Welcome back!
Dolly Parton was all over our algorithms last week, even before her sad passing:
🦋 Mark’s daughter requested Dolly-themed pancake mix at the grocery store
Her book-donation efforts came to mind amid last month’s high-born handwringing about post-literacy (thanks for reading, Stakeholders)
Ken Pomeroy recently released a cover of Woody Guthrie’s “Deportee,” which Parton covered on her 1980 album 9-to-5 and Odd Jobs (ht Ben M)
Dolly wasn’t an employee ownership advocate. But she probably would have been if she’d known much about it. Like us, she worked in pragmatic, bipartisan ways to make life a little easier for her neighbors just getting by on odd jobs, whether at her home in Tennessee or on a plane over Los Gatos. Let’s all pour ourselves a cup of ambition.
Hasta pronto, Gabriel!
This week we also give a less final farewell to Gabriel Gray, who starts college (!) next month. He:
Managed three different bosses (Mark, Colin, Michael) in the span of three months
Helped train our new Research Fellow Kate Tully
Handled most of the back-end of our ongoing summer subscription drive
(Thanks, btw, to Hannah Sandmeyer, Jason Wiener|p.c., Christine Clarke, and David Gray for the shout-outs last week 🫶)
Gabriel has been a valuable thought partner and is working on some really interesting employee ownership content ideas. Watch this space!
🥃 Top Shelf News
Curated by Colin
Department of Treasury designated Chris Miller as the new CDFI Fund Director
Big congrats to:
The Expanding ESOPs coalition for growing to more than 100 members
OwnersEdge, named to Inc. Magazine’s annual list of America’s fastest growing private companies
A 1-2 combo from Transform Finance on community ownership (need a refresher on the topic? We’ve got you covered)
What community-owned real estate actually needs to get financed, and why conventional capital stacks keep stalling these projects
How to operationalize and reinforce values in a company
📖 Sep 19 Deadline: Submit your nominations for the Institute for the Study for Employee Ownership and Profit Sharing’s 2027 William Foote Whyte and Kathleen King White Book Prize
👉 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 events more than a week away, see our main Events page.
Aug 29-Sep 3: The Economics of Fraternity summer school hosted by The Economics of Francesco in Germany
Sep 1-3: The Great Game of Business’ 2026 conference in St. Louis, Missouri
On the same days EO Equals is hosting its 2026 Summit in Chicago, IL
Sep 1-4: The Royal Geographical Society’s Democratizing the Economy conference in London
Opportunities
For more, visit our Ownership Jobs Board.
W.K. Kellogg Foundation seeks an inaugural Vice President for Community Investment
Canadian Worker Co-operative Federation is hiring an intern
Employee Ownership
JWPC’s August newsletter delves into the advantages of blended capital of deal structures
Counterpoint: Holland & Hart warns that some legal templates can inflate transaction costs and risk long-term failure in ESOP and EOT conversions
Ahead of their EO Equals Summit, Project Equity teases the five questions they’ll be asking + a link to sign up for the Summit report
North Dakota Center for Employee Ownership was granted 501(c)(3) status
UC Berkeley’s David I. Levine argues that California’s SB 1174 puts state research into action, funding local infrastructure for employee ownership transitions
🇬🇧 Kellogg College recaps its fourth annual employee ownership research conference with Rutgers
Torana Group outlines key findings, including how M&A by established ESOPs adds ~20,000 employee-owners annually
🎙️ Harvard Business School’s Worker Ownership Conference shares its keynote with Rutgers’ Joseph Blasi, and other employee ownership leaders
📈 Employee Stock Ownership Plans
EPS Group, an Arizona-based civil engineering and infrastructure firm, transitions to 100% employee-owned through East West Bank’s ESOP debt financing
An Arizona federal court rejected Wilson Electric’s bid to decertify a class action after ESOP participants argued the internal fiduciaries failed to properly invest a chunk of cash reserves (paywalled)
Mary Josephs breaks down M&A for ESOPs with a shout-out to NCEO’s newly updated manual
Project Equity presents Black Employee Ownership: A Pathway to Wealth Building and Economic Opportunity (Downloadable)
U.S. Senator Chris Murphy visits employee-owned Flow Tech as he considers cosponsoring the American Ownership and Resilience Act (AORA)
Mike Mallaro has a new book with stories and lessons from three decades at the Iowa firm VGM, which has been 100% employee-owned since 2008
🤝 Employee Ownership Trusts (EOTs)
Pennsylvania software company LockData converted to an employee-owned trust for its 13 employees, as reported by Roodgally Senatus for ImpactAlpha (paywalled)
From Project Equity, Courtney Kemp publishes an in-depth white paper explaining Employee Ownership Trusts (ht David Gray)
Luxury travel company Black Tomato converts to EOT, with founders retaining 25% ownership and decision-making control
Founder Miren Oca shares how converting to an EOT resolved her exit strategy concerns with the women of Entrepreneurs’ Organization
🇬🇧 Scottish electronics firm Lisle Design completes it’s transition to 100% employee ownership after paying off the founder’s five-year seller note
✊ Worker Cooperatives
Igalia, a Spanish software consulting firm, acquired Bocoup, a tech consultancy, merging two open-source worker co-ops into one collective
NCBA CLUSA’s Doug O’Brien asks an age-old question about the paucity of co-ops in the US: Why do mainstream advisors and policymakers often overlook the co-op model when addressing regional economic challenges?
Last week, we mentioned a paper by Christine Clarke. This week, we celebrate her new role as Co-Executive Director of the Canadian Worker Co-op Federation
This week’s Venn Diagram: Debt financing and co-ops
Texas Energy Fund closes its first co-op loan to Rayburn Electric, a not-for-profit electric utility owned by four cooperatives
Shared Capital Cooperative underwrote H&H Builders’ conversion to worker co-op in Denver
Did You Know? There’s a Cooperative World Map! (ht Digital Commons Co-op)
Vox’s Rachel Cohen Booth investigates private equity’s impact on child care
🎙️ University of Wisconsin’s Kristin Forde Hurckes examines what co-ops can —and can’t— do for the child care crisis.
The Ownership Economy
ICYMI: In May, Swiss cloud provider Infomaniak transferred majority voting rights to a public-interest foundation with employee-shareholders voting unanimously to protect against future buyouts
Ownership on Purpose
Steward Market releases their monthly brief, outlining how legal and financial infrastructure is evolving to support steward ownership
OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman reflected on their shift away from nonprofit governance as traditional capital demands usurped soft mission locks
LA Weekly spotlights Susana Cabrera’s story, who shares how Everytable’s social equity program trains frontline restaurant workers to become business owners
Community Ownership & Wealth
The Lower Sioux Indian Community launched a tribal-owned hempcrete manufacturing facility in Minnesota to address the need for sustainable building materials and housing shortages
🏠 Brick by Brick Housing Corp combines community partners with creative capital to expand home-ownership in Minnesota
In Chicago, The South Side Collective formed to purchase real estate near transit stations, locking in community ownership and affordable commercial space
Miles Hadfield of Co-Op News reports on developments in co-op banking:
🇬🇧 The UK launches its first regional co-op bank
US credit unions and co-op banks continue to consolidate with M&A activity from Massachusetts to the Pacific Northwest, including Willamette Valley Bank in Colin’s neck of the woods
🛒 LaDonna Sanders-Redmond refocuses questions about food access to questioning business models of the grocery industry
Brooklyn Org’s Jocelynne Rainey urges foundations to replace top-down grantmaking with funding structures that build local decision-making power. Some guy named Friedrich Hayek made similar points about the importance of local information
Cooperative Fund of the Northeast joined a new statewide steering committee to coordinate CDFI capital deployment across Massachusetts
Community Land Trust (CLT) updates:
Lake Trust Credit Union and nonprofit Community Catalysts build Michigan’s first CLT
Northwest Florida CLT set up Pensacola’s first permanent affordable housing
Fort Worth CLT deploys a similar strategy in Texas
East New York CLT acquires historic commercial property. It’s the first time a NYC land trust purchased off the open market without public subsidies or nonprofit transfers
Workplace & Economic Democracy
🇪🇺 Inspired by Yugoslav history, O.U.R. COOP tests how blockchain can underpin an international cooperative that can’t rely on one single national banking system
David Ellerman positions worker-owned businesses as moral and legal necessities (more from David below)
Political theorist Tim Christiaens strategizes how democratic workplaces scale without concentrating power in the C-suite
📚 New Research
Outgoing Rutgers Institute Director Bill Castellano has a new book out, Managing the Future of Work, on how organizations should think about the evolving nature of work
Ulf Johanson and Emmanual Aboagye publish a chapter on economic democracy in the newly released Pluralistic Economics (paywalled)
Academic News
🏆 David Ellerman was awarded by Fourth Annual Rutgers-Oxford Employee Ownership Research Conference for his paper on why fair market valuation breaks employee ownership. The upshot: because goodwill inflates repurchase obligations, “it will always be profitable for the current members of an ESOP to terminate the ESOP in a sellout”
Harvard’s Graduate School of Design brings in Nikishka Iyengar, founder of The Guild, to co-teach a new course on community ownership with Toni L. Griffin
NCBA CLUSA launches Foundations of Cooperative Enterprise Professional Certificate through Arizona State’s W.P. Carey School of Business