Watch out, world; here comes Tiffany
The Ownership Economy Newsletter, Vol. 141
Welcome back!
It is with great ambivalence we share this is Tiffany Vargas’s last post with The Stakehold.1 Longtime readers know Tiffany has been core to our work for years since she cold-emailed me as a student at UTA. Things to know:
She is an excellent writer—see her most recent piece on rethinking property and belonging in Mexico City
We also co-authored book chapter on utilizing purpose trusts for rural succession and community resilience with Zoe Schlag
Operationally, Tiffany also helped us:
Prepare a Shared Ownership 101 for our Black business in Georgia
Draft, edit, and re-edit our forthcoming Skoll Centre white paper on organizational purpose lock-in, decision-making power, and financial participation
… and handle too many critical back-end things to list
Thank you, Tiffany! Readers, please connect with her on LinkedIn, wish her well in her law school applications, and watch this space—she’ll be back in your news feeds someday doing great things.
- Dr. Hand
🥃 Top Shelf News
NCEO’s ownership culture survey is back in action
SOCAP Open’s Community Voting is live; vote today!
Loads of your friends and fellow readers need your support, including Lafayette Square, Project Equity, Ownership Works, Delta Fund, Zingerman’s, Torana Group, Natural Investments, Ownership Capital Lab, the Purpose Trust Ownership Network, Steward Market, and more
McKinsey’s recent report tipped off The Economist to the coming wave of small business closures, but they failed to mention employee ownership (paywalled). Who’s going to tell them?
🇺🇸 The ESOP Association and NCEO analyze encouraging new ESOP enforcement guidelines from the Department of Labor, as Assistant Secretary of Labor Daniel Aronowitz testifies that the DOL is now “pro-ESOP”
👉 In This Issue
🏙️ Events + Jobs
For a full list of upcoming events, see our events page. Share your conference recaps with us, too!
April 19-21: The Exit Planning Institute’s annual summit in Nashville
April 22: Project Equity’s session on Building a Culture of Ownership at the B Lab Champions Retreat in Milwaukee, Wisconsin
April 22: Kellogg College at Oxford’s Impacting Investing with Mutuality event on the side of the Skoll World Forum
April 23: Common Trust’s Owners Session: Turning Culture Into Ownership webinar with Cypress Valley Meat Company
April 23: Introducing the Purpose Trust Ownership Network (PTON), hosted by Program Manager Issie Corvi and Cofounder Jenny Everett
👩💻 Jobs and Recaps
The Cooperative Development Institute is hiring an Executive Director
Recaps: NCEO’s Maria Lianos on their Annual Conference in Milwaukee; and Alison Lingane on Ownership Capital Lab’s recent conversation with institutional investors
Employee ownership
In FastCompany, Rita McGrath argues for new forms of ownership
In ImpactAlpha, Roody Senatus finds that employee ownership can offer retiring owners a financially competitive alternative to private equity
In the UK, The Times explains how veteran business owners are using employee ownership trusts to protect company values
In Fortune, Vicente Reynal shares how employee ownership helped drive enterprise value growth at Ingersoll Rand, an Ownership Works-affiliated company
David Ellerman’s latest revisits Paul W. Litchfield of Goodyear’s early 20th-century advocacy for profit-sharing and worker ownership
📈 Employee stock ownership plans
Expanding ESOPs launched their #MyCompanyMyVoice project at the NCEO conference last week, recording employee owner stories; here’s one from Marcease Warren from Sentry Equipment
NCEO’s latest blog post highlights HFA Enterprises’ journey to becoming 100% employee-owned
Building Indiana Business explores Indiana’s growing ESOP movement
🎧 ESOP Radio hosts Jeff Bradley and Heather Hines of M-Group, an urban planning firm that used ESOP pre-funding to reduce stress on the business
Journey to an ESOP argues that the right first question for selling owners is strategic fit, not technical feasibility
ICYMI: The Nuts and Bolts of Leadership podcast recently hosted ESOP holding company OwnersEdge:
✊ Worker cooperatives
California architecture firm MMPV Design and New Hampshire publisher Earth Sky + Water are now worker-owned. Congrats all!
Worcester Business Journal covers Massachussetts’ growing employee ownership movement and spotlights Work, a cooperatively owned printing company (paywalled)
The ownership economy
Axios reports on Sam Altman’s proposed “New Deal” for AI, including public wealth funds, robot taxes, and new worker protections as superintelligence approaches
Enith Williams of the Reparations Finance Lab argues that reparative finance must center the people most harmed as the architects of repair, rather than passive recipients of institutional solutions
Steward ownership
🎧 The Explorers Podcast interviews Lisette Schuitemaker on steward ownership and conscious investing
Community wealth-building
kevin jones’ latest post highlights four proven, scalable models for community wealth building
Community Spaces Network published a manifesto for social purpose in real estate
SHIFT Capital, Lafayette Square, and Aedera Companies launched the L|S|A Affordable Housing Fund
NCBA CLUSA highlights how cooperatives can help rebuild rural healthcare through local ownership
Workplace + economic democracy
In Social Europe, Valerio De Stefano argues that Silicon Valley’s anti-democratic turn begins in the workplace, where concentrated managerial power and worker surveillance normalize authoritarian forms of control
Stan De Spiegelaere argues that workplace democracy and ownership are essential safeguards against corporate capture and political authoritarianism
Impact Tank’s report presents practical recommendations for democratizing the workplace, including key success factors, social impacts, and ways to scale collective governance solutions (in French)
Alfredo Mathew III has put together a new high school curriculum on economic democracy, mapping four models of economic power and shared prosperity
📚 New academic research
Adria Scharf, Oyindamola A. Ijewere, Matt Mazewski on business owners’ perspectives when selling to their employees
Zahoor Ahmad Parray et al. on employee ownership for sustainable business
Stan De Spiegelaere and Sigurt Vitols on worker participation
Abhishek Sharma et al. on empowering employees through ownership
Mehdi Nekhili et al. on employee shareholder board representation in family firms
Alison Lingane on Ownership Capital Lab’s Employee Ownership Capital Roadmap
For now, we hope!