Introducing our Ownership Deals tracker

The Ownership Economy Newsletter, Vol. 158

👋 Welcome back

… and welcome to all fifty-one new subscribers! Thank you for supporting EOX by subscribing and for telling your colleagues about us.

Last week we introduced our Ownership Economy Jobs board. You loved it; thanks for the feedback. This week we published an Ownership Economy Deals tracker covering mergers, acquisitions, transitions, conversions, and foundings of companies by employees and other stakeholders.

• Why another database? Other “deals” databases tend to cover (1) mergers and acquisitions in a particular sector or (2) a specific investment type. But ownership economy deals cut across industries, and financing is not always central to or necessary for ownership deals.

Check out the Ownership Economy Deals tracker and tell us how to make it most useful!

The Stakehold is supported by the NCEO and by readers like you. Subscribe for free to receive all our posts; upgrade to keep it free for others. ❤️

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🥃 Top Shelf News

• Adria Scharf is the newly announced Director of the Rutgers Institute for the Study of Employee Ownership and Profit Sharing. Congrats Adria!

• Business Insider’s Alex Nicoll shares how employees at an Ownership Works company used their profits from the company’s sale

  • 💭 Is anyone doing this for employee owners? We can imagine the TikTok campaign now…

• New York Times’ Maureen Farrell reports that US private equity firms own more companies than they can sell (paywalled; ht Claire Everhart)

  • 🤔 What if their LPs, as a condition of investment in future funds, put pressure on them to sell those companies to employees or other stakeholders?

• Why isn’t there more employee ownership activity on Reddit, the front page of the internet?

  • 🥸 We reached out to the mod of r/Employee Ownership this week; stay tuned

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👉 In This Issue

• Events, Etc.
  Upcoming Events + Ownership Deals

• Employee Ownership
  ESOPs + Worker Cooperatives + Employee Ownership Trusts

• The Ownership Economy
  Ownership on Purpose + AI at Work + Community Ownership + Member-Owned Finance

• Academic News

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📅 Events and Deals

Events This (and Next) Week

For more, check out our Events page.

• Aug 20: The Wisconsin Center for Employee Ownership’s free lunch for business owners in Milwaukee

  • NC Center for Employee Ownership hosts a Business Succession Planning and Employee Ownership event in Raleigh, NC

• Aug 23: The first day of The ESOP Association’s CEO Summit in Rancho Palos Verdes

• Aug 25: Institute for Family Governance’s lunch presentation with Newman’s Own Foundation in Miami

  • Plus the Center for Community Wealth’s Employee Ownership Skills: Shared Leadership virtual workshop

• Aug 26: NCEO’s 2026 NCEO Forum starts in Phoenix

  • Day one features an intensive workshop on employee ownership trusts

  • Also: The Northwest Cooperative Development Center’s 6-week Co-op Conversion Academy begins

• Aug 27: Kellogg College’s Jonathan Michie’s lecture on the role of employee ownership in England

  • And the Urban Institute’s panel Who Owns the Future? in DC

Ownership Deals

For more, check out our Ownership Deals page.

• Southern Shade Tree (NC) raised equity from Mosaic Capital Partners, acquired Atlantic Coast Landscaping (NC), and established an employee ownership trust

• Former employees of a Pittsburgh newspaper founded their own cooperative news organization, the Pittsburgh Progress

• Herbalists in Rhode Island launched Gentle Strength Herbal Co-op

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Employee Ownership

• The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics just released data showing the labor share of economic output hit 52.9 percent last quarter, lowest in recorded history

  • Ownership Works re-shared The Aspen Institute’s report on essential wealth, or the level at which you can withstand a financial setback

• In The Nation, Courtney Martin argues for employee-owned elder care (paywalled)

📈 Employee Stock Ownership Plans

• NCEO posted a framework for navigating ESOP mergers and explains why they’re becoming more common

• ESOP holding company OwnersEdge welcomed Robert Dillon as its new CEO. Congrats!

• 🎙️ For Basic Bananas, Tim Rettig of InTrust IT advocates for selling to employees rather than private equity:

Worker Cooperatives

• Co-Op News is looking for reader feedback

• 🎙️ Strange Birds reflects on their experience transitioning to a co-op, why they did it, and how it’s going:

Employee Ownership Trusts

• 🏊 Miren Oca, founder of Ocaquatics, explains how an employee ownership trust works and why she chose it over an ESOP

• Jon Shell spills the tea on how Employee Ownership Trusts were established in Canadian law

• Beth Nedrow highlights the importance of having a dedicated brain trust to effectively carry out employee ownership trust transactions

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The Ownership Economy

• SXSW’s PanelPicker is open for voting, and the ownership-related panels cover tokenized ownership of real assets; ownership of media; audience ownership of creator work; and Ownership Works’ broad-based employee incentive plans

• Paula D’Ambrosa argues that shared ownership is a driver of social connection that binds people together through shared governance

• In ImpactAlpha, Gina Dalma and Alison Lingane argue for a new economy (paywalled)

• Debbie White has stepped down as chair of the UK-based, consumer-owned retailer Co-op Group, replaced with Moni Mannings as interim chair

Ownership on Purpose

• Matt Pardieck of 21 Hats examines Grady-White’s transition to purpose trust ownership and asks Have You Considered Giving Away Your Business?

  • John Abrams reflects on Yvon Chouinard’s biography and his reasons for giving his company to a purpose trust

  • Ari Weinzweig reflects on how perpetual purpose trusts force long-term thinking at Zingerman’s

• A new Harvard report reveals that 79% of Gen Z seek jobs that positively influence others’ lives, yet many are concerned about their low pay (ht Daphne Berry)

• Nina de Korte analyzes a new report from EY, a consultancy, on extractivism

• The Impact Track analyzes the governance conflict at Indian conglomerate Tata Sons, hlighting the tensions between mission-driven trust ownership and market oversight (ht Daniela G.)

• The steward-owned collective CO_ recently structured a loan for açaí harvesters in Colombia around harvest cycles rather than quarterly cycles

• 🎙️ Journey to Regeneration talks with We are Stewards cofounder Esther Welles about steward ownership:

AI at Work

• 🎙️ In this week’s “when someone shows you who they are, believe them,” here are two quotes that grossed us out—and help make the case for more broadly distributed ownership:

  • The head of Y Combinator, a startup accelerator, thinks “those people” displaced by AI at work just “need to start companies.” Easy peasy!

  • WSJ journalist Tim Martin says that manufacturers love the idea of humanoid robots because “all of the sort of human elements that can make life complicated for a company go away with robots.” 🤮

• Venture capitalist David Perez-Hernandez published a manifesto about the ownership of AI

🏘️ Community Ownership

• New Growth Innovation Network published a field guide comparing five community-owned real estate models

• The Hidden Circle Residents Cooperative in Maine purchased the land beneath their mobile homes

• The East Colfax Community Collective acquired a complex that was accused of links to Venezuelan gangs by Donald Trump, and renovating it into affordable housing

• The South Tower Community Land Trust in Fresno (where Gabriel Gray was born!) acquired its first commercial building to house an indie bookstore

• Rupal Patel’s ownership stack suggests that resilient community ownership requires a blend of capital, structure, policy, and community engagement

• Ground Works Consulting outlines lessons for advocates on how to properly sequence policy campaigns for community ownership

🏦 Member-Owned Finance

• In the UK, Nationwide Building Society creates communication cards to help customers communicate their needs and report problems

• The Australian Labor Party has committed to doubling the cooperatives and mutuals sector

• Co-operatives UK launched a new investment fund for community shares, building on its Booster Fund

• In Nepal, victims of co-op fraud staged demonstrations demanding their funds back

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📚 New Academic Research

• Chi Kwok gives five epistemic arguments for why democratic workplace structures are better than republican alternatives at protecting worker agency

• Worker wage concessions in the 1980s yielded a 10.6% annual return over twenty years. The study argues the ESOP succeeded because workers acted collectively to preserve their long-term interests

• Research by McGovern et al. reframes open-book management as a voluntary substitute for statutory disclosure rights dismantled by neoliberal policies

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