Who's Going to Tell Chris Hayes?
The Ownership Economy Newsletter, Vol. 137
Welcome back!
🥳 We are spitting distance from having 1000 Stakehold subscribers. To celebrate, we’re offering $25 Bookshop.org gifts cards to our 1000th Stakeholder and the reader that recommends them. Get yours!
🥃 Top Shelf News
Dr. Hand spent last weekend reading Ari Weinzweig’s latest book, Why Democracy Matters, a resource-rich and a powerful justification of workplace democracy. Order yours today
The Bipartisan Policy Center’s new report, A Nation at Risk to A Nation at Work: The Case for a National Talent Strategy, urges Congress to improve incentives for employee ownership, writes Corey Rosen
Lolita Nunn is the new Director of Unlock Ownership, a grantmaker. Congrats!
Check out fresh newsletters from the International Cooperative Alliance, Aspen Institute’s Economic Opportunities Program, and Empowered Ventures
👉 In This Issue
🏙️ Events
For a full list of upcoming events, see our events page. Share your conference recaps with us, too!
March 16: USFWC’s webinar on labor neutrality as the new standard for cooperatives
March 17: NCEO’s Candid Conversation with HFA Leadership
March 17: Rebuild by Design’s How Communities and Banks Can Invest in Community-Wide Infrastructure webinar
March 18-19: New Private Markets’ Responsible Investment Forum in NYC includes a panel with Alison Lingane (Ownership Capital Lab) and Delilah Rothenberg (Predistribution Initiative)
March 18: Grounded Solutions Network’s webinar on innovative models for the real estate market
March 19: NCEO’s webinar ESOP accounting for service providers
March 25-26: The TX/OK Chapter of The ESOP Association’s Regional Conference in Austin, TX
March 26: Ownership Capital Lab’s EO Fund Spotlight webinar
March 27: Cooperative Development Foundation’s How to Move Shared Equity Housing Forward with Better Data webinar
Newly announced
March 25: PTON’s Purpose Trust Research Group’s first research webinar, featuring Tony Guidotti and Nien-hê Hsieh. Email for details!
March 30: LSE’s in-person event on economic democracy
April 9: ImpactPHL’s Employee Ownership as a Community-Anchored Alternative to Extractive Capital webinar
May 5: Great Game of Business’ Financial Literacy Workshop in Columbus, OH
May 19-21: ICA’s symposium on cooperative identity and energizing the cooperative brand
Aug 29-Sep 3: Economy of Francesco’s Economics of Fraternity summer school in Germany
Jobs + opportunities
ICA is looking for speakers for their May cooperative symposium
Start.coop x Defector Media are building a pool of service providers to support independent, worker-friendly media organizations
Trust Neighborhoods is hiring an Asset Manager for their Fresno neighborhood trust
Employee stock ownership plans
Apis & Heritage Capital Partners has Legacy II Fund has now reached more than $250M in AUM (paywalled). DimaondBack Covers is Pennsylvania’s newest ESOP. Congrats all!
NCEO’s Corey Rosen’s latest paper examines how ESOP companies share profits with employees. NCEO also released a new framework for CEOs navigating an ESOP transition
The Journey to an ESOP podcast hosts Makenzie Wirth on how ESOPs and owners can develop a strategic direction
Worker cooperatives
Prentiss Haney explores how child care cooperatives can increase economic power and democratic governance
Moshi Co-operative University in Tanzania hosted the Fifth International Forum on Cooperative Law in February
The International Cooperative Alliance posted the video of its February webinar, Launching the Legal Framework Analysis 2.0 (LFA) for Cooperatives
Purpose trusts + steward ownership
Music Box Supper Club of Ohio is now an employee ownership trust. Congrats all!
Julie Menter and and Andrea Steffes-Tuttle reflect on last month’s Purpose Trust Ownership Conference
Purpose Foundation also shares highlights from their Steward-Ownership Gathering in NYC last month
On the heels of Anthropic’s jettisoning their model safety pledge, ImpactAlpha’s David Bank writes about investors’ hunt for ways to fund responsible AI (paywalled)
A new research report from Clarasys and A Blueprint for Better Business explores how market pressure undermines corporate purpose
Employee ownership + the ownership economy
In impactAlpha, Julie Menter and Sean-Tamba Matthew explore the intersection of entrepreneurship-through-acquisition and employee ownership (paywalled)
Menter also announced Transform Finance’s hiring of Fernanda Sesto to head its Values-Led Business Project
✊ In Nonprofit Quarterly, Shivank Pandey reflects on efforts to build workplace democracy in a newsroom, describing how practices like rotating meeting facilitators and creating space for all voices helped shift decision-making power
David Ellerman’s latest lesser-known supporter of workplace democracy is Edwin G. Nourse
🏡 A new case study from Transform Finance explores a community-owned real estate project in the Twin Cities
Catherine Toner from Gary Community Ventures released a new report on their Tenant Equity Vehicle for building wealth for renters
Moolala, a YouTube Channel, hosted Jon Shell for a conversation on Employee Ownership Trusts in Canada: A New Succession Option for Business Owners
Birmingham Business Journal highlighted the Alabama Center for Employee Ownership’s recent fundraising campaign (paywalled)
Ownership Works’ Anna Lisa-Miller spoke on a Milken Institute panel on advancing economic mobility
The Predistribution Initiative shared CorpGov’s post on shared capitalism
📚 Academic updates
The Purpose Trust Research Group hosts its first research webinar this month, featuring Tony Guidotti and Nien-hê Hsieh. Respond to this email for details!
Marina Albanese, Asia Guerreschi and Marco Lomuscio’s new paper examines worker cooperatives’ role in the circular economy
Marc Levy’s chapter in the recently published Oxford Handbook of Social Purpose covers foundation ownership as a mechanism for protecting social purposes in business
🦞 Lagniappe
In the latest edition of “Who’s Going to Tell Them About Employee Ownership,” Christopher Hayes gets one heartbeat away from making the pitch for employee ownership in this Ross Douthat podcast. Here is Hayes at 41m06s:
“I think one of the traps in center-left policy in the last, say, 30 years, is that we have this sort of pretax and transfer inequality, and then tax and transfers to change it. And we just keep getting more and more inequality in what the market does, and then the recipe is more and more redistribution… The problem is you can’t have a political economy that just keeps producing larger and larger forms of inequality that then have larger and larger amounts of redistribution to produce an equitable society. So the question then becomes: What is a vision for an equitable market economy or labor market or labor force or society that is genuinely middle class?
And later, at 58m40s:
Douthat: There’s a version that says you basically want to look at all the money that the people in the A.I. world are going to be making, and you want to tax it — just directly subsidize Americans out of that largess. Or, you need a politics that basically protects work. And it sounds to me like you are on the job side, not the U.B.I. side.
Hayes: I guess I haven’t thought it through enough to feel like I have a very fixed view on either.
The Stakehold and its readers can help, Chris!