What could stadiums, pipelines, and data centers have in common?

The Ownership Economy Newsletter, Vol. 146

👋 Welcome Back!

Readers, I’m happy to report we have added another member to The Stakehold summer team. Co-author and friend Michael Palmieri will ship your next few newsletters while I take a breather to be with my (soon to be growing) family. Enjoy his first edition! - MCH

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Happy Friday! Editing my first edition of The Stakehold got me thinking about community benefits agreements—formal agreements that developers and other organizations enter into with communities in which their project will be built.

One example: The Denver Broncos are negotiating a community benefits agreement with with community members from the host county for their new stadium that might commit the Broncos’ owners to things like “building affordable housing, expanding childcare options and creating opportunities for local artists.”

There is a long history of sports stadiums—often publicly subsidized, like the Cleveland Browns’ planned $1 billion new stadium—that do not quite deliver for local communities. Denver could serve as a model for development projects across the country, creating a formal mechanism that sets up stakeholders to benefit from a project they will have a hand in building and maintaining.

This is not quite shared ownership, but perhaps a distant cousin? And it could be applied to any project—including the 1000+ planned data centers across the US or the Tallgrass pipeline in Nebraska (h/t Scott Kleeb).

About me: I’m a nerd for employee ownership and (strangely) thought it was a good idea to get a PhD focused on it. At the Ohio Employee Ownership Center I am lucky to work daily with business owners, employee owners, and academics in the employee ownership community. And finally, I am super excited to be in conversation with all you Stakeholders! - Michael Palmieri

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🥃 Top Shelf News

• Gavin Newsom’s Executive Order on AI includes language on worker ownership, writes NCEO’s Scott Rodrick

• The Perpetual Trust Ownership Network is hiring a Network Coordinator. (Maybe this will put me in Mark’s good graces, given that he co-founded the organization!)

• In Europe, the Steward Ownership Network (StOne) won a highly competitive grant from the European Cooperation in Science & Technology (COST)

• In case you missed it, Fidan Kurtulus and Eric Hoyt recently published a landmark ESOP study:

  • Using three national datasets, they find that ESOP adoption in manufacturing companies leads to productivity increases between 5.6%-6.7%, with those gains increasing as ESOP accounts increased in value

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👉 In This Issue

• Events + Opportunities. This week’s events + new jobs

• Employee Ownership, including ESOPs and worker cooperatives

• The Ownership Economy, including community-owned real estate

• Academic News, including new papers

(Editor’s note: Thank you for filling out the poll! None of you use the links, and you were 50/50 on whether this section is useful, so we cut it in half.)

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📅 Events + Opportunities

Visit our Events page for recently announced and other events.

This Week

• May 23: The Economy of Francesco’s International Conference on Franciscan Economics in Sansepolcro, Italy

• May 26: CUNY Law School Community Economic Development Clinic’s Building Mutual Social Economy Bridges in Queens, NY

  • And Steward Market’s Live Demo + Q&A

• May 28: The first day of the International Cooperative Banking Association’s 2026 Symposium at the UN Headquarters in Manhattan, NY

  • And Humanity @ Work & Life and ASETT’s Building Mutual Social Economy Bridges Reception in Boston, MA

Opportunities

• 40 Million Owners opened applications for an Employee Ownership M&A Analyst

• The Missouri Center for Employee Ownership is hiring a Community Partnerships Coordinator

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Employee Ownership

• Employees at Hustle, a San Francisco-based social messaging company bought it from Social Capital

• EOX added Direct Employee Ownership as a flexible, low-cost path to ownership transition on its website

• The leaders of Text-Em-All, an employee ownership trust, won the Small Giants Founder & CEO Hall of Fame Award (h/t Zoe Schlag)

• Ownership Works launched its own newsletter, The Ownership Exchange

• Sophie Hares from MasterCard interviews Pete Stavros about the 180 companies where the Ownership Works model has been applied

Employee stock ownership plans (ESOPs)

• The Rutgers Institute is running a national survey of ESOP companies and their workers. Contact Doug Kruse if you (or someone you know) would like to participate

• SteadyRain, a 100% employee-owned digital agency, acquired fellow ESOP company Smooth Fusion (h/t TXCEO)

• The House Appropriations Committee urged the Commerce Department to address the financing gap holding back ESOP growth in small and mid-sized businesses, writes Corey Rosen

• Verit Advisors’ Jake Cravens outlines the benefits of partial ESOPs

• 🎙️ Journey to an ESOP episode covers the work done during the negotiation process of ESOP transactions

  • In the latest episode of Alternative Exit, Bob Whalen discusses how he turned a 94-year-old family business into a 100% ESOP

Worker cooperatives

• Solar Shaw of Colorado and Wasatch Food Coop in Salt Lake City are now worker-owned. Congrats!

• A National Survey of Worker Cooperatives is under way. If you would like to participate, or know a business that would, reach out to Mike Palmieri (yes, the same one)

• Adam Schultz and others are building a school in Durham to teach founders and workers how to create cooperative enterprises

• Tamah Yisrael reflects on her keynote speech at the California Co-op Conference

• ICA’s May 2026 Coop Insider newsletter is out

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The Ownership Economy

• On ImpactAlpha, Roodgally Senatus covers Calvert Impacts recent investments in employee and community ownership

• Two foundations filed a shareholder proposal demanding clarity about Home Depot’s use of customer data

• Michal Leibowitz of the New York Times profiled Deep Springs College, a student-owned and operated institution in the California desert (paywalled)

• We spotted that The Ownership Economy has ratcheted up their LinkedIn posts—give them a follow for their more-than-bullet-point analysis

• ICYMI: 🎙️ The Screw this… Let’s try something else podcast released all six episodes of its podcast telling stories of communities making changes from the ground up (h/t Jessica Friday):

Community-owned real estate

• The UK’s Community Right to Buy became law, though Yasmin Ibison of the Joseph Rowntree Foundation warns that the most deprived communities will need targeted funding to benefit

• Jessica Friday revisits Hazel Sheffield’s recent interview on community land trusts

• The Farm Bill that passed through the US House includes a provision to reinstate the Rural Cooperative Development Grant program through 2031

• Neil McInroy argues that Community Wealth Building isn’t soft social policy; it’s economic development done properly

📚 Academic News

• The University of Miami created the Community Ownership Learning and Action Lab, and it released its first report, as well as a webinar

• New papers

  • In his new article, Tej Gonza breaks down how Slovenia quietly built its new employee ownership law

  • Lisa Herzog published a new Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on economic democracy

  • Here’s a hot take: Stephen C. Miller believes Catholic Social Teaching supports free market capitalism

• Allen Tellis’s recently completed dissertation, The Well-Balanced Republic: Liberty, Domination, and the Maximal Production of Antipower, has a chapter on the “strategic interventions meant to ensure widespread ownership of productive property,” including employee ownership. Congrats!

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Photo of the wrong Broncos stadium, by Hailey Tong on Unsplash

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