How to Make Business a Force For Good (For Real)

Ownership on Purpose, Vol. 8

Nov 04, 2026

👋 Nice to meet you!

Heyo! Ariel here, Contributing Editor for Ownership on Purpose. Mark and I graduated from the same PhD program at the University of Texas at Austin (🤘), and now I lead at the Center for Social Impact Strategy (CSIS) at The University of Pennsylvania. CSIS, the foremost space for purpose-first executive education at Penn, recently became the proud home of Penn’s long-standing Leadership Program for ESOP CEOs and Presidents.

I’ve taught social innovation, entrepreneurship, leadership, and international development at Penn. Our ESOP leadership program was my entry into employee ownership, and here at The Stakehold I’ll explore how purpose-first initiatives in any sector can leverage shared ownership to deepen their impact.

Now that the US elections are over, I’m looking forward to Mark’s panel, What is Your Organisation For?, and asking how aligning purpose, participation, and profit can advance an organization’s ability to achieve its mission. See you there!

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🥃 News On Ownership for Purpose

For ImpactAlpha, Christoph Bietz analyzes the Long Term Benefit Trust unveiled in Anthropic’s S-1 filing and finds it “neither permanent nor fully secured”
- Antony Bugg-Levine, by constrast, compares OpenAI’s and Anthropic’s structures—and compares both to the “founding ideals of the US”
- A thought: Maybe these are not contradictory. Per Abraham Lincoln, the founding ideals of the US are never fully secured, either
🇳🇱 A new Dutch foundation sets out to protect and strengthen mission-driven businesses. Their first potential client? Ben & Jerry’s (paywalled)
- KKR executive Pete Stavros (founder of Ownership Works and Expanding ESOPs) has other ideas
- Also see the People’s Campaign to free Ben & Jerry’s
What’s in the water in the UK? Two reports came out this month that are resonant with the guidebook Oxford’s Skoll Centre launches this month:
- In the UK, the Institute of Directors published Business as a Force for Good, which lays out seven dimensions for assessing “the governance, ownership, incentives, and wider conditions that shape business behaviour”
- Yoak, a consulting firm, published Business Design for Systems Change, a “systems approach to designing business and their funding ecosystems”
- 📺 Joseph Rowntree Foundation’s Erinch Sahan also speaks to how “distributive models of ownership and governance might save democracies...and more”

👉 In This Issue

Events & Opportunities
Stories on Purpose
Research & Insights

🏙️ Events & Opportunities

Events

Nov 4: The ESOP Association’s Employee Owned 26 in Las Vegas wraps up today
Nov 9: LSE’s Philanthropy and the Impact Economy, online and in London
Nov 12: The Institute for Business in Global Society at Harvard’s TOP26: Steward Ownership Conference in Cambridge, MA
Nov 13: Oxford’s Skoll Centre asks What is Your Organisation For? on how to redesign organizations for shared purpose, power, and profit
Nov 25: Kellogg College’s Stakeholders Without Voice, on human rights at work, in Oxford
Dec 1: Big Table Institute’s Systems Change & the Impact Economy

For more events more than a month out, see our main Events page.

Opportunities

B Lab is hiring a Regional Director for the U.S. & Canada
Nov 15: Deadline: Spring Point Partners | Impact Investments MBA Internship, Summer 2027, in Philadelphia, PA
Dec 11 Deadline: NY Small Business Funders Collective opens grant applications for Successful Succession
Seed Commons announces five new member orgs in CA, NE and PA
Applications are open until the cohort is filled for the Leadership Program for ESOP CEOs and Presidents 2027 cohort at the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Social Impact Strategy

For more, visit our Jobs page.

Stories on Ownership for Purpose

🎙️ Beyond the B releases a new episode with Rod Johnson of BLK & Bold, a coffee and tea brand distributing 5% of gross profits to youth programs
Forbes’ Afdhel Aziz spotlights Newman’s Own Foundation 100% For Purpose Club (paywalled)
📺 ICYMI: In June the Walker Group hosted Beyond the Traditional Sale, a conversation among leaders of employee ownership trusts and perpetual purpose trusts:

Research & Insights

The latest arguments, analysis, stories, and academic research (📚)

Employee ownership 🤝 purpose: Beyond a sense of individual purpose, NCEO finds that employee-owned companies cultivate a shared sense of purpose in their community
- 📺 Findlay-Hancock County Chamber of Commerce (OH) interviews Ginny Vanderslice (Ariel’s colleague at UPenn) and Chris Cooper of the Ohio Employee Ownership Center
- A widely read op-ed took aim at the incentive structures of business schools last week. Christopher Marquis argues they should become “schools for organizing” and “study co-ops, unions and social movements alongside the shareholder corporation”
What’s the purpose of data centers? Cordeiro and O’Brien bat around the idea of data center owned by a perpetual purpose trust in the San Diego Union-Tribune
- The Federation of American Scientists analyzes local policies and ten executed community benefits agreements
- In SSIR, Sadler et al. argues that Community Governance is Critical for Better Data Informed Decisions
- ICYMI: Aspen’s EOP explores Work and the Social Contract in the Age of AI
Purposeful finance: Sandra Stewart investigates the emerging trend of purpose-driven M&A for Impact Entrepreneur
- Forbes’ Aparna Rae delves into the strategic funding partnership between Molina Niño of Known Holdings and Lauren Grattan of Mission Driven Finance
- In SSIR, Sarah Mousa pushes against scarcity framing with Generative Philanthropy
Field updates: Purpose’s October SO Monthly Brief covers all the news on steward ownership (and plugs our our guidebook launch next week!)
- Steward Market also releases their October edition of Notes from the Field

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More News on Shared Ownership & Social Impact

This section features news from The Stakehold on shared ownership structures and their intersections with social impact.

Community Ownership

🇨🇦 Social Innovation Canada and System Shift report how to scale individual community wealth building initiatives into broader economic development
Gwen Frisbie-Fulton gives a glimpse of her tightly interconnected community campaigning for affordable senior housing in North Carolina (ht GEO)
📺 Sam Nabi shares what an Indigenous Community Hub and community land trust could look like in Kitchener (🇨🇦)
Explore The Guild’s approach to Community Stewardship Trust, which focuses on neighborhood ownership of commercial real estate
New Growth Innovation Network spotlights employee- and community ownership models as wealth-building strategies for low- and middle-income workers
Castlemaine Community Co-operative translate their community’s experience buying real estate together into a how-to guide, in partnership with Paul Ramsay Foundation
🎙️ Transform Finance drops the second episode of their new podcast Own the Block, on building power vs. just acquiring property
Cooperative Development Foundation is awarded $950K Rural Cooperative Development Grant from USDA’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture

Economic Democracy

📺 Aspen Ideas: Economy 2026 releases recordings from Tulsa
How can we build a food system that works for the people who feed us? (ht Priya Fielding-Singh)
Worth Watching: One Project is developing funding vehicles designed to give communities more ownership in building economic democracies
Sruti Suryanarayanan interviews USFWC’s Esteban Kelly, ranging from the systems organizing Berkley Student Co-ops to the wider solidarity economy
📚 Degen et al. publish Which economic democracy? Towards principles for transformative democratization in socialization projects

✌️ See you next week

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