Where to Work
The Ownership Economy Newsletter, Vol. 139
Welcome Back! Happy Easter.
Dr. Hand will be at the NCEO conference in Milwaukee next week, TSA willing. Say hello! You can have one of The Stakehold’s first business cards.
🥃 Top Shelf News
Do you have news? Share here or to news@thestakehold.com.
Fortune’s 2026 list of the 100 Best Companies to Work For includes eight employee-owned firms
New York State Senator April Baskin introduced a bill to consider employee-owned enterprises and worker cooperatives as preferred state contractors
📚 Bob Whalen’s new book, Beyond Your Ownership: How Employee Ownership Can Align Your Purpose, People, and Profit, just dropped
B Lab and PTON released a new resource, Purpose Trust Ownership & B Corps: Aligning Business Ownership & Operations for Broad Benefit1
👉 In This Issue
🏙️ Events
For a full list of upcoming events, see our events page. Coming up:
April 4: Trent-Towne Market’s Reimagining Your Community and Its Future panel in Trenton, NJ
Apr 6-9: NCEO’s Employee Ownership Conference in Milwaukee
April 9: ImpactPHL’s Employee Ownership as a Community-Anchored Alternative to Extractive Capital webinar
April 17: St. Mary’s University’s Making Sense of AI with the Cooperative Movement webinar
April 23: Common Trust’s Owners Session: Turning Culture Into Ownership webinar with Cypress Valley Meat Company
Jobs + opportunities
Some other best places to work:
Director of Business Lending Outreach & Pipeline Development at Employee Ownership Expansion Network
Summer Associates at Ownership Capital Lab
Program & Operations Associate at Transform Finance
Financial Services Provider at the The LA County Department of Economic Opportunity
Employee stock ownership plans
Western Beef of Queen, NY is now 100% employee-owned. Congrats all!
NCEO released the 6th edition of its book ESOPs and Corporate Governance
Corey Rosen reports on a recent ruling that ESOP releveraging is not a fiduciary violation
Expanding ESOPs interviews Kathleen McInerney Kane of Praxis Consulting Group on how to build true ownership culture
🎧 The Ownership Effect’s Season 1 finale answers audience questions on business succession, ESOP-related policy, and more:
Purpose trusts + steward ownership
RainTech of Colorado is now 100% owned by an employee ownership trust. Congrats!
🇪🇺 PURPOSE breaks down the European Commission’s “EU Inc.” framework
Andrius Juozapaitis at Startups Magazine argues that it must include employee ownership
🎧 Alternative Exit hosts Kevin Clegg of Clegg Auto, an employee ownership trust
The Future for Work Institute podcast hosts Sandra Castañeda-Elena of Somos Stewards on “ownership on purpose”:
Employee ownership, broadly speaking
The Open Co-op is relaunching to build a “trust-based internet”
Ethan Rouen builds on Larry Fink’s warning that AI will widen wealth inequality to argue that broad-based ownership is essential to ensure workers share in the value AI creates
CNBC interviews KKR partner Pete Stavros on their recent sale of Ownership Works company CoolIT
Fortune highlights the $240,000 average employee bonus from the sale
Brian and Katie Boland argue this is “not better than nothing”
David Ellerman’s latest lesser-known supporter of employee ownership is economist William Stanley Jevons
The ownership economy
Maryam Mohiuddin Ahmed and Samantha Matters published A Playbook for Community-Based Budgeting, outlining how communities can directly shape public spending decisions
🎧 On Boardroom Governance, The Lean Startup author Eric Ries discusses Incorruptible, his forthcoming book on how most corporate structures fall short on long-term thinking
📚 Academic updates
⭐️ The University of Rhode Island is hiring an endowed Assistant Professor of Human Resources
Neil Warner asks what it will take to revive economic democracy 50 years after the Meidner plan
Nigel Forrest and Simon Parker published Sustainability and alternative organising: worker cooperatives, local communities and radical democracy, a chapter in the new Research Handbook on Sustainability and Governance
Hyunmin Choi and Jungook Kim compare employee stock ownership in South Korea, Japan, the UK, and the US
Craig Borowiak et al. review Jason Spicer’s recent book, Co-operative Enterprise in Comparative Perspective: Exceptionally Un-American