Humans are Magnificent!

The Ownership Economy Newsletter, Vol. 147

👋 Welcome Back (From Michael)

Happy Friday! I don’t know if it’s the same for you, but this past week I have been (pleasantly) inundated with analysis, reactions, and hot takes on Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas. For the uninitiated, an encyclical is basically the pope’s long-form memo to humanity — and this one puts humans, specifically workers, at the center of the text. And it speaks to the same questions and issues that those working in the shared-ownership space are asking and answering today, including questions about the centrality of work to human dignity, technology’s benefits for or harms to workers, and a singular focus on the pursuit of profits (I can go on!).

As Nathan Schneider points out, this encyclical is best understood alongside one issued in 1891 by Pope Leo XIII, which focused on the upheavals of the Industrial Revolution and provided a “spiritual foundation” for reshaping economic policy and workers’ rights movements. Then, as today, the encyclical is best read not merely as a religious document, but as a rough sketch of what a system that works for all humanity would look like.

I’d like to think all you fellow Stakeholders have a few ideas of how to make that happen. It’s good to know the Pope does too!

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🥃 Top Shelf News

• The Aspen-Rutgers Employee Ownership Ideas Forum kicks off in DC next week

• Nathan Schneider argues that Pope Leo XIV’s new encyclical Magnifica Humanitas has the potential to help shape our economic future

• MICEO is hiring an Executive Director in Grand Rapids

• CU Boulder’s MEDLab launches a student-led and faculty-guided media campaign aimed at bringing community ownership into mainstream entrepreneurship in Colorado

• Jo Hun Han et al. use a dataset of over 1 million workers to understand what drives participation in company-sponsored Employee Stock Purchase Plans

• In Social Capital Insider, Chris Benguhe et al. highlight that workers’ well-being is directly connected to business performance, including profitability

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👉 In This Issue

• Events + Reflections, including events this week, recaps, and job postings

• Employee Ownership

• The Ownership Economy

• Academic News

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📅 Events + Reflections & Opportunities

To see a comprehensive list of events, go to our main Events page.

This Week

• June 1: Project Equity hosts a free webinar, Employee Ownership for B Corps: A Deeper Dive

  • And the Economy of Francesco’s webinar: What Is Integral Finance?

• June 2: The Aspen-Rutgers Employee Ownership Ideas Forum in DC begins

  • At SXSW London, Purpose Foundation hosts a fireside chat with Ben & Jerry’s co-founder Ben Cohen

  • The Grunin Center’s Conference on Legal Issues in Social Entrepreneurship and Impact Investing, with a track on ownership investing

  • 🆕 NCEO’s Mature ESOPs: What Boards and Leaders Need to Plan for Next webinar

• 🆕 June 3: Cooperatives Europe hosts a webinar for episode three of their dialogue series: Cooperating, adapting, responding: spotlight on environmental crises

  • 🆕 Boston Impact Initiative’s Advancing Regenerative Capital Fellowship Info Session Zoom webinar

• June 4: The Walker Group’s Beyond the Traditional Sale webinar, brings together owners of PPTs and EOTs

  • 🆕 Also, the UK Society for Cooperative Studies 2026 Annual Online Lecture: Co-operatives and their ecosystems: The ‘why’, ‘who’, and ‘how’ in supporting the sector to grow

Reflections & Opportunities

• Ownership Capital Lab reflects on its EO Capital Roadmap Roadshow in Atlanta, focusing on the post-conference workshop

  • Watch attendees share why community ownership matters, from frontline workers to philanthropic investors

• MICEO is hiring an Executive Director in Grand Rapids

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Employee Ownership

• Zoe Schlag of Common Trust explains how to build an effective EOT transition team capable of assisting with the layered decisions selling owners must make

• Aspen Institute’s Matt Helmer and Maxwell Johnson writing in Forbes propose an answer to the problem of the “silver tsunami” - employee ownership (paywalled)

• A newly introduced House bill would exempt RSUs from overtime pay, making it easier for employee-owned companies to share equity with workers, writes Corey Rosen

• Peter Koehler suggests employee and trust ownership aren’t new; they’re modern solutions to an ancient question: How to make productive property serve the broader community?

• 🎙️ The Owners at Work podcast released a new episode exploring how employee ownership fits into economic development

• The ESOP Association released its monthly report, including event reflections and announcements

• Ownership Works outlines five key takeaways from its 2026 CEO & Executive Convening

Worker Cooperatives

• Congrats to the organizations selected to receive funding from the Cooperative Development Fund!

• COWOP launches a cooperative reading circle and podcast alongside a new Routledge Research Companion on cooperative economics

• ICYMI: CooperationWorks! posted an introductory presentation on cooperative governance

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The Ownership Economy

• Jennifer Harris argues AI is speeding the creation of a new aristocracy, and expanding ownership through worker co-ops and public equity is the strongest remedy (paywalled) (H/t Jenny Everett)

• Nick Hanauer and Eric Beinhocker note that minimum wage increases, once feared to kill jobs, don’t. They hope this challenges our “certainties”(paywalled)

• Kyle Westaway of Vanguard breaks down how its customer-owned governance design saved $1 trillion for everyday investors

• For The Elysian, Jeff Fong proposes giving city residents shares in their municipality, allowing residents to share the value created by their collective presence

📚 Academic News

• Investigating Japan’s labor-management relations, Hiroyuki Fujimura finds they remain stable and collaborative; however, working conditions have not improved as much as they should do to unions being too “cooperative” with management

• Jonathan Michie and others argue that cooperatives and mutual businesses are not just “ethical alternatives” but disciplined enterprises that generate social value

• Jason Spicer and Ruoniu Wang find that while most community land trusts pursue climate action and economic security, financial constraints force them to choose between the two, creating a “double bind”

• Reviewing forty-four studies, Norgaga et al. find that employee ownership is an effective tool for reducing agency costs and improving governance

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Image created by AI prompted to “create a picture that shows humans are magnificent”. Nice that it didn’t include a data center in this one, right?

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