Sector Report. Congrats!
💁🏽♀️ Fun fact: 83% of Colorado’s worker-owners are women
A report from Canada.Coop by Christine Clarke details strategies to strengthen equity, access, and support for underrepresented co-op entrepreneurs
On Sept 15, the International Cooperative Alliance (ICA) will meet in Panama to elect a new President and 15 Directors for their 30-member global Board
Anurag Dang questions the relationship between cooperatives and capitalism
and calls on co-op leaders to revive the core values of 1844
Senate lawmakers stalled the Farm Bill over party lines before recess, but key funding wins for rural co-ops remain locked into the draft as talks continue.
The Platform Cooperativism Consortium is running a workshop series on cooperative tech futures geared toward building toward a collaborative zine of utopian, democratically-owned technology
🎙️ Strange Birds shares the story of worker co-op, EMMA Technology
The Ownership Economy
Alexander William Salter examines J.D. Vance’s economic perspective, framing his advocacy for state-influenced market policies as a shift toward rebalancing traditional conservative economic ideas
🚚 NY Mayor Mamdani’s Delivery Protection Act enters the ownership economy chat, challenging Amazon’s subcontracting practices (paywalled)
The Aspen Ideas: Economy Conference is set for early Oct; this week they announced a first set of speakers
⚾️ UMKC’s CLEI asks what if public-private deals treated cities as investors, like Kansas City/Royals negotiations. (Update: Kansas City would get 5% of non-baseball profits)
Mark is going to check out the Conscious Capitalism Dallas chapter next week; come say hello!
Community Ownership & Wealth
Two Canadian credit unions pursue a merger after unanimous approval from both boards
The National Cooperative Bank returns $44.79M to 1,636 shareholders
Sean Geobey shares a reading list on how cooperative ownership and community capital can keep local businesses locally owned
Rupal Patel observes that community ownership funding already exists but is difficult to access due to the lack of coordination between capital stacks and funders
Built to Last suggests a “shift in the rights, power, and benefits of ownership into community hands, held there by design” to better define community ownership
The Center for Community Investment published a report of what they learned after working in five major US cities
From Co-operative News, the Mayday Saxonvale project states its share offer targets of £1.2m to create a community-owned town center
Susana Cabrera went from street vending to owning an Everytable franchise through a social equity program that finances 100% of franchise costs and guarantees salary during the transition
Roodgally Senatus and Amy Cortese report that Paul Bradley and the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy are building out new financing strategies for affordable housing acquisitions (paywalled)
Ownership on Purpose
Hannah Sandmeyer of Steward Market and Elizabeth Limbach of 1% for the Planet will get into the nitty gritty of what needs preserved during ownership transitions in their September webinar
🎙️ Lift Economy’s Beyond the B talks with Tony Chocolonely’s CEO, Douglas Lamont about their steward-influenced governance structure and gets another shout-out during their conversation with Chris Marquis about systems change and transforming industries
Workplace & Economic Democracy
The Democracy Collaborative launches its new From Our Archives series, drawing from over 50 years of resources
“Discipline vs. Extraction”: With P&G acquiring Thorne, Pure Synergy’s CEO argues that who owns the company matters
📚 New academic research
Julian M. Hill of Georgia State University’s College of Law explores strategies to address procedural, structural, and cultural barriers to Black employee ownership, building on a new Atlanta-based study
New Research from Saïd Business School’s Ownership Project finds public companies led by a founding-family-member outperformed all other firms on ESG
Simone M. Müller and co-authors examine whether shareholders’ nonfinancial motivations are reflected in corporate governance, suggesting stakeholder governance as a more inclusive alternative (paywalled)
Not new, but newly more available: Nathan Schneider’s co-edited book on solidarity economies is now a free online toolbox