What is the Ownership Economy?
Disentangling too many words for too many things
At The Stakehold we aggregate news and analysis on employee ownership and “the ownership economy.” But what, exactly, is the ownership economy? Given no consensus definition and multiple similar, overlapping phrases (see postscript), below is a first crack at what we mean when we say the ownership economy.
We plan to keep learning and writing about this, and eventually launch a second newsletter on the broader ownership economy. If you’d like to become a partner or founding sponsor of that newsletter, please email us! And in the meantime, subscribe to our current weekender:
A working definition of the ownership economy
In an ownership economy, those affected by or who contribute to an organization also have a stake and/or a say in how and for whom those organizations operate.
The ownership economy includes ownership of where we work (worker, employee, and producer ownership); where we live (community ownership of real estate); where we spend money (consumer ownership); our data (digital user ownership); and where our money lives (member-owned finance).
We’ll walk through each of those categories below, in addition to steward ownership, which might philosophically reject all of the above.
Ownership of where we work
Employee, worker, and producer ownership are much more widespread than you might think. 25 million Americans, ~14% of the US workforce, are employee owners in some way. That's far more than the country’s 15 million union members, more than half of whom are public sector workers. Walking through a few of those ownership forms:
You have likely heard of the employee stock options common in the tech industry; some 12 million people are part of equity compensation plans like that. Millions of other Americans who work in publicly traded companies might have purchased or been granted stock.
Typically, though, employee ownership in the US describes four forms of broad-based worker and employee ownership: worker cooperatives, employee stock ownership plans (ESOPs), employee ownership trusts (EOTs), and direct employee ownership. Employee stock ownership plans (ESOPs) are retirement plan equivalents regulated by the Department of Labor. They make up the lion’s share of the 11 million employee owners in America. WinCo, Bob’s Red Mill, and King Arthur Baking are all 100% employee-owned via an ESOP.
More recently, private equity firms affiliated with Ownership Works, a nonprofit, have gotten in the employee ownership game by offering restricted stock to employees of the companies they buy and intend to sell.
Globally, worker and producer cooperatives are much more common than in the United States. They “provide jobs or work opportunities to 10% of the employed population,” or ~280 million people. Mondragon, a 70,000-worker network of cooperatives in the Basque region of Spain, is the largest.
A note to the eagle-eyed reader: “and producer” is doing a lot of work in that sentence above. Worker cooperatives tend to be in a single firm; producer cooperatives are typically made up of independent producers of a similar good, often an agricultural commodity.
Agricultural cooperatives have a long and global history. They were central to Black Americans’ efforts at self-determination, bring much of India’s milk to its citizens, and also bring you Tillamook Cheese, Land O’ Lakes butter, and Organic Valley milk.
Beyond cooperatives, countries like Canada and the United Kingdom have established other forms of government-incentivized employee ownership. Others, like France, have had government-mandated profit-sharing systems in place for some time.
One final note: Platform cooperativism is an emerging concept that references shared ownership of digital platforms by producers or contributors. Think Stocksy in Canada, CoopCycle in France, or the Drivers Cooperative in the US.
Ownership of where we live
In the early- and mid-twentieth century, entrepreneurs in England, India, and the US South began setting up what would become community lands trusts, in which a nonprofit permanently owns land, while residents own the structures. Many of the first CLTs in the US were formed to protect and empower Black farmers. Then, in the eighties, Bernie Sanders municipalized the model, and the housing-focused community land trust he helped set up is now the largest in the country.
Also in the mid-twentieth century, energetic New Yorkers began scaling up local labor-focused housing cooperatives. Since then, other forms of community ownership (aka community wealth-building models) have ramified:
In Los Angeles in 2001, The Staples center became the first real estate project to sign a community benefits agreement. That’s not exactly ownership, but it does lock in benefits to communities typically left out of major projects.
In 2015, the NYC Real Estate Investment Cooperative launched one of the first real estate investment cooperatives, member-owned cooperatives that finance and hold commercial space—not housing, but still real-estate.
In Portland in 2017, Mercy Corps launched the first community investment trust, designed not just to protect land for use by a community, but also to give community members appreciating ownership in it.
In Philadelphia in 2019, Kensington Corridor Trust launched the first neighborhood trust, a sort of community land trust but built on top of a non-charitable purpose trust dedicated to a purpose rather than to beneficiaries.
The US hasn’t been alone in this experimentation, of course—along the way Americans have learned from similar efforts in Europe, Australia, Latin America, and the rest of the globe.
Ownership of where we spend money
What do REI, the Basin Electric Power Cooperative of North Dakota, and the Green Bay Packers have in common? They’re all owned by their customers, like the internet briefly hoped Spirit Airlines could be.
Start with the most popular, but perhaps least powerful, example of consumer ownership: the Green Bay Packers. The football team is owned by half a million fans, but their ownership “pays no dividends, benefits from no earnings, isn't tradeable and has no securities-law protection.”
If that doesn’t sound like real ownership to you, we agree: the sort of ownership we imagine here includes both financial and/or decision-making rights. By contrast:
The owners of outdoor gear chain REI have both: we get a patronage dividend and also elect REI’s Board of Directors.
The Basin Electric Power Cooperative of North Dakota is a sort of meta-cooperative: it sells electricity to 138 rural electric cooperatives, in turn owned and controlled by their 3 million users.
ACE Hardware is a cooperative owned by individual store-owners.
All these are examples are of consumers, users, customers, or even businesses owning the companies they buy stuff from, rather than the companies they work for.
Ownership of our data
In this economy, one industry hoovers up the lion’s share of our data, investment, and trained electricians: artificial intelligence. Think tanks, philanthropists, commentators, policymakers, and even tech industry insiders are asking:
Who should own and control these private companies, whose leaders make decisions with public consequences?
This is not the first time someone has asked who should own/control/make money from a new technology. For example:
Wikipedia, Mozilla, the Internet Archive, ProtonMail, and Signal are all nonprofit- or foundation-owned; BlueSky is a Public Benefit Corporation, which (mostly) locks in it mission.
Silicon Valley luminaries have long argued that data is the new labor, and we should be compensated when others profit from it.
Data trusts, collaboratives, and cooperatives help protect user control over their data.
Before Spirit Airlines’ brief TikTok moment, #BuyTwitter and The People’s Bid for TikTok explored what user-owned social media might look like.
One interesting thing: these examples tend to understand users (us) as producers, not customers.
For most of these platforms, advertisers are the customer. We are the producers, and the product is our attention, which we trade for nice software or entertainment.
For others (e.g. Anthropic’s Claude, which doesn’t have ads) we are both customers (if we subscribe) and data producers (if we don’t uncheck that box).
Ownership of where our money lives
Credit unions, mutual savings banks, mutual insurers, and cooperative banks offer
Over 140 million Americans—more than half of adults in the US—are members of a credit union like Navy Federal Credit Union.
State Farm and Nationwide are both examples of mutual insurance, or insurance companies owned by their policyholders.
In Europe, mutual finance shows up as cooperative banking. Some of the Europe’s largest regional banks (Crédit Agricole and Crédit Mutuel in France; Rabobank in the Netherlands) are member-owned.
As with the Green Bay Packers above, there are some edge cases worth mentioning: Public wealth funds, public banking, and baby bonds are all to de-privatize finance in some way, and some descriptions of ownership economy-related terms include them. While those ideas have their merits, they are either (1) government ownership, or (2) at-a-distance ownership of companies via index funds, which seems pretty far from an individual having a meaningful stake in any particular company, much less a say in how they operate.
Ownership of—wait, have we gotten this all wrong?
There are two expressions of the ownership economy that don’t fit neatly into this bullet point framework. The first is multi-stakeholder ownership, including multi-stakeholder cooperatives and multi-stakeholder purpose trusts. In both of these, as the name implies, multiple stakeholders (workers, customers, residents, users, suppliers, communities, nature) hold ownership of some kind.
Multi-stakeholder cooperatives have developed mostly in two places: in Italy, thanks to a 1991 law supporting social cooperatives; and the Canadian state of Quebec, which in 1997 developed the legal framework for solidarity cooperatives.
Organically Grown Company of Oregon is the first (and maybe only?) multi-stakeholder purpose trust.
The second outlying expression of the ownership economy that doesn't fit our boxes is steward ownership, which stands somewhat apart from all this (and perhaps sometimes in opposition to it). For steward ownership advocates the answer to “who should own this?” is “no one.”
Steward ownership includes a commitment to two principles:
Self-governance, in which control of the company is detached from passive, absent, or speculative investors; instead, people involved in the company control it.
Purpose-orientation, which is that a company’s profits should serve the company’s purpose, rather than being extracted to owners.
In practice, steward ownership takes multiple forms, with varying degrees of commitment to those two principles.
In Northern Europe, steward ownership manifests as enterprise foundations.
In the US, it usually means purpose trust ownership (e.g. Patagonia and Anthropic) and sometimes foundation ownership (e.g. Newman’s Own, Dr. Seuss Enterprises, and the John Green’s Good Store).
Others, like German search engine Ecosia and Finnish software company Sharetribe, use a golden share or veto share to protect their purpose.
We think this still belongs under the ownership economy umbrella as one set of defensible answers to our core questions about ownership. What is distinct about their answers is that they look (to us) more like the rejection of private property practiced by indigenous Americans.
With A Little Help From Our Friends
As always, thank you for reading. We would love to hear from you in the comments or via email. Which of the above phrases resonate with you? What else do you think should be included here? Excluded? Broken out or described some other way? What other examples should we include?
Postscript: On Labels and Definitions
Many other organizations are building this ownership economy, with different labels and/or definitions, and with varying levels of overlap with our own (working) definition.
On the ownership economy:
Unless you count George W. Bush’s ownership society, the first use of the phrase I could find to is a now-deleted distributist video series from 2015.
In the early 2020s it re-emerged among technologists in reference to cryptocurrency and decentralized finance. The Ownership Economy grew out of that world, then broadened to incorporate other types of ownership.
The first recent use of the phrase in this broader sense might be Clara Lindh Bergendorff’s 2022 article in Fortune.
Roodgally Senatus launched ImpactAlpha’s ownership economy beat in 2024, the same year Ashoka’s Michael Zakaras started using the phrase.
In 2025 Elle Griffin raised >$100k for her forthcoming book, We Should Own the Economy.
In 2026, Former Ashoka fellow Alison Lingane uses it today to describe her Ownership Capital Lab roadshow, and investor-facing groups now talk about ownership investing.
The phrase ownership economy has some momentum, but it isn’t the only label out there:
Sara Horowitz’s definition of mutualism, for example, includes much of the above plus non-monetary organizations like mutual aid societies.
Kellogg College at Oxford’s Centre on Mutual and Co-owned Business is more narrowly focused on businesses owned by their members (customers, employees and communities).
Other labels include: democratic economy (used by the Democracy Collaborative), pluralist commonwealth (Gar Alporovitz), plural ownership (Elaine Tod and company), community ownership (Nonprofit Finance Fund and Justice Capital), distributism (some Catholics), economic democracy (leftists), predistribution (other leftists), property-owning democracy (liberal political theorists), shared ownership (us, in a previous life), and incorruptible companies (Maybe? Eric Reis’s term).
