A study from Jonathan Preminger and Guy Major of Cardiff University shows UK EOT conversions are down in 2026 compared to previous years, and the decline is substantial — 627 conversions in 2024, down to 570 last year, and just 208 so far in 2026. The authors project that number will settle around 270 by year end.

A common refrain is that EO transitions are rarely motivated by pure economic interest. Owners transitioning to EO would like to avoid taking a haircut, of course, but are often more focused on protecting jobs, maintaining firm independence, rewarding employees, and protecting their business legacy.

Still, Preminger and Major can’t help but notice that the decline in EOT conversions coincides with changes to UK tax policies that reduce the tax benefits of EOT conversions and make them more complex, even if EOT tax advantges “remain attractive” .

The study reminds us that nothing happens in a vacuum — policy changes interact with broader economic, social, and demographic tends to influence onwers’ decisions to transition to EO.

🥃 Top Shelf News

• The Wall Street Journal reports on Anthropic’s five-person trust ahead of the IPO (paywalled; ht Loren Rogers)

• The incentive structures of business schools come under fire this week, and this particular critic thinks there should be more focus on collective ownership in business education. Dang, what an novel idea… it sure would be cool to have a gigantic repository of resources for that exact thing

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👉 In This Issue

If you’re new here, friend, welcome! You may want to start with Stories & Dealflow.

• Events and Opportunities

• News

• Stories & Dealflow

• Research and Insights

🏙️ Events and Opportunities

Events This Week

• Oct 26: Day one of ESCA’s Pacific Regional Policy Seminar in Coronado, CA | Sky Blue Builders’ Book Talk: What People’s Capitalism Could Mean for Denver in…well, Denver | GEO Journal Release Party (quarterly theme: Union Worker Co-Ops)

• Oct 27: Innovative Finance Initiative’s Training Day in Amsterdam | Rocky Mountain Farmers Union: Best Practices in Indigenous Communities with Trillium Cooperative

• Oct 28: TXCEO’s Austin Courts & Floors Chooses EO to Preserve Legacy | Info Sessions: 2027 Reclaim the Economy Week

• Oct 29: Aspen Institute EOP’s What Employee Ownership Means to Workers | OEOC’s Building a Financial Forecast You’ll Actually Use | NCEO’s Navigating Tricky ESOP Distributions | Somos Stewards hosts Financiación Orientada al Propósito

• Nov 1: Day one of The ESOP Association’s Employee Owned 26 in Las Vegas

For even more events, see our main Events page.

Opportunities

• Spring Point Partners | Impact Investments MBA Internship, Summer 2027

• Oct 28 Deadline: Rutgers fellow Andres Cuadros-Menaca invites employee ownership and ESOP researchers to participate in the Annual Midwest Economics Association Meeting, April 2-4, 2027. Send paper title and brief abstract to andres.cuadros@uni.edu

• Dec 11 Deadline: NY Small Business Funders Collective opens grant applications for Successful Succession

For more jobs, including at employee-owned companies, visit our Jobs page.

🗞️ Ownership News

Employee Ownership

• TNCEO launches Tennessee Employee Ownership Business Assistance Program for businesses to explore ESOPs as succession strategies, joining MI, NJ, PA and CO in funding feasibility studies for employee ownership

• Seed Commons announces five new member orgs in CA, NE and PA

• The ESOP Association launched their Professional Marketplace where owners, companies and ESOP professionals can find advisors and build their own profiles

• Frothy trend: The alcoholic beverage industry imbibes in employee ownership (ht Kellogg College, Oxford)

• NCEO recaps the 2026 Repurchase Obligation Workshop with Chartwell Financial

• ESOP Case Law: In Bolton v. Inland Fresh Seafood, the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals overturned a lower court ruling requiring ESOP participants to exhaust all administrative avenues before filing fiduciary claims under ERISA

• Cooperative Development Foundation is awarded $950K Rural Cooperative Development Grant from USDA’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture

• 🇬🇧 Once you’re done looking at our Events page, check out eoa’s Member Organised Events

• Forbes’ Aparna Rae delves into the strategic partnership between Molina Niño of Known Holdings and Lauren Grattan of Mission Driven Finance

Ownership on Purpose

• May 12-14: PTON announces 2027 Purpose Trust Ownership Conference dates in Portland, OR

The Ownership Economy

• Worth Watching: One Project is developing funding vehicles designed to give communities more ownership in building economic democracies

Stories & Dealflow

Employee Ownership

• 📺 ALCEO produces Safe Landing: The Story of Employee Ownership in Huntsville

• 📺 ICYMI: The Walker Group hosts Beyond the Traditional Sale: Real Owner Stories on Employee Ownership Trust (EOT) & Perpetual Purpose Trust (PPT)

• 📺 CurrentShift Legal’s Jason Wiener gets the story of how and why Music Box Supper Club became Ohio’s first EOT from owner Mike Miller

• 🎙️ Empowered Ventures drops a new episode featuring Troy Osborn with ESOP Paramount Plastics (IN) and his evolving experience as an employee-owner

• First Jet Airways launches crowdfunding campaign to develop a community-owned airline

• ESCA spotlights Schweitzer Engineering Laboratories (SEL)

• Darren Gleeman examines questions of employee ownership and legacy in the cannabis industry (ht ICA Group)

• Common Trust checks in with seven companies who recently converted to EOTs

The Ownership Economy

• Selçuk Balamir shares the story of a Dutch apartment building designed for inclusivity, affordability and “private sufficiency, communal luxury” (ht GEO)

• Gwen Frisbie-Fulton gives a glimpse of her tightly interconnected community campaigning for affordable senior housing in North Carolina (ht GEO)

• 📺 Sam Nabi shares what an Indigenous Community Hub and community land trust could look like in Kitchener (🇨🇦)

• Explore The Guild’s approach to Community Stewardship Trust, which focuses on neighborhood ownership of commercial real estate

Ownership on Purpose

• Forbes’ Afdhel Aziz spotlights Newman’s Own Foundation 100% For Purpose Club (paywalled)

Dealflow

• ICYMI: North Carolina ESOPs have been active in the M&A market this summer: Hoffman & Hoffman, an ESOP HVAC company, acquires Aeromechanical, LLC (FL) | Columbia Forest Products acquires PRO Pallet LLC (PA) | McKim & Creed, a regional engineering and geospatial services firm, acquires Davis Martin Powell (ht NCEOC)

For more, check out our Dealflow page.

Research & Insights

The latest arguments, analysis, and academic research (📚). Go deeper with our other topic-specific, spillover newsletters.

Employee Ownership

• Project Equity releases two new resources:

  • Local Policy Toolkit: An EO Playbook for City and County Leaders, which draws on Project Equity’s local, state and federal database

  • Client Impact Report: Building Stronger Companies, Better Jobs and Shared Prosperity, drawing on nearly a decade of data from 23 companies

• 📺 Findlay-Hancock County Chamber of Commerce (OH) interviews Ginny Vanderslice (Praxis Consulting Group, Penn) and Chris Cooper (OEOC)

• Beyond a sense of individual purpose, NCEO finds that employee-owned companies cultivate a shared sense of purpose in their community

• 🎙️ Michael Palmieri explores ESOP recruitment and retention gaps with NCEO’s Liza Shifrin on the latest Owners at Work

• OEOC releases Selling Your Business to Your Employees, a strategic guide to employee ownership models by Mike Palmieri and Chris Cooper

• 🎙️ The Ownership Effect talks to Carla Ondrasik, author of Stop Trying!, about the importance of making room for ideas and mistakes among employe-owners

ESOPs

• ESOP For Contractors breaks down how the tax breaks can leave companies with more cash on hand to run their operations

• Kleinbard’s Chris Wingard analyzes the impact of the recent Retire Through Ownership Act and five companion bills on the ESOP landscape (paywalled)

• NCEOC analyzes the recent growth-by-acquisition trends in their ESOPs

• John Solimine (Verit Advisors) explores Financing Alternatives for New and Existing ESOPs

• Aaron Dean maps ESOPs against AI exposure, finding that almost half are in industries AI touches most while 40% are in industries it touches least

• Drew Bringhurst compares the trade offs of ESOPs against other exit strategies

EOTs

• 🇨🇦 Tallgrass Fund addresses employee FAQs about EOTs

Worker Cooperatives

• 🇨🇦 Sean Geobey simulates “product-market-governance fit” across different co-op models

• 🇬🇧 Tom Powdrill examines the exclusion of workforce from governance, arguing for a system that gives voice to those less likely to exit

• 🎙️ Co-op Developer Stories features US Co-ops’ Doug O’Brien on how to build a more resilient ecosystem, particularly in the care, tech and AI sectors

• The Ownership Economy

• How can we build a food system that works for the people who feed us? (ht )

• New Growth Innovation Network spotlights employee- and community ownership models as wealth-building strategies for low- and middle-income workers

• Castlemaine Community Co-operative translate their community’s experience buying real estate together into a how-to guide, in partnership with Paul Ramsay Foundation

• 📺 Aspen Ideas: Economy 2026 releases recordings from Tulsa

• Workplace democracy: What is the overlap between democratic management structures and servant leaders?

• 🎙️ Transform Finance drops the second episode of their new podcast Own the Block, on building power vs. just acquiring property

• 🎙️ The Ownership Economy speaks with Dr. Elizabeth Bennett on product labels, value-chain profit sharing, and capacity considerations of shared ownership

• 🇬🇧 Yoak invites community stakeholders to contribute to their new platform, Field Guide + Map on Business Design for Systemic Change

Community Ownership

• 📚 Degen et al. publish Which economic democracy? Towards principles for transformative democratization in socialization projects

• SSIR has been on a roll: Sarah Mousa pushes against scarcity framing with Generative Philanthropy while Sadler et al. argues that Community Governance is Critical for Better Data Informed Decisions

Digital Ownership

• Data Centers: Who decides for communities? Federation of American Scientists analyzes local policies and ten executed community benefits agreements

  • ICYMI: Aspen’s EOP explores Work and the Social Contract in the Age of AI

Welcome Back

Next month the Skoll Centre at Oxford will launch a new report, What is Your Organisation For? The report helps leaders answer three questions that can align their ownership with their mission:

• What is your organization for, and how committed is it to that?

• Who has a stake in it the value it creates?

• Who has a say in its direction?

Join us online or in Oxford on Nov 13th.

I’m also happy to introduce Contributing Editor , Executive Director of the Center for Social Impact Strategy at Penn. That center houses ’s Leadership Program for ESOP CEOs and Presidents. Welcome, Ariel!

To subscribe to Ownership on Purpose, toggle on emails here:

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🥃 Top Shelf News On Purpose

• Anthropic’s Long-Term Benefit Trust is getting some scrutiny ahead of its initial public offering

• The second Purpose Trust Ownership Conference dates are set for May 12-14 in Portland (check out Mark’s keynote from the first one)

• Aspen Institute’s Economic Opportunities Program published What Employee Ownership Means to Workers, insights gleaned from 85 employee-owners

  • On Purpose: The report found that shared goals and commitment to a social mission were important to workers

  • Which recalled for us this hundred year-old quote from Mary Follett:

👉 In This Issue

• Events and Opportunities

• News on Purpose

• Research and Insights

🏙️ Opportunities

For events more than a month out, see our main Events page.

• Today: Day one of the Opportunity Finance Network’s OFN42 conference in New Orleans, LA

  • Social Nest Foundation‘s The Gap in Between conference in Valencia, Spain

  • Doughnut Economics Action Lab hosts DEAL Intersections

• Oct 27: Innovative Finance Initiative’s Training Day in Amsterdam

• Oct 28: Reclaim the Economy Week’s 2027 Info Sessions

• Oct 29: Aspen Institute EOP’s What Employee Ownership Means to Workers (see above!)

• Nov 12: The Institute for Business in Global Society at Harvard’s TOP26: Steward Ownership Conference in Cambridge, MA

Opportunities

For more, visit our Jobs page.

• New Majority Capital | Deal Sourcing Associate

• GitLab Foundation | Managing Director, Collaborative Capital

• Applications are open for the Leadership Program for ESOP CEOs and Presidents 2027 cohort at the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Social Impact Strategy

• Dec 15 | Deadline to join 2027 Cohort of Impact Peers, a community for mission-driven leaders

🗞️ News on Purpose

• PURPOSE premieres their monthly Steward Ownership Monthly Brief

• Cathy Clark announces her final year as Faculty Director of CASE at Duke

• Optimax founder Rick Plympton visits HBS to discuss their teaching case, co-authored by Mark and

• B The Change returns with a new edition, featuring an interview with employee-owner Madeline Barr of Resonant Energy

• 🇬🇧 Ignition, a B Corp digital marketing agency and EOT, joins EOA

• ICYMI: B Lab UK launches B Corp Consultants

• 🎙️ The Ownership Effect explores how purpose transforms a company with :

Research & Insights

The latest arguments, analysis, and academic research (📚)

• 🎙️ Jerome Nikolai Warren drops textbook-as-podcast episode linking co-ops, sustainable development and environmental protection

• 📺 Postlethwaite investigates why more purpose-driven companies are combining B Corp with employee ownership with EOT Orms Architects

• 🇨🇦 We love a list: Check out this Canadian digest of values-aligned transitions

• Alexandra Amouyel, President and CEO of Newman’s Own Foundation, shares her favorite Acquired podcast episodes (we think she has great taste)

✌️ See you next week

Thanks for reading! To subscribe to Ownership on Purpose, toggle on emails here:

Subscribe

In this week, Daniel Massey of Expanding ESOPs and Steve Storkan of the Employee Ownership Expansion Network give a rundown of state-level policies intended to spark more employee ownership.

It’s hard to look at the expansion of EO centers, greater subsidies for EO conversions, explicit preferences for procurement from EO companies, and other developments as anything but positive. One bite at a time.

But as academic researchers, we’re always looking for questions to ask. How will they affect the growth of different types of ownership? Which of these initiatives will move the needle the most? How will we measure that? Things move slowly in Policy Research Land — be sure to check back in 5-10 years 😉

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Top Shelf News

• Captrust of North Carolina, which has both private equity investors and an ESOP with roughly $215M held in the ESOP trust and 1,700 participants, acquired the Hoge-Barrett Group, a financial advising firm managing $3B in assets

  • From the article: “Brett Hoge could have taken private money and launched his own firm. Instead, the Winston-Salem, North Carolina-based advisor brought his $3 billion team to Captrust Financial Advisors, drawn largely by the chance for his staff to own equity in the mega-RIA giant”

• Aspen Institute’s Economic Opportunities Program published What Employee Ownership Means to Workers, insights cleaned from 85 employees at ESOPs, employee ownership trusts, worker cooperatives, and private equity-owned companies

• President Trump signed Retire Through Ownership Act into law (see our recent Bootleggers and Baptists newsletter for our own musings and links to others’)

👉 In This Issue

If you’re new here, friend, welcome! You may want to start with Stories & Dealflow.

• Events and Opportunities

• News

• Stories and Dealflow

• Research and Insights

🏙️ Events and Opportunities

For events more than a week away, see our main Events page.

• Oct 17: Venture for Canada hosts the Canada Succession Summit in Calgary | Day one of the New York Cooperative Summit in Schenectady, NY

• Oct 19: Ownership Capital Lab’s Innovation in EO Holding Companies | Day one of ICA Group’s 10th Annual National Home Care Cooperative Conference in Tacoma, WA | Christopher Marquis’ Purpose as the End, Not the Means in Amsterdam

• Oct 20: The Business Council of Co-operatives and Mutuals’ BCCM Leaders’ Summit in Sydney | Day one of Employee Ownership Canada’s Canadian Employee Ownership Conference | Day one of the Opportunity Finance Network’s OFN42 conference in New Orleans, LA | Social Nest Foundation‘s The Gap in Between conference in Valencia, Spain | TXCEO hosts P. Terry’s Chooses EO to Preserve our Lonestar Legacy | Doughnut Economics Action Lab hosts DEAL Intersections

• Oct 21: Austin Cooperative Business Association’s Co-Opportunity Fair in Austin, TX | SEWN and Steel Valley Authority host PaCEO’s Kevin McPhillips on Succession Planning | OEOC’s From Study to Strategy: Building a Liquidity Framework for ESOPs

• Oct 22: EOT 101 Webinar with Common Trust and PaCEO | HBS explores EO’s impact on cost cutting with Emory’s Kaylee Kimbrough | NCEO’s Preparing Stronger ESOP Projections

• Oct 23: Association of Cooperative Educators General Meeting

Opportunities

For more, including for jobs *at* employee-owned companies, visit our Jobs page.

• New Majority Capital | Deal Sourcing Associate

• GitLab Foundation | Managing Director, Collaborative Capital

• Oct 30 | Deadline to apply for PennPac Spring 2027 nonprofit projects

• Dec 15 | Deadline to join 2027 Cohort of Impact Peers, a community for mission-driven leaders

🗞️ Ownership News

Employee Ownership

• ICA, Legacoop and Fondazione PICO host inaugural Cooperative AI Bootcamp in Rome, asking how the co-op movement can inform governance and development

• 🇦🇺 Trusts x Taxes: Australia proposes new tax laws that exempt employee share trusts; will employee ownership trusts be named next? (ht )

• ICYMI: Unlock Ownership invests in the Fund for Jobs Worth Owning

The Ownership Economy

• Capital Infrastructure: Mission Driven Finance formalizes partnership with Built, Fund as a Service, to scale private market solutions to community challenges

• 📺 Jon Stewart interviews labor economist Kathryn Anne Edwards — we drop you in around 37 minutes, on how workers can share in the prosperity they catalyzed

Ownership Stories & Dealflow

ESOPs | The Fabricator’s Tim Heston examines how ESOPs can impact manufacturing through the story of Metalworking Solutions (TN) | PaCEO profiles social services company JusticeWorks | 🎙️ Menke’s ESOP Radio explores why ISEC, a CO contractor, transitioned from direct employee ownership and management incentives to minority ESOP | Employee-owner Austin Evans (TN) of 5by5 Agency shares what ownership means to him and for the community

The Ownership Economy | Barber-Campbell and Rousseau report how unionized employee-owners fought for a co-worker’s promotion at Hunger Mountain Co-op (ht GEO)

Ownership on Purpose | B The Change returns with a new edition, featuring an interview with employee-owner Madeline Barr of Resonant Energy

Dealflow | 🇬🇧 Rebellion Beer Company transitions to EOT ahead of 2027 crowdfunding campaign

For more, check out our Dealflow page.

Research & Insights

The latest arguments, analysis, and academic research (📚)

Employee Ownership | 🇬🇧 For Property Week’s Tim Clark, EO changes how employees network with clients, changes their attitudes and changes their career trajectories | 📚 People’s Capitalism: NYU’s Hans Taparia and Bruce Buchanan upcoming book frames employee ownership as generative economic development | Corey Rosen highlights the non-financial benefits of EO | Beltran-Figueroa et al. research employee outcomes in US ESOPs and worker co-ops (paywalled)

• ESOPs | Prairie Capital’s Franco Silva on how construction companies can protect bonding capacity during an ESOP Deal | 📺 Gary Gray examines ESOPs for the hospitality industry at LendingCon

• Co-ops | ICA reflects on how cooperative law can preserve culture and identity while adapting to socioeconomic and technological changes | 🎙️ Co-op Developer Stories interviews Dr. Jessica Gordon Nembhard | Gabrielle Newell reports on DC City Council briefing on community wealth building | 🎙️ Jerome Nikolai Warren drops textbook-as-podcast episode linking co-ops, sustainable development and environmental protection | 🇨🇦 ICYMI: Sengupta’s research connects Canadian co-ops, economic development, colonization and indigenous cultures. | Juri et al. analyze modern employee-buyout innovations and trade offs in scaling cooperatives

The Ownership Economy | 📚 Christian Felber releases updated edition of his book, Economy for the Common Good | Digital Commons Cooperative links to a litany of resources for the ownership data behind real estate and housing | Newton and Ruroede propose credit union strategies to support shared equity models in housing | SSIR’s Chana R. Schoenberger reports new research building on how profit sharing redistributes wealth

• Economic & Workplace Democracy | The Democracy Collaborative celebrates 20 years of Community Wealth Building in essays | Erel Onojobi argues that owning an asset isn’t the same as changing the economy | Thomasson and Hallonsten trace the history of municipally owned corporations in Sweden | Nonprofit Quarterly’s Ben Palmquist explores democracy beyond elections

Ownership on Purpose | ImpactAlpha analyzes the capital stack and stakeholders behind ‘Trustworthy AI’ (paywalled) | 📺 Postlethwaite investigates why more purpose-driven companies are combining B Corp with employee ownership:

✌️ See you next week

One final thanks to Rebecca Kern for the shout out at SOCAP this week, following her ImpactAlpha article on the long term benefits of the ownership economy (paywalled)

Why do people care about employee ownership? Every week I speak with owners, advocates, and funders; almost every week I hear a different answer to this question.

Ed Greenberg noticed the same thing about workplace democracy fifty years ago. He argued that the nonpartisan, unanimous support for the topic was illusory; and that if you asked what different tribes meant by the term, you see they are motivated by different and sometimes opposing goals. He found four:

• Business people motivated by how to blunt “the negative impact of labor troubles on productivity and profits”

• Psychologists interested by human development and economic efficiency

• Participatory democrats seeking “the full development of human beings”

• The Left, who viewed it as a tool to develop an “anti-capitalist, revolutionary consciousness”

I wonder if today’s cross-party unanimity about employee ownership is is similar. If it is, there are two ways it could be a problem: (1) It gets papered over, and the tensions turn into resentments that express themselves in weird ways; or (2) it gets put on the table in an explosive way, breaking apart the coalitions we need to advocate for change.

But it could, handled carefully, work to our advantage: If advocates mutually commit to strategic ambiguity, it can create space for surprising outcomes. The geopolitical version of this is Taiwan, whose ambiguous status has let it function as a sovereign state for three quarters of a century. If the US and China can pull that off, I think we can, too.

🥃 Top Shelf News

• Lafayette Square Institute was awarded $5M from Aspen Digital to launch Access to Capital, a national initiative to reach entrepreneurs and small business owners

• Common Trust launches a new tool to help businesses assess if employee ownership trusts are the right fit for them—and a variation for advisors

  • Owners might also want to check out the Baker Project Employee Ownership App

• Expanding ESOPs reveals its inaugural Advisory Board, including former Senator Rob Portman (R-OH)

• Pennsylvania Senate passes landmark employee ownership legislation SB 478

• Invest for Better celebrates their 5th anniversary with The Amplifers, 50 influential women that include ownership advocates like our own

• 🎃 What better way to celebrate Employee Ownership Month than to buy your Halloween candy from employee-owned companies?

Subscribe now

👉 In This Issue

If you’re new here, friend, welcome! You may want to start with Stories & Dealflow.

• Events and Opportunities

• News

• Stories & Dealflow

• Research and Insights

🏙️ Events and Opportunities

Events This Week

• Oct 11: The People’s Festival: Celebrating Local Economies and Employee-Ownership in Denver, CO

• Oct 12: Day one of SOCAP 2026, in Chicago // Day one of New Economies Conference in Bonn, Germany

• Oct 13: The Employee Ownership Capital Roadmap Roadshow in Chicago, IL // The eoa interviews Jeremy Walford (members only) // Day one of The Aspen Institute’s Aspen Ideas: Economy in Tulsa, OK

• Oct 14: The Next Economy and the Paul Ramsey Foundation host Enrich Sahan from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation in Sydney // Project Equity and ALCEO Happy Hour in Birmingham, AL // Project Equity: Addressing Key Person Risk Ahead of an EO Transition // Next City and the Kresge Foundation present Beyond the Model: Building Community Knowledge, Power, and Ownership

• Oct 15: Cooperatives Europe celebrates 20 years

• Oct 17: Venture for Canada hosts the Canada Succession Summit in Calgary // Day one of the New York Cooperative Summit in Schenectady, NY

• Oct 19: Ownership Capital Lab’s Innovation in EO Holding Companies // Day one of ICA Group’s 10th Annual National Home Care Cooperative Conference in Tacoma, WA

• Oct 20: The Business Council of Co-operatives and Mutuals’ BCCM Leaders’ Summit in Sydney // Day one of Employee Ownership Canada’s Canadian Employee Ownership Conference // Day one of the Opportunity Finance Network has its OFN42 conference in New Orleans // Social Nest Foundation‘s The Gap in Between conference in Valencia, Spain

For even more events, see our main Events page.

Opportunities

• Brown Advisory | Portfolio Manager (ht Jenny Everett)

• Boston Center for Community Ownership | Small Business TA Provider

• Center for Community Wealth | Cooperative Developer (ht Matt Licina)

• Ohio Employee Ownership Center | Special Assistant - Term Position

• Menke & Associates | Senior Associate, ESOP Advisory

Oct 21 Deadline: Visa Foundation opens call for the US Small Business Growth and Innovation Program (ht — we think more EO folks should apply!)

For more jobs, including at employee-owned companies, visit our Jobs page.

🗞️ Ownership News

Employee Ownership

• US Secretary of Labor Keith Sonderling visits Publix, the largest employee-owned company in the US

• Maryland creates a new LLC structure that operates under state co-op law, LWCAs

• MassCEO launches a new program to help businesses explore employee ownership

• Jason Wiener | p.c. rebrands to CurrentShift Legal

• Plaintiffs in the Russelectric ESOP court case filed an unopposed motion for $5.55M class action settlement

• Capital Impact Partners and National Cooperative Bank announce the four winners of 2026 Co-op Innovation Awards (ht CDI)

• Worker Co-Op Networks in NYC and Madison call for changes to USFWC bylaws to improve representation and governance (en español también)

• In response to the bankruptcy of JoAnn Fabrics, creatives pitch “craft and fabric co-op” as small business hub where skills can be honed (ht GEO)

• USFWC’s announces the 2026 Worker Co-op Awards winners

• Project Equity invites readers to share what EO means to you

• Victoria O’Banion becomes Executive Director of Northwest Cooperative Development Center

• NCEO welcomes Kristine Kerr as their new Education Assistant

• The Rutgers Consortium on Employee Share Ownership now includes Mark Hand and Myrtle Bell’s Shared Ownership Initiative at UT-Arlington! Congrats us

• 🇨🇦 Arctic Co-operatives Limited joins ICA’s Cooperative Cultural Heritage List

• Building on their Women’s Summit in Detroit, NCEO establishes a new Women in EO Peer Network

Ownership on Purpose

• PURPOSE premieres their monthly Steward Ownership Monthly Brief

• 🇬🇧 Ignition, a B Corp digital marketing agency and EOT, joins eoa

• Catherine Clark announces her final year as Faculty Director of CASE at Duke

• Optimax founder Rick Plympton visits HBS to discuss their Perpetual Purpose Trust case study

• Speaking of podcasts: The Ownership Effect dropped a new episode on how purpose transforms a company, in interviewing Kathy Varol on her work with Adidas

The Ownership Economy

• MacArthur Foundation allocates $750M to impact investments, a 50% increase

• Dec 17 Deadline: ECOnGood opens a call for ECGIC 2028 hosts (Economy for the Common Good International Conference)

• Another call to apply: LSE’s 100x Impact is looking for “future social unicorns”

• New Majority Capital, ETA investors with an impact thesis, are bringing bringing broad-based ownership and profit sharing into their strategy

• Intrinsic Entertainment Collaborative leads campaign to make Letterboxd community-owned, a case study in Exit to Community (E2C)

• 🇬🇧 Lewisham council proposes a combination of co-ops and CLTs in what The Guardian calls “the most radical suite of solutions to the housing crisis”

• KKR banns non-competes for employees making less than $100K/year at its portfolio companies (paywalled); and plans to include a broad-based employee incentive program in its acquisition of Gen II

Stories & Dealflow

Employee Ownership

• Empowered Ventures shares OpCo stories in their October newsletter

• 🇨🇦 GEO profiles New Brunswick housing co-ops

• Local First Arizona features ESOP Spinato’s Pizzeria

• Teamshares portco Patina (MN) opens ninth and largest store yet

• Common Trust profiles P. Terry’s in The Ownership Upside

• 📺 Alternative Exit interviews Shannon Litton on her ownership transition experiences with 5by5 Agency and 3LS

• Menomonie Market Food Co-Op (WI) “a-peels” to market with student animated commercial that increases customer traffic

Dealflow

• Parkway Electric & Communications (MI), Reynolds & Moore (TX), and Fidelity Manufacturing (FL) transition to 100% ESOP

• 🇬🇧 Two Welsh companies merged into a single EOT: 3P Technik focuses on stormwater treatment and rainwater harvesting, while Celtic Sustainables supplies building products; they are now Celtic House Holdings Limited

• Mission Health (FL) begins a transition to 100% ESOP

For more, check out our Dealflow page.

Research & Insights

The latest arguments, analysis, and academic research (📚). Go deeper with our other topic-specific, spillover newsletters.

Employee Ownership | The Aspen Institute releases new report on employee ownership as economic and workforce development strategy // Transform Finance and Ownership Capital Lab publish a two-part series, Employee Ownership in Private Credit // 🇬🇧 David Owen launches his new book, Employee Ownership: Seven Success Stories // Renée Mundell gamifies business literacy for employee-owners (members only) // Gartenberg and Pak find that active owners pay 2-4% less for comparable work, inversely correlated to how monitored and quantifiable the job is // Gabrielle Lindemann lays out non-ESOP ownership options in St. Louis Magazine (ht )

• ESOPs | ESOP Association launches First-Year Ownership Education Pathway for new hires and post-M&A support // XPX debunks ESOP myths with Menke CEO Trever Gilmore // OwnersEdge encourages owners to plan for exiting before they’re ready to // 📚 Gonza et al. analyze employee ownership through the lens of Tocqueville’s Second Memoir (paywalled) // Prairie Capital’s Christopher M. Silvetti emphasizes the importance of communications in building ownership culture

• EOTs | 📺 Miren Oca reframes ROI as Ripples of Impact in a new TEDx talk // 🎙️ Andreas Jørgensen delves into the largest study to date comparing UK EOTs with management buyouts (spoiler: EOT productivity, revenue, and pay are all higher)

• Worker Cooperatives | GEO’s Matt Noyes examines unions and co-ops // ifa expands on Oxford research to show how co-ops and mutuals create social value // JEOD calls for papers for the special issue, Cooperatives in Times of Conflict and War

Ownership on Purpose | 🇨🇦 We love a list: Check out this Canadian digest of “values-aligned transitions”

The Ownership Economy | 🇬🇧 Digital Commons shares slides from Land Talks #7 on how property should serve the communities around it // Jurcisin argues that cooperativism addresses economic inequality better than taxation // Alexandra Amouyel, President and CEO of Newman’s Own Foundation, shares her favorite Acquired podcast episodes (we think she has great taste)

• Community Ownership | Sean Geobey reflects on social acquisitions and the newly launched Waterloo Region Community Co-operative // Atkinson Foundation’s Selena Zhang (🇨🇦) explores how economic choices and structures impact inclusivity and what it means to belong to a place // Impact Alpha’s Rebecca Kern reports on alternative ownership models, observing how fair financing shifts power to overlooked people and places (paywalled) // 📺 The Democracy Collaborative spotlights community wealth building in the US:

• Digital Ownership | and John Mende propose US Sovereign Wealth Fund, funded by Treasury sales (paywalled). Their book, Own the Future: How Sovereign Wealth Funds and Universal Capitalism Build Generational Wealth, comes out next year // Hilary Abell highlights the “cost disease” of AI // This Guardian piece asks: Beyond ownership structures, what makes our AI use “cooperative”?

A final thank you to Praxis Consulting Group for the shout out in their latest newsletter!

Each week The Stakehold posts a free newsletter for the ownership economy. Ownership on Purpose is a deeper cut on organizational purpose than we include there.

To subscribe to Ownership on Purpose, toggle on emails here:

Subscribe to Ownership on Purpose

🥃 Top Shelf News

• 🇪🇺 An EU decision on steward and employee ownership frameworks is expected on Oct 8; Netherlands and Germany also make strides with national legislation

• 🇨🇭 Swiss cloud provider Infomaniak went public as a public-interest foundation

• 🇺🇸 NCEO and PTON announce new partnership to strengthen the ecosystem around purpose trusts

• Oct 8: The Steward Ownership Festival Amsterdam

🗞️ News and Events on Purpose

• 🇳🇱 The Dutch Parliament is pursuing a new steward ownership structure to reduce administrative and legal costs for mission-driven companies

• ICYMI: After passing 47% of customer service calls to AI, IKEA upskills their workforce to build new revenue streams instead of laying off employees

• 🎙️ B Lab’s Brigitta Nemes analyzes how the B Corp standards relate to company purpose and stakeholder governance

  • illycaffè just renewed its B Corp status under the new V2 standards…

  • …but B Corps, like other types of organizations, are limited in their ability to to scrutinize product sourcing of raw materials

🔊 Stories on Purpose

• Our own spoke about purpose trusts at last month’s Neighborhood Economics gathering in Galveston (paywalled)

• 🎙️ Last week’s Conscious Capitalism newsletter recapped a January podcast with Dusan Vujovic, CEO of Tony’s Chocolonely

  • This week on Purpose 360, Carol Cone revisits stories about Bombas, Just Ice Tea, Patagonia, Seventh Generation, and Tony’s Chocolonely

• 📺 Fast Company’s Giving Back to Get Ahead recent panel starred Alex Amouyel of Newman’s Own (and 100% for Purpose) and Les Szabo of Dr. Bronner’s (and Purpose Pledge)

Research & Insights

• contends that mission and values must go beyond legal contracts and be built into the company structure itself (ht Jenny Everett)

• 📚 Daadaa and Hdhili analyze ownership structures across G5 countries, finding long term benefits of employee ownership but insignificant short-term impact (paywalled)

• B Corps in Spain collectively call for regenerative tourism to mitigate externalities

• In HBR, Nick Hobson and Margie Warrell, PhD ask Will Your Organization Stand By Its Values—Even When It’s Hard? (paywalled; ht Conscious Capitalism)

  • Our guess? Only if you have already locked those values into your structure or culture

• 🎙️ Last week on Purpose 360, Carol Cone interviewed Benevity CEO Sona Khosla about their recent State of Corporate Purpose report

✌️ See you next week!

If you made it this far, you’re a real one. We’d love to talk with you about sponsoring this newsletter so we can keep it free for other Stakehold readers.

Researchers from Cornell, UC Berkley, and MIT find that profit sharing materially impacted the wealth of less-skilled French workers without negatively affecting the productivity or the wealth of other employees. Hey, that’s great!…right?

As we say in the academic biz, “Well, sort of.” The authors estimate that labor’s share of profits increased more than accounting profits decreased (1.8% vs. 1.4%). That’s the good news for fans of profit sharing. The not-as-good news is that there was no noticeable effect on firm productivity, and that 0.4% difference mostly came from reduced corporate income tax payments.

The comprehensiveness of the study (~600K firms per year from 1985-1997) and the rigor of the journal should give readers confidence, and the research will probably be considered in the same class as Kim and Ouimet’s thorough 2014 analysis of ESOPs in the US.

The bottom line: to increase equity and decrease wealth and income inequality via employee ownership, there probably needs to be a bigger incentive to business owners than profit sharing alone can provide.

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Top Shelf News

• NCEO and PTON announce new partnership to strengthen the purpose trust ecosystem

• 🇬🇧 England launches a new £10 million initiative to develop more co-ops

• 🇨🇭 Swiss cloud provider Infomaniak goes public as a public-interest foundation

• The latest Owners at Work podcast—featuring The Stakehold—is out! It features William Foley’s latest research on (1) unions and employee ownership; and (2) job satisfaction in worker cooperatives:

👉 In This Issue

If you’re new here, friend, welcome! You may want to start with Stories & Dealflow.

• Events and Opportunities

• News

• Stories and Dealflow

• Research and Insights

🏙️ Events and Opportunities

For events more than a week away, see our main Events page.

• Oct 6: The ICCM’s short course on circularity as co-operative strategy in the Arlington, VA area // The EO Capital Roadmap Roadshow hits Philly // SSIR’s Closing the Renter Wealth Gap // NCEO’s How to Tell Your Ownership Story // The Next Economy and Greater Melbourne Foundation host Enrich Sahan in Melbourne

• Oct 6-8: AFN’s 2026 Grantmaker Conference: Igniting Change for Inclusive Prosperity in Philadelphia

• Oct 7-8: NCEO’s Women’s Summit and Repurchase Obligation Workshop in Detroit // EOT Advisors’ webinar for owners learn about EOTs // The Steward Ownership Academic Day in Amsterdam // US Co-ops’ Cooperative Impact Conference in D.C.

• Oct 8: eoa’s second eoaLive! in Manchester, UK // The Cooperative Hall of Fame 2026 induction ceremony in DC // NCEO’s What are the Rs of ESOPs?

Opportunities

For more, including for jobs *at* employee-owned companies, visit our Jobs page.

• Asset Funders Network | Central Texas Program Officer. Deadline: Today

• DAWI | Project Manager CA Seed (Contract). Deadline: Monday

• NeighborWorks Montana | ROC Post Purchase Manager

• Worldwide Education Services | Investment Associate

🗞️ Ownership News

Employee Ownership

• Oct 19: Deadline for the NCEO Annual Conference call for 2027 speakers

• UPenn announces their 2027 leadership program for ESOP CEOs, Presidents and successors

• Faces in new places: Kristine Kerr joins NCEO // Mary Fair joins Tandem // Shannon Litton became 3LS’s Chief Integration Officer. Congrats!

Ownership on Purpose

For even more news on organizational purpose, take a sneak peek at next Tuesday’s Ownership on Purpose newsletter

• 🇪🇺 An EU decision on steward and employee ownership frameworks is expected on Oct 8; Netherlands and Germany also make strides with national legislation

• B Corps in Spain collectively call for regenerative tourism to mitigate externalities

• 🎙️ B Lab’s Brigitta Nemes analyzes how the B Corp standards relate to company purpose and stakeholder governance

  • illycaffè just renewed its B Corp status under the new V2 standards…

  • …but B Corps, like other types of organizations, are limited in their ability to to scrutinize product sourcing of raw materials

The Ownership Economy

• 🇫🇷 Driven by policy changes, employee representation In France grows from about 7% in 2015 to 12.8% in boards across 85.7% of companies in the SBF 120 index

• Boulder’s (CO) Board of Commissioners pledges $11.2M of $42.5M needed to convert San Lazaro’s mobile home community into resident-owned real estate

• Shelterforce’s Steve Dubb reports on new models to drive community ownership

• NeighborWorks examines shared equity housing in community land trusts as a path to ownership

• 🎙️ Transform Finance launches a new podcast, Own the Block, on community-owned real estate

Ownership Stories & Dealflow

Employee Ownership | The Institute for Policy Studies profiles Bol, Washington DC’s only worker-owned bookstore (ht TXCEO) // Broughton Consulting runs a pilot program in open-book management for frontline workers

• ESOPs | SUCCESS explores why Colorado restaurant group Edible Beats became an ESOP // Newport Restaurant Group in Rhode Island celebrates 30 years as an ESOP, paying out $33M since 1996, with 12-14% staff turnover compared to industry average of 110% // New Hampshire’s Keene Sentinel profiles local ESOP, Tree-Free Greetings // 🎙️ Empowered Ventures interviews Gary Morin, president of Vermont’s largest employee-owned plumbing, heating and A/C contractor

The Ownership Economy | Kachuwa, an investment cooperative in Colorado, raises $4.2M from 83 members (OE) // Built to Last delves into community ownership with Helen Leung of LA-Más

Dealflow | FIELDS celebrates 20-year anniversary by converting to 100% ESOP (ht GACEO) // Women-founded MaMa Jean’s Natural Market transitions to 100% ESOP (ht MOCEO) // Illinois’ WEBIT Services partners with Buildkin to become 100% employee-owned as founder retires // 🇬🇧 Bell Contracting, a UK firm with 210 employees, converts to EOT // 🇬🇧 Landmark, a UK branding agency, converts to EOT

For more, check out our Dealflow page.

Research & Insights

The latest arguments, analysis, and academic research (📚). Go deeper with our other topic-specific newsletters.

Employee Ownership | 📺 Project Equity CEO Evan Edwards asks, What Does EO Equal? // Remember that study on profit sharing in France? The Stanford Social Innovation Review gives a handy summary with input from Doug Kruse at Rutgers

• ESOPs | Corey Rosen asserts that ESOPs can net higher ROI than M&A over time // Robert Reavis argues ESOPs are effective for transport logistics companies seeking to retain their older, blue collar workers // analyzes tax, legal and policy implications of the Roth ESOP in white paper // Will Hobby discusses the growth of ESOP M&A // Expanding ESOPs launches new website of stories, maps and data

• EOTs | To paraphrase Miren Oca in her interview with Evolve Economics: You are what you measure, so measure what matters (just don’t let it become your new target, however)

The Ownership Economy | Bush and coauthors (🇬🇧) highlight the importance of communities capturing the value they create // Delta Fund enters the chat on AI governance, ownership and who profits from society’s technological gains // interviews Stephanie Gripne of Impact Finance Center // 🇬🇧 Byers reports co-ops generate more than £1.5B in income across Northern Ireland with opportunities to expand the sector further // 🇨🇦 Co-op Canada find >6,000 co-ops and mutuals generating $119B in revenue and employing ~180,000 people

• Economic & Workplace Democracy | 📚 Entler and coauthors link perceptions of economic democracy and participation in decision-making with employee satisfaction // Ananda Gowda N. analyzes India’s caste system as a barrier to economic democracy // The Wellbeing Economy Alliance asks: Who gets to decide how the economy works and who it serves?

Ownership on Purpose | 📺 Fast Company’s Giving Back to Get Ahead recent panel starred Alex Amouyel of Newman’s Own (and 100% for Purpose) and Les Szabo of Dr. Bronner’s (and Purpose Pledge) // Our own spoke about purpose trusts at last month’s Neighborhood Economics gathering in Galveston (paywalled)

✌️ See you next week

One final thanks to EOX for the shout out on LinkedIn this week!

Podium Entertainment, a publisher for independent authors, was acquired in PE deal that layers in employee incentives via Ownership Works (paywalled). Podium’s claim to fame is audio-first publishing—i.e., skip the silly print stuff and go straight to audiobooks and creator-driven content.

This one caught my eye because the audio-first publishing industry is somewhere between its infancy and adolescence. Decades ago, sociologist Arthur Stinchcombe noticed that companies in new industries set the example for later entrants to follow.

Mark and I found out that’s exactly what happens with ESOPs: when more companies in an industry (or a place) are employee-owned, new entrants are more likely to use the same blueprint and adopt employee ownership themselves.

So, the question is, will this transaction make other audio-first publishers more likely to adopt a form of employee ownership? For proponents of private equity’s version of employee ownership, Podium’s acquisition is good news because it makes similar deals more likely. For opponents of the PE form of employee ownership, it’s bad news for the same reason, unless they can persuade potential imitators to consider other forms of employee ownership.

Subscribe now

👉 In This Issue

If you’re new here, friend, welcome! You may want to start with Stories & Dealflow.

• Events and Opportunities

• News

• Stories & Dealflow

• Research and Insights

🏙️ Events and Opportunities

Events This Week

• Sep 26 | Center for Community Wealth’s satellite USFWC conference in Denver

• Sep 28 | The EO Capital Roadmap Roadshow hits Seattle // Platform Coops’ Worker Co-ops & The Long History of Labour // Lafayette Square Institute’s Working Class Insights Forum in Middleburg, VA

• Sep 29 | The ESOP Association’s Great Lakes Regional Conference in Indianapolis

• Sep 30 | Employee Ownership Canada’s Life After the Sale // ICA Group’s LevelUp Conversations in NYC // Centre for Climate Psychology’s An Economy of Right Relationship // Cooperatives Europe’s From Aid to Ownership

• Oct 1 | The Ownership Economy Summit in NYC and Barcelona // Iowa Center for Employee Ownership’s Annual Conference // B Corp Postlethwaite’s Ownership Matters webinar

• Oct 2 | People’s Economy Lab’s Making Our Economy Work for Us webinar

For even more events, see our main Events page.

Opportunities

• Prairie Capital Advisors | Associate - ESOP Consulting

For more jobs, including at employee-owned companies, visit our Jobs page.

🗞️ Ownership News

Employee Ownership

• A Las Vegas casino gave ~10,000 $70 million in company stock (ht Conscious Capitalism’s The Briefing)

• ESCA honors Senator Steve Daines as their 2026 ESOP Champion

• Ownership Works receives Citi Foundation’s 2026 Community Finance Initiative

• A task force launches in Vermont to expand employee ownership

• Project Equity welcomes Alison Boess as Capital Deployment Manager of their EO Catalyst Fund. Congrats!

• 🇬🇧 Oct 12 Deadline: Wellington HR calls for news stories of 200 words or less for their first-ever EO Annual, celebrating the year’s employee ownership milestones

Ownership on Purpose

• 🇳🇱 Dutch Parliament is pursuing a new steward ownership structure to reduce administrative and legal costs for mission-driven companies

• Laurie Lane-Zucker contends that mission and values must go beyond legal contracts and be built into the company structure itself (ht )

• ICYMI: After passing 47% of customer service calls to AI, IKEA upskills their workforce to build new revenue streams instead of laying off employees

The Ownership Economy

• Agricultural co-op Ocean Spray expands its executive suite

Ownership Stories & Dealflow

Employee Ownership | 6D Health and Wellness Cooperative (🇨🇦) offers ownership to care providers and mental health services to clients (ht GEO) // Jolly CEO Dean Zimberg spotlights the employee retention at QuikTrip, a convenience store whose employees own 20% via ESOP and where Mark drinks 20% more slushies than he should // Neilcott Construction (🇬🇧) pays off its buyout loan 5 years ahead of schedule

• Dealflow | Philadelphia’s Celsius Companies combines ETA with ESOPs // New Hampshire publisher Earth Sky + Water transitions to worker co-op // New Jersey manufacturer James Alexander, Wisconsin’s Ellis Construction, Minnesota’s Cafe Imports, and Michigan construction firm Rockford all become 100% ESOP-owned

• For more, check out our Dealflow page.

Ownership Economy | Members of Park Slope Food Co-op in NYC provide 75% of labor to keep prices low // @Robert Geline contrasts fan engagement with community-owned Green Bay Packers vs. other NFL teams (paywalled, ht Peter Dorman) // 📺 Lindsay Harris shares how Propolis Housing Co-op raised $1.1 million in community bonds (ht GEO)

Ownership on Purpose | ICYMI: This week’s Conscious Capitalism The Briefing newsletter recapped a January podcast with Dusan Vujovic, CEO of Tony’s Chocolonely:

🌲🌲 Trivia | Have you noticed a preponderance of pines in co-op branding?

Research & Insights

The latest arguments, analysis, and academic research (📚). Go deeper with our other topic-specific, spillover newsletters.

Employee Ownership | Project Equity’s Zarin Kresge calls for advisors to include employee ownership as an exit option // In Newsweek, CCA’s Howard Brodsky asserts employee ownership builds economic participation in ways that government assistance cannot // ICMYI: ’s LinkedIn newsletter Employee Ownership launched around this time last year

• ESOPs | The CLEI proposes a new financial vehicle to fund employee ownership, drawing inspiration from the mortgage market // 🎙️ The Ownership Effect’s new episode exploring what sets ESOPs apart from other employee ownership structures // BDO Advisors analyzes legal and cultural dynamics when unions meet ESOPs

• Worker Cooperatives | 📚 Fordham’s Gowri Krishna examines how the franchise model could be adapted to scale worker ownership

Ownership on Purpose | 🎙️ On Purpose 360, interviews Benevity CEO Sona Khosla about their recent State of Corporate Purpose report // In HBR, Nick Hobson and ask Will Your Organization Stand By Its Values—Even When It’s Hard? (paywalled) Our guess? Only if you have already locked those values into your structure or culture (ht Conscious Capitalism)

The Ownership Economy | 🇨🇦 MP Ryan Turnbull advocates for collective ownership in Canadian Parliament // Sustainable Economies Law Center ponders Cooperatives as Incubators of Democracy (ht GEO) // ICA positions co-ops as tool for international development and peace

• Community Ownership | Katie Deal confronts the tension of communities depending on workers who can no longer afford to rent there // Ground Works Consulting shares its latest insights on campaigning for community ownership policy change // argues that community ownership structures are tools for economic development // Lyn Jardine of the Scottish National Party connects ownership to community wealth

• Digital Ownership | 📚 Landemore and Tang consider democratic ownership of AI through game theory’s stag hunt framework

• Workplace Democracy | The ICA Group reacts to HBS findings on building ownership culture // Aspen EOP helpfully collated the ownership culture conversations from their June event

You’ve stumbled across a spinoff newsletter of The Stakehold, our newsletter for the ownership economy. This is a deeper cut on employee ownership than we include in our free weekly newsletter.

If you’re an employee ownership junkie and you want it all shot straight into your inbox once we launch, you can toggle on emails for Ownership at Work here:

Subscribe to Ownership at Work

If you haven’t already, you should start with the Top Shelf News in our main newsletter. Below is the rest!

🗞️ The News

Employee Ownership

• 🇬🇧 I-COM, a marketing agency and employee ownership trust, is building a UK employee ownership map

• 🇫🇷 France considers new policy (Pacte Papin) designed to incentivize employee ownership with reduced taxes and registration duties

• 21 Hats announces its 2027 workshop series, designed to give business owners access to founders with a wide range of succession experiences and employee ownership models

• Durham, NC officially joins DAWI’s Employee Ownership Cities program with the launch of their Keep It Durham-Owned initiative (ht Steve Storkan)

ESOPs

• Rutgers Institute researchers find that full-time workers without 4-year degrees but in ESOP jobs earn 15% more each year than their counterparts in non-ESOP jobs (ht Adria Scharf)

• Stout reports ESOPs generated an 18.1% return in 2025, compared with 16.4% for the S&P 500—and that performance gap widens over a 5-year time horizon

• Expanding ESOPs features its newest member, Christensen Group Insurance

• Ulteig, a consulting engineering firm and 100% ESOP, adds employee ownership expertise to its board with Susan Conner

• Congrats to OwnersEdge as 2026 Waukesha County Large Business of the Year

• An NCEO task force report calls on the Department of Labor to factor repurchase obligations into upcoming valuation rules to protect long-term ESOP sustainability

Employee Ownership Trusts

• ICYMI: According to EOT Advisors, recently converted employee ownership trusts include environmental services firm Heumann Environmental (IN), software company Katapult Engineering (PA), Allied Foundation Repair (TX), DCW Cost Management (WA), logistics firm Marshall Fine Arts (NY) , and consulting firm SEI (NV)

• NCEO releases four new case studies in their EOT Toolkit, featuring Ocaquatics Swim School, Guidon, ShopBot Tools and Mainscape (members-only)

Worker Cooperatives

• ICYMI: The ICA Group looks far and wide for all the worker co-ops on LinkedIn

• Two national organizations rebrand to clearer, simpler names: NCBA CLUSA will be U.S. Co-ops and Co-operatives and Mutuals Canada is now Canada Co-op

• Cincinnati’s Topia Coffee Copperative rebrands as Radical Bean Cooperative, restructuring the business to reconnect with the community

• 🎙️ ICA Group’s LevelUp Coops announces new podcast premiere on Sep 30

• Oct 1 Deadline: Apply for Cooperative Education Fund grants of $1,000-10,000

• Congratulations to ICA Global Board President Dr. Ariel Guarco and the 15 new At-Large Directors — including U.S. Co-Ops’ Doug O’Brien

• The Fund for International Cooperative Development invites global co-ops to apply for grants for crisis response, rebuilding or long-term co-op development

• Cooperative Development Fund released their quarterly updates, including upcoming events, their 2025 Annual Report, and a new 5-year strategy plan

• Cooperative Fund of the Northeast announces newest Co-op Navigator Fellows

The Stories

• Paramount Plastics, a 100% employee owned manufacturing ESOP under Empowered Ventures, achieves one year without any OSHA injuries

• EV launches their Season 5 podcast by spotlighting their 5 companies

• NCEO spotlights how employee ownership completely changed how Jaime Garcia and his wife thought about retirement

• Grassroots Economic Organizing (GEO) profiles an employee-owned newsroom, a bakery worker co-op and more in their latest newsletter

• 🎙️ Construction ESOP Collective interviews Harkins Builders’ Ben Nichols

• 🎙️ Counterpoint: Kevin Donnelly shares the story of selling his telecoms company to private equity with the 21 Hats podcast:

Research & Insights

• Project Equity shares their Annual Report, including data on company resilience and national initiatives to scale employee ownership

• 🇬🇧 The eoa launches a new series of employee ownership guides for businesses

• 🎙️ ESOP Exit Podcast breaks down Section 1042 and its tax benefits

• U.S. Co-Ops pilot tests new Learning Hub tools for coffee co-ops in Adjuntas, PR

• Cooperatives Europe releases From Aid to Ownership: The Cooperative Approach to International Development while the International Cooperative Alliance and UN COPAC publish 17 briefs on cooperatives and sustainable development goals

• 🇨🇦 Lucie Moncion and Andrew Pakes argue for employee ownership to be core to Canada’s economy, noting the challenge is one of scale rather than public support

• Starting Oct 7: Rocky Mountain Employee Ownership Center announces The The People’s Economy Academy

• Rutgers proposes innovative structures for licensed professionals seeking more broad-based equity for staff

✌️ See you next week!

If you made it this far, you’re a real one. We’d love to talk with you about sponsoring this newsletter so that we can keep it free for other Stakehold readers.

You’ve stumbled across a test: a spinoff of The Stakehold, a newsletter for the ownership economy. This is a deeper cut on the ownership economy than our free weekly newsletter.

If you’re an ownership economy junkie and you want it all shot straight into your inbox once we launch, you can toggle on emails for The Ownership Economy here:

Subscribe to The Ownership Economy

If you haven’t already, you should start with the Top Shelf News in our main newsletter. Below is the rest!

🗞️ Ownership Economy News

Community Ownership

• From her new book, shares a story about a county in England that build a community-controlled endowment fund; Katie Boland posts about Patton Power’s book, Brave New Capital

• Headwaters Community Trust in Vermont purchased one of Sterling College’s campuses last month

• Congrats to Jerome Nikolai Warren as the new Faculty Fellow and Mentor at the Rutgers Institute for the Study of Employee Ownership and Profit Sharing!

• Helen Leung of LA Más receives Innovator of the Year award from Connect CRE for using community ownership to preserve affordable housing

Digital Ownership

• As Tech Policy Press synthesizes the latest AI news and the calls for developmental pacing, an unresolved question lingers: Who gets to set that pace?

  • Pacing the frontier is the theme of the week: AI for Non-Profits Network examines how to scale expertise and impact via AI, with a solid shout out to Project Equity

  • And The Owner’s Box delves into ownership and governance

  • In TIME, Sarah Polcz and argue that the idea of publicly owning AI has become bipartisan, positioning a public-benefit tax as an alternative to government equity

Producer Ownership

• 🎙️ The Ownership Economy profiles Austin Robey of music platform Subvert

• Hoffman Green partners with Terrena, a French agricultural co-op

Research & Insights

• A pastor in Goergia recounts why their church worked with Urban Recipe to set up food co-ops for its food-insecure neighbors

• Community Land Trust Network releases new impact report and 5-year plan, noting that in the last three years 26 CLTs have built 333 affordable homes

• A new HBS case study analyzes emerging framework options for democratic governance and shared stewardship of AI

• 📺 Oxford Professor Jonathan Michie fames employee ownership as a resilient response to global pressures and inequalities (video below)

  • 📚 Great minds: Oliver Browne and Graeme Nuttall recently published similar findings from local Scottish economies

  • Project Equity’s Amanda Calder also sees business succession as an economic development issue

✌️ See you next week!

If you made it this far, you’re a real one. We’d love to talk with you about sponsoring this newsletter so that we can keep it free for other Stakehold readers.

Each week The Stakehold posts a free newsletter for the ownership economy. This newsletter is a deeper cut on organizational purpose than we include in that free weekly newsletter.

If you’re an organizational purpose junkie and you want it all shot straight into your inbox, you can toggle on emails for Ownership on Purpose here:

Subscribe to Ownership on Purpose

If you haven’t already, you should start with the Top Shelf News in our main newsletter. Below is the rest!

🗞️ News on Purpose

• Jim Sorenson and Alan Eagle’s new book The Impact Capitalist launches Oct 6

• HBS published the agenda and speakers for its TOP26: Steward Ownership Conference

• 🤓 The Purpose Trust Ownership Network has a new Data Dashboard

Purpose Stories

• 🎙️ Alternative Exit interviews Sam Boustred, Chair of the Global Members’ Board for Scott Bader, on the employee ownership trust’s history, financial structures and governance:

• 🫧 Purpose Pledge member Dr. Bronner’s was featured by two podcasts, Shelfsense: Stories Behind Our Stuff; and The Checkout: Grocery Nerds, with Les Szabo (The Purpose Pledge & Dr. Bronner’s) and Seth Goldman (Beyond Meat and JUST Ice Tea)

• 📺 P. Terry’s Burger Stand chose an employee ownership trust over a $100M exit:

✌️ See you next week!

If you made it this far, you’re a real one. We’d love to talk with you about sponsoring this newsletter so we can keep it free for other Stakehold readers.

• Bloomberg reports on US House’s passage of the Retire Through Ownership Act, a bill which gives ESOP trustees a clearer path to determining fair market value

  • See analysis from NCEO, TEA, and Menke, which calls it “the most consequential ESOP legislation in a generation”

  • Striking to us is just how bipartisan this legislation is—during an election year in a historically polarized country. This bill pulled in the bootleggers, the Baptists and everyone in between

• Rutgers Institute researchers find that full-time workers without 4-year degrees but in ESOP jobs earn 15% more each year than their counterparts in non-ESOP jobs (ht Adria Scharf)

• 🇬🇧 John Lewis, the UK’s largest employee ownership trust, detailed the next phase of its multi-year turnaround plan, focusing on retail investments and cost discipline

Subscribe now

👉 In This Issue

If you’re new here, friend, welcome! You may want to start with Stories & Dealflow.

• Events and Opportunities

• News

• Stories & Dealflow

• Research and Insights

🏙️ Events and Opportunities

For events more than a week away, see our main Events page.

• Sep 22 | Common Trust interviews P. Terry’s Co-Founder Kathy Terry on scaling a people-first business // The Great Game of Business Conference in St. Louis // The ESOP Association’s Midwest Regional Conference in Des Moines

• Sep 23 | UWFWC’s Union Co-Ops Council meeting // ESCA’s Federal Policy Conference & Lobby Day in DC // eoa online panel, How to Become Employee Owned // Movement Politics Accelerator’s Public Dollars, Private Capture: How Co-ops Might Change the Landscape of Childcare

• Sep 24 | Kent State’s Ohio Employee Ownership Center’s ESOP Contribution and Allocation Mechanics // Project Equity and Silicon Valley SBDC’s Succession Planning Through Employee Ownership for Silicon Valley Businesses

• Sep 25 | USFWC and DAWI’s Worker Cooperative Conference in Boston (y en español también)

• Sep 26 | Center for Community Wealth’s satellite USFWC conference in Denver

• Sep 28 | Platform Coops’ Worker Co-ops & The Long History of Labour // 2026 Working Class Insights Forum in Middleburg, VA // The EO Capital Roadmap Roadshow hits Seattle

Opportunities

For more, including for jobs *at* employee-owned companies, visit our Jobs page.

• Vermont Employee Ownership Center is hiring a Communications and Program Coordinator

• ESOP Partners is hiring three new Assistant Administrators (ht Matt Licina)

• Texas Impact Capital Alliance is hiring a founding Executive Director

🗞️ Ownership News

Employee Ownership

For even more employee ownership news, see Ownership at Work, a spinoff newsletter we’re testing.

• Expanding ESOPs and pollster released a new survey on Americans’ perceptions of employee ownership

  • “Amidst all the negative headlines about young people and the economy, employee ownership offers a path to rebuilding their faith in our system,” said Echelon’s

• Two national organizations rebrand to clearer, simpler names: NCBA CLUSA will be U.S. Co-ops and Co-operatives and Mutuals Canada is now Canada Co-op

• Ownership Capital Lab announces inaugural cohort of their Employee Ownership Fund Accelerator

Ownership on Purpose

For even more news on organizational purpose, see Ownership on Purpose, a spinoff newsletter we’re testing.

• HBS updates the agenda and speakers for TOP26: Steward Ownership Conference

• 🇳🇱 Netherlands bookseller BoekenBalie becomes steward-owned

The Ownership Economy

For even more ownership economy news, see The Ownership Economy, a spinoff newsletter we’re testing.

• Newly launched Thriving Communities Fund went live with their website this week

• David Cobb, whose work ranged from cooperatives to tribally-owned community land trusts to workplace democracy, passed away on Labor Day

• Next City analyzes why this fall is critical for mission-driven lenders, from pending distribution of CDFI funds to the impact of proposed CRA changes; Shelterforce has more helpful context

Ownership Stories & Dealflow

• 🍻 Unions + employee ownership = ? Cambridge, MA brewery Lamplighter founders surprised employees with a transition to employee ownership trust after labor voted to unionize earlier this year

• OEOC’s Michael Palmieri publishes new case study for Rutgers on Web Industries

• A pastor recounts why their church in Georgia worked with Urban Recipe to set up food co-ops for its food-insecure neighbors

• 📺 Rachel Eva Merfalen and Shawn Saint Michael debut their first Good Future film, featuring John Hannah of Tennessee’s Inline Electric & Lighting:

• Dealflow | Kentucky’s Lark Electric merged with American Gridwork Partners as it builds out an employee ownership program to attract and retain more workers // Tropical Foods sells to its employees in an ESOP deal backed by Apis & Heritage (paywalled) // Netherlands bookseller BoekenBalie became steward-owned // Headwaters Community Trust in Vermont purchased one of Sterling College’s campuses last month

  • ICYMI: According to EOT Advisors, recently converted employee ownership trusts include environmental services firm Heumann Environmental (IN), software company Katapult Engineering (PA), Allied Foundation Repair (TX), DCW Cost Management (WA), logistics firm Marshall Fine Arts (NY) , and consulting firm SEI (NV)

For more, check out our Dealflow page.

Research & Insights

The latest arguments, analysis, and academic research (📚). Go deeper with our other topic-specific newsletters.

Employee Ownership | Rutgers’ Employee Ownership Hub compiles their latest research and action briefs // Fellowship applications open for dissertation-stage PhD students at the Center for Engaged Scholarship (ht Melissa H) // 📚 Albanese et al. examine the relationship between employee ownership and sustainability (paywalled)

• ESOPs | Stout reports ESOPs generated an 18.1% return in 2025, compared with 16.4% for the S&P 500—and that performance gap widens over a 5-year time horizon

• Worker Cooperatives | Movement Politics Accelerator posts The Mondragon Playbook (ht Just Economy Institute) // Nonkululeko Tabata of Nexus Community Partners considers the importance of education to co-op success

Workplace Democracy | HBS’s Karasik, Rouen and Whillans argue that clearly communicating behavioral norms increases retention and sense of belonging for employee-owners // College presidents are pushing to redesign university governance

The Ownership Economy | The UN released their 2026 Report on the Social and Solidarity Economy

See you next week!

One final thanks to 100% for Purpose, Zoe Schlag, IA-CEO, Cool Hardware Company, OEOC, and new Stakehold Advisory Board member Tim Garbinsky for the LinkedIn shoutouts this week.

Why distribute control?

Here is one way to think about why owners might decide to share power:

1. Owner-focused reasons, like making more money or distributing the stress of leadership

2. Business-focused reasons, e.g. aligning incentives or recruiting/retaining workers, to strengthen business performance

3. Others-focused reasons, like helping develop workers’ personal agency or autonomy

…as well as a final section on why they might not.

Human motivations are tricky.1 We don’t always know why we’re doing things, and we often have multiple reasons for doing them. That double-barreled ambiguity means the three categories above often overlap.

But they don’t always overlap. An owner might distribute control because it will make the company perform better but then distribute that cash flow to their employees. Or they could choose to sell the company to private equity to maximize their sale price, knowing there’s a good chance it will mean the end of the business they built. Or they might distribute control because they want to engender an “owner’s mindset” in their workers, even if they worry it could lower productivity and performance.2

A quick note before we get in it: some of the claims below are well-studied. Some are derived from arguments about distributing cash flow. Others I’m just riffing on. I try to be clear about which are which and welcome pointers to more reasons or evidence!

1. Owner-focused reasons to distribute control

Start with where your 20th century Economics 101 class ended: people are motivated by self-interest. So if we see owners sharing power, we should first ask what’s in it for them. Some self-interested reasons owners might want to share power:

• Cementing their legacy as a transformational leader, a corporate rebel, an against-the-mediocre-grain businessperson.

• Preserving what they built and care deeply about, including the people and culture that helped build it.

• Distributing the stress of leadership among an expanded group of owners.

• Making more money for themselves by improving firm performance through shared control.

2. Business-focused reasons to distribute control

If a business owner wants their business to do well to maximize their own profit, that’s an instrumental reason. But it could also be that seeing their business succeed, regardless of whether they are in control anymore, is a business owner’s end goal. Either way, there are multiple pathways through which distributed control might boost performance.

• Boosting worker productivity. Recent employee ownership research suggests that the 3-5% productivity benefits of employee ownership depend less on profit-sharing than on employee-owned companies’ management approaches. This lines up with research from the nineties arguing that productivity gains come primarily from giving workers control rather than cash flow rights.

• Building trust, loyalty, and a sense of ownership among stakeholders. Earlier this year Trevor Young-Hyman presented to the Purpose Trust Ownership Network’s academic working group (cc ) a paper arguing that firms make commitments to the French equivalents of benefit corporations so that their stakeholders have more confidence in the company’s commitment to its purpose. Optimax Systems, we discovered, solidified relationships with some of its customers once they learned the company could never be sold. That’s about legally locking in a purpose, but the same might be true of sharing control, too. Customers might appreciate that decisions affecting them will be internally legislated, rather than made by the whim of a single CEO. Employees may be more likely to trust their careers to a company where they have some power and feel like owners. The result is what employee ownership advocates call an “ownership culture” or “ownership mindset,” and nerds call collective psychological ownership.

• Improving the odds of firm survival. Employee-owned firms are more likely to survive economic downturns, but it isn’t clear to me why, and I suspect it has more to do with loyalty to/identification with the firm than workers thinking “if I stick this out, I’ll get my bag.”

• Lowering transaction costs. Henry Hansmann argues that firms choose ownership structures that cumulatively lower two transaction costs: contracting costs and ownership costs. You want to give control to stakeholders that can work together effectively; you want to transact at a distance with stakeholders you can easily contract with. Hansmann predicts (and I think we see) more distributed control in industries like law and architecture, where similarly trained partners know how to operate together and would be expensive to contract with if they were external to the firm.3

• Recruiting and retaining employees. Hiring, retaining, and firing workers are a real time suck for most businesses. Employee owners are better off than the rest of us—they get paid more, build more wealth, and stick around longer.

• Aligning incentives, vision, and accountability. The most common understanding of a firm is as is a collection of contracts, which results in a cat-and-mouse game between “principals” and their “agents”—think investors v. bosses, bosses v. managers, managers v. workers. Distributed control can interrupt that pattern in multiple ways: (1) it collapses some of those categories; the agents (workers) become principals (owners), too; (2) it means that there are more owners making sure all those other principals (coworkers) don’t shirk; (3) it inspires prosocial behavior: As Colin Birkhead, Noah Gibson and I argue, it also sets the stage for a “pay-it-forward” flywheel within an organization. When we see one coworker stepping up to help another, we’re then more likely to help another one; (4) it can lead to more aligned incentives: if the direction of the company is commonly determined, individuals can make sure they and others benefit from its growth; and (5) it can lead to greater alignment around a common purpose: a commonly determined purpose is more likely to be commonly protected.

• Unlocking innovation and better decision-making. Corey Rosen’s excellent book Beyond Engagement argues that a primary pathway to improved performance is employee-owned firms’ tendency to build structures reward workers for frontline innovation. To me, this is connected to the power paradox, which is that when we have more power, we see things less clearly. Owners might want to give away power so that more people in the organization are seeing and thinking strategically. When owners set up more transparent, inclusive decision-making systems, they’ll get more participation, higher-quality deliberation, and better problem-solving.

3. Others-focused reasons to distribute control

Armchair economists tend to dismiss the possibility that people might do things out of actual altruism. If something looks like altruism, what they were really doing was making themselves feel good by being altruistic. But scholars today take seriously insights from psychology and evolutionary biology that humans are wired for both competition and collaboration. Reciprocity and generosity are as human as self-interest and pleasure-seeking. So while stipulating that some of these can be used as instrumental smokescreens, here are some altruistic reasons owners might choose to distribute control:

• Rewarding and protecting the builders of the company. Employee owners are safer, more financially secure, and happier with their jobs. An owner that cares about their people might be interested in those as goals in themselves, rather than just a means to higher productivity or lower turnover.

• Protecting the company’s mission and reducing externalized harms. By expanding the number of people who can monitor how a company behaves, a company might be more likely to deliver on its mission or purpose. It might also be less likely to behave badly—if a company could otherwise get away with doing something that negatively affects the community (say, dumping toxic waste), there are more jiminy crickets around to call foul.

• Extending dignity, freedom, and self-reliance. These are all core democratic principles, that distributed control can help protect. It is harder for an owner to mistreat another owner poorly than it is for a boss to mistreat a direct report, for example. And inside of an organization that treats us as equal citizens, rather than subjects or resources, people may be more likely to fight for their freedom to express a contrary opinion. As citizens/owners, they may be more likely to develop a sense of self-reliance or autonomy, as political theorists argue democracy writ large does.

  • These are also moral principles: I heard that one business owner in Texas, for example, converted to employee ownership because he realized that all his employees were children of God, and should be treated accordingly. For him, that meant distributing profits to the tune of $30-35k per construction worker in one year, according to a recent filing—but it could also mean treating them as “created equal” in a political sense.

Reasons not to distribute control

I’ve long been puzzled by the reaction I get from business owners when I ask about sharing power. You can see their spidey-sense tingling, their minds wondering what kind of squish they’re talking to. Some of this might be branding; I haven’t used the phrase workplace democracy in this series yet for that reason.

What is puzzling to me is that particular phrase elicits skepticism even with business owners who are already sharing power. Power-sharing—even its scariest element, voting—is present in some degree all over the place: in college clubs, churches (including the Vatican!), and professional firms, codetermined German companies, not to mention university departments and pirate ships.

So why the resistance? Here are some things I’ve heard, some that have been tested and some that have not:

• It makes businesses less competitive. Big if true, but the balance of research (see above) suggests that this isn’t the case—and that the opposite might even be true. So why aren’t there more cooperatives and the like? The most compelling answer to me is that despite being effective (enough), these organizations struggle to gain credibility in markets dominated by an ethos of shareholder value maximization. That would help explain two difficulties firms with distributed control tend face:

• It introduces capital constraints. It’s tough to raise money from bankers not trained on or familiar with these organizations. It doesn’t matter if they tend to do just as well as hierarchically managed companies, if providers of finance are biased against them or consider getting educated about them too time-consuming.

• It sacrifices speed. Deliberation takes time, and distributing control (usually) demands deliberation. But most organizational decisions don’t require speed. Imagine a fire department: yes, during a fire you need someone to lead and others to follow. But 99% of the decisions made about fire departments are made in the firehouse, not on the site; the upsides of deliberation might outweigh the time required for those.4

• It devolves into a tyranny of the of the majority. As democracy spread during the Enlightenment, one major source of pushback was the belief that that most people were not capable of self-governance. If given power, they would run roughshod over the propertied, educated elites trained to govern. This argument is resonant with the “degeneration thesis” of workplace democracy scholarship, which is that democratic firms will eventually revert back to centralized power, either via market pressures or internal politicking.

• It means rule by the mediocre middle. A softer version of the tyranny-of-the-majority thesis is not that popular rule will be cataclysmic, but it will just be…meh. If you distribute control, he said, decisions will be made by the average worker, meaning probably poorly. Instead, you should give all the power to the most capable.5

• It misaligns incentives between current and future owners. This is known as the “horizon problem,” which is that employee owners might be less likely to make long-term investments than to extract today what value they can. This is puzzling to me, though: I don’t see why ten owners would be more subject to the horizon problem than one; in either case, the important variable would seem to be the owners’ estimation of whether they can maximize value by investing long-term v. taking dividends out today.

• It incentivizes free riding. When a company is shared and managed collectively, people have an incentive to take more and contribute less. This is a version of the classic “tragedy of the commons” argument. But there’s a funny thing about that tragedy: it’s just not always true. In fact, Elinor Ostrom won a Nobel prize for showing examples of places communities managed common pool resources without privatization or nationalization. Many of the features that enable that (and discourage free riding) are found in more democratic firms. Institutions shape incentives, norms, and behavior.

• It could negatively impact their family. Some owners see sharing control with workers as precluding sharing control with their family members, their heirs to the business. Or they might think that sharing control and economic rights happens all at once. In reality, sharing control can take many forms and levels, and it does not necessarily have to be bundled together.

Next: From Why → How

In our next episode in this miniseries, we’ll tackle our second question of how owners can distribute control more broadly. Don’t touch that dial! Between now and then:

• What are we missing here? What other motivations for distributing control have you heard business owners voice or seen researchers poke at? What other reasons have you heard for why an owner might not want to share control?

• How have you seen control-sharing done well? Or done poorly?

Here at The Stakehold, we’re convinced that advocates of employee ownership and social innovation should hang out more. As we argue in a Skoll Centre white paper coming out this fall, both groups of people are asking the same question: What is this organization for?

So I was excited to see that longtime employee ownership advocate Mary Josephs has joined the board of Conscious Capitalism, a group of business leaders committed to four tenets:

1. Higher purpose

2. Stakeholder orientation

3. Conscious leadership

4. Conscious culture

When I attended Conscious Capitalism Dallas’s event last month (see back left!) it struck me that employee ownership and steward ownership lock those personal commitments in. They can variably:

1. Lock in an organization’s purpose

2. Give stakeholders (employees, sometimes others) a financial stake

3. Distribute leadership throughout the organization

4. Build a culture of ownership and mutual commitment, and even a flywheel of generosity in a company.

Partly as a way to pull these two communities closer together, we’re testing out a new newsletter, Ownership on Purpose, which will aggregate news and stories about the different ways leaders lock in their organization’s purpose, including through steward, purpose trust, foundation, and nonprofit ownership; certifications from groups like B Lab, The Purpose Pledge, and Tugboat; affinity groups like conscious capitalism and 100% for Purpose; and legal structures like benefit corporations and sociétés à mission. Below is what you’ll get each week as a free subscriber, if this takes off!

Subscribe now

Top Shelf News

• B Lab is deploying its recently updated standards and considering stripping certification from Havas Media over its work with Shell

• The Purpose Pledge, launched as a more stringent alternative to B Corp certification, appointed Mountain Rose Herbs CEO Cameron Stearns to its board

  • Purpose Pledge’s Executive Director Les Szabo will join CEOs from Newman’s Own, Grace Farms Foundation, and 100% for Purpose at Fast Company’s Innovation Festival

Events This Week

For more, see our running list of (mostly employee ownership) events here.

• Sep 14: BKLYN STUDIOS’ panel on Jeffrey Hollender’s new book, Built for a Better World: How Seventh Generation Pioneered a Movement That Changed the Purpose of Business

• Sep 15: Tompkins Bank & Trust Power Breakfast: The Power of Purpose in White Plains, NY

• Sep 16: Good Together’s Talking Shift: Is the answer to tough times taking back the economy?

• Sep 16: 6th Annual BLD Southeast Conference in DC

In Other News

• Politico’s Joseph Schatz examines how government equity stakes in companies are shifting from temporary bailout mechanisms to long-term governance levers

• Tom Powdrill delves into the UK’s government consultation on corporate reporting, where attempts at modernizing raise questions around stewardship

• Newly certified B Corporations: ShipIn Systems, L-Acoustics, Cleanology, Sea to Summit, Birketts LLP, and Just Salad

• In a new paper, David S. Lucas and company find that benefit corporations that also have B Corporation status have longer and higher-quality benefit reports

• B Lab Africa is launching its latest Resilient Sustainable Business program

• Employee-owned B Corporation King Arthur Baking was named a Casella Sustainable Leader

• ICYMI: Check out Vital Farms’ appearance earlier this year on the How I Built This podcast:

• 🎙️ Last week we teased a new partnership with Owners at Work. The podcast is the latest incarnation of an employee ownership newsletter in operation since 1991. This week…we’re on it! Don’t miss it:

• 🧌 Calling all trolls: The fine folks of Reddit have questions for us about employee ownership. Pop over and see if you can help

• Thanks to , the , Ownership Works, the Employee Ownership Expansion Network, Margot Kane, Menke, and the Iowa Center for Employee Ownership, for all the shout-outs on LinkedIn this week 🫶

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🥃 Top Shelf News

• Employee ownership education just leveled up: UC San Diego’s Rady School of Management announced Alissa Orlando as their inaugural Beyster Executive in Residence for Innovation (ht Mary Ann Beyster)

• 📺 Tedx drops a new Talk: North Dakota Lieutenant Governor Tammy Miller on why America needs more owners

• Christmas is coming! Start shopping for your loved-and-tolerated-ones on the new Market Place of worker-owned companies

👉 In This Issue

If you’re new here, friend, welcome! You may want to start with Ownership Stories.

• Events and Opportunities
  Does what it says on the tin

• News
  Dealflow, ESOPs, Co-ops, Community Ownership, and the Ownership Economy

• Ownership Stories
  Profiles of employees, owners, and companies

• Research and Insights
  ESOPs, Co-ops, Community Ownership, Workplace Democracy, and the Ownership Economy

🏙️ Events and Opportunities

For events more than a week away, see our main Events page.

• Sep 14

  • BKLYN STUDIOS’ panel on Jeffrey Hollender’s new book about Seventh Generation, Built for a Better World

  • Day one of the Ohio Center for Employee Ownership’s 2026 National Employee-Owner Summit in Chicago

• Sep 15

  • Tompkins Bank & Trust Power Breakfast on The Power of Purpose in White Plains, NY

  • The Center for Inclusive Growth’s Inclusive Growth Summit in New Haven, CT

  • NCEO’s Busting the Benefit Level Myth

  • Day one of Neighborhood Economics Galveston 2026 in Texas

  • The International Cooperative Alliance’s General Assembly begins, in Panama

  • The Asset Funders Network’s Invested in the South: CDFIs Building Assets, Strengthening Communities

  • Deadline to register for the Vermont Employee Ownership Center’s next cohort of Taking Ownership, a series for new board members

• Sep 16

  • The Follett Foundation hosts Bernadette Wesley for a conversation on sociocracy

  • Good Together’s Talking Shift: Is the answer to tough times taking back the economy?

  • Center for Sustainable Finance & Private Wealth hosts Integrating Philanthropy and Investing to Build Community Ownership

  • B Lab’s BLD Southeast Conference in DC begins

• Sep 17

  • Júlia Martins Rodrigues hosts Jessica Gordon Nembhard for a conversation on collective courage in Boulder, CO

  • Les Szabo, Executive Director of Purpose Pledge, will join CEOs from Newman’s Own and Grace Farms Foundation at Fast Company’s Innovation Festival

• Sep 18

  • Asset Funders Network’s The Shared Ownership Economy virtual learning session

Opportunities

For more, visit our Jobs page. If you’re interested in working *at* an employee-owned company, check out Deanalytics’ job board, too!

🇬🇧 The British are hiring:

• Shared Assets is hiring a new executive leader (UK-based)

• Digital Commons Cooperative is hiring a Product Lead (UK-based)

• Chartered Governance Institute UK & Ireland is hiring for Head of ProShare

Ownership News

Dealflow

For more, check out our Dealflow page.

• California commercial contractor Mason Builders transfers 100% ownership to their new ESOP

• Technology platform ESOP One was acquired by BPAS, a leading provider of retirement plans, employee benefits and institutional trust services in the US

• Infinity Today, a New Jersey agency serving families with intellectual and developmental disabilities, partners with IPMG Holdings as they transition to 100% employee ownership

Employee Ownership

• 🇰🇷 South Korea’s SME Agency visits UK manufacturer PB Design to study their EOT model as a blueprint for succession planning in the same week South Korea passes new laws on “social solidarity finance”

• The Nasdaq Entrepreneurial Center just graduated their Summer 2026 Cohort for Ethical AI — and Zolidar put employee ownership on a billboard in Times Square

Employee Stock Ownership Plans (ESOPs)

• The ESOP Association reports the US House is expected to vote on Retire Through Ownership Act next week; the org also released their latest edition ESOP Report

• Norm Kurland, colleague of Louis Kelso and cofounder of the Center for Economic and Social Justice, died this week. His is the latest passing of some of the earliest supporters of ESOPs.

Worker Cooperatives

• 🇨🇦 Congratulations to Christine Clarke, CWCF’s new Co-Executive Director

• 🎙️ New Podcast Alert: CooperationWorks! launches Co-op Developer Stories

Community Ownership

• 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 Scotland names employee ownership in its new social economy investment strategy for community development

• Shelterforce assesses what the ROAD to Housing Act—the first federal housing overhaul in 30 years—means for community land trusts

The Ownership Economy

• Mamdani established the first-in-class Mayor’s Office of Worker Power, naming union and community organizer Tony Perlstein as Executive Director

• At the Paris Space Summit, French President Emmanuel Macron called for the shared governance of outer space as a cooperative, global commons

Before You Scroll On By

As you can see, we’re testing a new format this week. All the same content, curated by real-life humans (and Mark), streamlined.

Ownership Stories

• Expanding ESOPs published a raft of new employee-owner stories, including: Pennsylvania’s Aimée Deraco and Nick Wee; Wisconsin’s Marcease Warren; Ohio’s Rebecca Moix and Patrick Brewer; Montana’s Eva Villasana; California’s Lana Smith, and—here on The Stakehold!—DC’s Ashley Bell.

• Imagine Early Learning Centers, the first early childhood education ESOP in the US, opens a free child care center for City of NY employees and their families

• A chapter from Prairie Capital Advisors’ new book, The Journey to ESOP: Stories from Business Owners, investigates how owners use ESOPs to anchor culture, share wealth and drive growth

• 🇨🇦 Canadian EOT Taproot Community Support Services cuts its first dividend checks

• 🇬🇧 eoa released a new case study on Scott Bader, a chemical manufacturing company which the owner gave away to a charitable trust structure in 1951

• 🇮🇹 Sicilian agricultural co-op helps seasonal migrant workers escape exploitation

• 🎙️ Co-Op News spotlights Punchcard, a British workers.coop podcast featuring the stories of co-ops from all sectors and countries

Research & Insights

Arguments, analysis, and (📚) academic research

Employee Ownership

• 📚 Yaun-Ling Chen argues employee ownership makes top-down training programs more effective

• ICYMI: Writing for Newsweek, CCA’s Howard Brodsky positions employee ownership as a vital defense for family businesses facing corporate consolidation

Employee Stock Ownership Plans

• NCEO’s Corey Rosen analyzes why higher ESOP contributions could result in lower long-term maintenance costs

• Verit Advisors’ Mary Josephs sees ESOPs as a tool to build community wealth when the bottom 50% of Americans currently only holds 1% of US equities

• 🎙️ Construction ESOP Collective’s latest podcast discusses building ownership culture

• 📚 John Anderson and team examine the relationship between ESOP firms and foreign direct investment (preprint)

• ⏪ ICYMI: A report by Stout, an advisory firm, claims that the valuations of its ESOP clients grew 17.3% from 2021–2024, compared to 12% growth in the S&P 500 over the same period

Worker Cooperatives

• Shout out to the gig workers: Aaron Ross Coleman traces worker co-ops back to Reconstruction-era abolitionist strategies for escaping wage slavery

• Authority Magazine interviews NCBA CLUSA’s Doug O’Brien, who addresses information asymmetry and how to measure the impact of co-ops

• The Alberta Community and Cooperative Association ponders why co-ops aren’t more mainstream in Canada

• 📚 Begoña Echaburu Mulet et al. explore the role of social management directors at Mondragón (preprint)

Community Ownership

• Co-Op News’ Miles Hadfield quotes US NRECA’s Jim Matheson: The Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment initiative is failing rural America

• In Shelterforce, Steve Dobbs reports on housing co-ops, NORCs and what happens when long-term residents age

• Using Northern Ireland as a case study, Jan Kellett links co-ops with economic resilience against conflict, arguing for co-operative coordination at scale

• In AIA Architect, Patrick Sisson examines how some developers are reframing affordable housing to integrate healthcare, childcare and public infrastructure

Workplace Democracy

• For Jacobin, economist Peter Dorman outlines three strategic pillars to improve job quality: autonomy, democratic participation and worker representation

• Looking back at US history, C.G. Matteini pushes for worker solidarity to counter “divide and conquer labor tactics” (ht )

The Ownership Economy

• Politico’s Joseph Schatz examines how government equity stakes in companies are shifting from temporary bailout mechanisms to long-term governance levers

• 🇬🇧 British ownership stakeholders call for new Prime Minister Andy Burnham to leverage co-operatives and mutuals in place-based economic development

• Tom Powdrill delves into the UK’s government consultation on corporate reporting, where attempts at modernizing raise questions around stewardship

• In a recent interview, the editor of The Economist pressed Elon Musk on two of The Stakehold’s central questions: Who should have a stake in AI’s growth? And who should have a say?

  • Start at the 39 minute mark but don’t keep watching long after that, unless you need more evidence for why we don’t want the world’s fate decided by half a dozen coders. When the conversation shifts to politics, Musk transmogrifies from entrepreneurial savant to the cousin whose politics you avoid at Christmas

  • A fun connection: Minton Beddoes’ phrasing about giving people a “sense of a share” in the upside evokes ’s famous “sense of lunch“

In 2026 Hacker News user IESAI_ski announced their creation of Market Place, a search tool for. Check it out and let us know what you find!

Then, in my first phone interview, the manager said, “I noticed you have a degree in mathematics. One of our locations, near Logan Circle, actually needs an inventory coordinator. Are you interested in that role?” I said yes, though I still imagined this would be short-term.

At the time, I had no idea The Cool Hardware Company was employee owned. But when I started, I saw a culture completely different from what I’d experienced before.

There are tons of studies about young people entering the workforce right now. We want to be engaged and challenged by our jobs, and that’s not happening for most people. We want to make a positive difference, while managers are struggling to carve out the time to train us. And, we have little confidence that retirement is in our cards.

As a relatively recent graduate, I understand the cynicism. I think one of the reasons it persists is because a proven antidote, employee ownership, remains vastly underused.

Since 2021, The Cool Hardware Company has been employee owned through a retirement plan that lets companies share ownership with workers. It’s called an employee stock ownership plan, or ESOP.

Quickly, I saw how an ownership mindset changes the way everyone works. Whether we’re on the registers or stocking supplies or in the back office, everyone’s voice matters. From the start, if I had an idea on how we could improve something, my proposal was taken seriously. As I grew into the job, I learned more about how the ESOP impacts our personal finances. It’s a retirement plan that doesn’t require you to pay anything. In the simplest terms, the better work you do, the better the company does, the better financially you and everybody around you become.

In those early days, I was probably asking our former inventory manager a new question every five minutes. Like other co-owners, he thought about how day-to-day decisions will impact us years from now, and so he was incredibly patient. Over time, that approach paid off. Over four and a half years, I grew to be an assistant store manager and am now inventory manager, stepping into my former boss’s role when he moved on. I’m always working to make things better, and so our inventory record is more fine-tuned every year, a critical need as more and more people purchase their hardware supplies online.

Our customers see the difference too. Our store staff are super knowledgeable about our inventory, can recommend how to solve both common and obscure problems, and keep up to date on our regulars’ ongoing projects. We know that if you have a bad experience with us, you’re probably going to turn to Amazon for your next purchase, which in turn will take money out of all of our pockets. People keep coming to us because we make sure our customers have an awesome experience every time, and that the products in each store are tailored to their neighborhoods. If you go to the Logan store, you’ll see queer-themed novelty socks, while the Takoma Park store carries local neighborhood t-shirts. The same is true whether it’s the Petworth or Union Market store.

Among my peers, I imagine few people are thinking about retirement, but I already feel well set up. Between my traditional 401(k) and my ESOP account, I’m building something that can transform my life decades from now. And most importantly, this same opportunity is available to everyone in our company--cashiers and managers alike.

With Labor Day upon us, I imagine we’ll start to see more dire headlines and politicians wringing their hands about my generation’s uncertain future. There are only 18 ESOPs in DC, just 110 in Maryland and fewer than 6,500 across the country. But we can change that. Expanding ESOPs, a coalition of more than 100 organizations, is building a movement to grow employee ownership in the DMV region and beyond.

Turning things around in this economy will take more than hoping the status quo delivers different results. This Labor Day, let’s try something new and commit to making more workers employee owners. You can trust my experience. After all, my job is all about delivering tools that fix things.

Ashley Bell is the inventory manager at The Cool Hardware Company, a group of fifteen employee-owned hardware stores in the DC, Northern Virginia, and Baltimore metro areas.

For more stories from employee-owners, check out Voices of Ownership from Expanding ESOPs, a promotional partner in our ongoing subscriber campaign.

Expanding ESOPs is celebrating Labor Day with a series of employee-owner op-eds:

• In Pennsylvania, Karrie Ravert still holds her “temporary” job twenty-two years later

• In Connecticut, Heidi Lavigne considers the impact of an ESOP on employees at Web Industries from the perspective of HR

• Keep an eye on The Stakehold next week—we’ll be running an op-ed from an employee owner on Labor Day, too, in partnership with Expanding ESOPs ✊

U.S. political and popular support for labor unions approaches record numbers, even as only 11% of workers report being union members.

• Earlier this summer, The United Steelworkers union outlined its strategy for union- cooperatives, framing worker-driven leadership as a tool for long-term job preservation.

• USWFC hosts its next virtual Union Co-Ops Council meeting on Sept 23

This week, guest contributor Andrea Steffes-Tuttle examines how employee ownership models can offer a competitive alternative to private equity buyouts in the childcare industry

🎙️ And...keep an eye out for next week’s episode of Owners at Work, featuring a new segment powered by The Stakehold 👀

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🥃 Top Shelf News

• IBT Media, parent company of International Business Times, transferred ownership to a perpetual purpose trust in Delaware.

  • IBT says the trust will protect its editorial mission. What could have been if Paramount/CBS and the WaPo had done the same many years ago...1

• 🚨 The New Jersey Governor’s signed a bill that will let the state’s Economic Development Authority subsidize EO feasibility studies, give financing to newly transitioned EO firms, and encourage EO proliferation in other ways. EO roots are growing deeper in the Garden State

• @Antony Bugg-Levine argues that Mark Cuban's new tax proposal is essentially a rebrand of ESOP incentives that have been on the books for fifty years

👉 In This Issue

• Events, Etc.
  Upcoming Events + Opportunities

• Employee Ownership
  ESOPs + Employee Ownership Trusts + Worker Cooperatives

• The Ownership Economy
  Community Ownership & Wealth + Ownership on Purpose + Workplace & Economic Democracy

• Academic News

🏙️ Events + Jobs

Events This Week

For more, see our Events page.

• 🆕 Sep 6: A Better Model for Data Centres: A Community Counter Offer, a community-led Southern Highlands initiative

• Sep 9: EOT Advisors is hosting a webinar to help business owners learn about EOTs

• Sep 10: Steward Market hosts The Next Steward, an online discussion with Hannah Sandmeyer and Kate Williams

• 🆕 Sep 10: MCM Collaborative shares their journey to becoming a psychotherapy cooperative

• Sep 14-15: Ohio Center for Employee Ownership’s 2026 National Employee-Owner Summit in Chicago (check out their webinar schedule too)

Opportunities

For more, visit our Ownership Jobs Board.

• Francesco Collaborative is hiring a Director of Investor Relationships

• JPMorganChase is hiring a VP of US Governance, Global Philanthropy

• Project Equity is hiring a Director of Communications & Public Relations

• Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta is hiring a Community and Economic Development (CED) Advisor/Sr. Advisor

• Trust Neighborhoods is hiring a Director of Capital Partnerships

• Common Future is hiring a Chief External Affairs Officer

Employee Ownership

• Deadlines:

  • Oct 1: MOCEO calls for employee ownership ambassadors in Missouri

  • Oct 9: Submissions for the 2027 Mid-Year Fellows Workshop in honor of Louis O. Kelso are due. Get them in and we’ll see you in New Brunswick in January

  • Oct 19: In the latest edition of The Ownership Constellation, NCEO calls for speakers at their 2027 Annual Conference in Pittsburgh

• Congrats to Nathan Stuck for his appointment to Georgia Center for Employee Ownership board. Build those bridges between EO Land and B Corp Land, Nathan!

• 🍕 Data suggests employees may want more than just another pizza party (and no, a ping pong table in the break room probably isn’t sufficient either. Ht )

• 💡 Project Equity’s Evan Edwards proposes a mash-up of entrepreneurship through acquisition (ETA) with employee ownership in Forbes

📈 Employee Stock Ownership Plans (ESOPs)

• Rise & Shine Social Enterprise, an Oregon-based care agency, surprised 250 employees with the chance to become owners in their new ESOP

• The ESOP Association released their framework to evaluate new ESOP policy proposals through five guiding principles

• 📚 Mike Mallaro released his new book, VGM: Stories & Lessons of a Great American ESOP Company. Congratulations!

• NCEO’s Corey Rosen opines on how AI will —and will not— impact ESOP transactions

• Harbor founder/CEO Andrew Dunlap sparks conversation around buying Virginia companies to keep them local vs. converting into ESOPs

• 🎙️ ESOP Radio drops a new episode on how ESOPs defer capital gains tax

  • ESOP Exit Podcast interviews Tenor partner Gary Gray on his journey from ESOP client to advisor (ht ESOP for Contractors)

  • 🎙️ The Ownership Effect podcast, hosted by The ESOP Association, premieres Season 2:

🤝 Employee Ownership Trusts (EOTs)

• 🇨🇦 For Canadian Senator Tony Loffreda, EOTs represent a market-based strategy against foreign buyouts of Canadian firms

• NCEO launched their new EOT Toolkit

• TXCEO profiles LiveOak Living Community, an established EOT in the long-term care industry

• Common Trust is now hosting The Ownership Upside on LinkedIn

• Knox & Wells, a building contractor company established in 1888, transitions to Employee Ownership Trust with fds, an employee-owned corporate finance firm

• 🎙️ The latest Beyond the B episode hosts two CEOs who chose employee ownership structures over a conventional exit, including challenges faced in the transitions:

✊ Worker Cooperatives

• Cooperative Development Foundation spotlights Cooperative Hall of Fame inductee Fannie Lou Hamer's journey from voting rights to collective ownership

• 🎬 Filmmaker Sarah Maria released a new documentary, After Capitalism: A Cooperative Economy

• Drivers Cooperative Colorado might be getting tired of imposters and imitators…

• Jaya Saxena of Ravenous, a worker-owned food magazine, details the ins and outs of worker-owned restaurants

• Author Nathan Schneider cautions co-ops against overextended social agendas, arguing that bounded operational focus protects democratic governance from member burnout.

• 📺 ICYMI: This TedEd throwback features companies thriving without CEOs

• Sep 20 Deadline: Apply to join the Food Co-Op Initiative’s 2027 Peer Learning Groups

• 🎙️ Who should Everything.Coop host on their podcast? Let them know!

The Ownership Economy

• 🛒 In Michigan, board members of the People’s Food Co-Op filed legal injunctions to successfully reclaim their store after another member’s allegedly unauthorized takeover

• 📺 A recording of the Urban Institute’s Who Owns the Future panel on locally-owned economies is now available

• Martin O’Neill reviews Mariana Mazzucato’s The Common Good Economy for Stanford Social Innovation Review

• New analysis by Prospect Law examines the legal and capital barriers facing UK mutuals and co-ops

• Common Good Journal launches an initiative ahead of Neighborhood Economics 2027, gathering stories of the ownership economy in Cincinnati—early shout out to Co-op Cincy. Go get ‘em

• ImpactAlpha debuts Edge, their new Claude tool to help analyze sustainable investment opportunities

• Digitals Commons Collective released a cool new tool to investigate historical land ownership in the UK. Bless them for obviating the need to learn ArcGIS. Grad students across the world rejoice!

Community Ownership & Wealth

• Farmer-owned co-op CHS partners with OCP North America to bolster fertilizer production supply chains

• 🏠 NCBA CLUSA spotlights Michigan Community Land Cooperative as leaders in the cooperative housing movement

• Transform Finance publishes a new briefing on Capital Needs for Community-Owned Real Estate

• Predistribution Initiative predicts worker participation in corporate governance will increase with British Steel converting to public ownership

• The city of Seattle, the Duwamish Tribe and Shared Spaces Foundation work together to rematriate 3.56 acres to the Tribe for community stewardship

Ownership on Purpose

• Dave Whorton of Tugboat Institute asserts that separating ownership and control is the most underrated benefit of building an “Evergreen company”

• Wallowa Resources, a Rural Development Hub, releases their new Stewardship Economy Community Guide (ht Aspen Institute)

• The Impact Explorers Club Fieldbook features a chapter on Steward Ownership (ht Steward-owned)

• Elisa Achterberg’s essay analyzes the psychology of ownership, stewardship and belonging

• Peter Dorman argues for purpose trust ownership of AI

• Think tank Purpose introduces Stuart, their AI-assistant built on steward ownership knowledge

Workplace & Economic Democracy

• OpenAI’s Hugging Face breach revealed 1,200 rogue AI agents formed an organizational hierarchy, managing task delegation and compute budget without human prompts or financial compensation

• 🍑 Ari Weinzwieg of Zingerman’s (a purpose trust) is raising money for Democracy Now through his Apricots for Dignity and Democracy store

• Corporate Rebels curates a reading list on alternative management cultures

• offers his own reading list, plus an argument that cooperatives must build low-stakes voting habits to be prepared for high-stakes crises

📚 Academic News

• The Center for Community Investment posts the New Economy Project case study on “ecosystem stewardship,” including Transform Finance’s analysis of the Arlington Ave acquisition

• 🏄🏾‍♂️ Larry Wigger publishes “Silver Surfers: Employee-Ownership Conversions for Retiring Entrepreneurs” in the Journal of Economic Issues this week

• Morehouse College releases the latest issue of The Collective from the International Comparative Labor Studies program

• 🎙️ The Institute for Economic Democracy drops a new podcast, a companion to their 2026 textbook, Global Cooperative Economics and Movements

• Ryan Claassen argues for a social ownership democracy as a third just arrangement of society, in addition to Rawls’ market socialism and property-owning democracy

Bright Horizons is a corporate childcare chain owned by Bain Capital, a private investment firm, before it went public in 2013. Imagine is a privately owned childcare organization with centers across New York City. It is also the only childcare organization in the country that is a 100% employee-owned company. Private equity investors approached the founder of Imagine with acquisition offers, CEO Laura Tulchin shared with me, but Imagine founder Holly Saltzman chose to sell the company to its employees through an Employee Stock Ownership Plan (ESOP).

Imagine is growing, expanding from 12 to 14 centers in 2026, with 81% of its teachers saying they plan to be at Imagine in two years. But if employee-owned daycares like Imagine are going to compete with private equity, which today operates 10-12% of all daycares, they need support: expanded access to capital, creative real estate solutions, and shared back-end infrastructure.

“A textbook example of a broken market”

Former Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen has described the childcare industry as “a textbook example of a broken market.” Part of the problem, she argues, is that the price families pay doesn’t reflect the full value childcare creates. Research shows kids with access to quality care go on to more schooling and higher earnings, and underinvesting in care now means giving up a more productive workforce later. Childcare is critical to the health and future of people and communities.

But childcare is also labor-intensive and low-margin. Labor makes up 70 to 80% of the cost to run a childcare business, making the service unaffordable for many: in 2024, a family needed an income of at least $187,000 to cover the $13,128 average national price for one child. Families in areas across the country spend more on childcare than on housing. To make care even remotely affordable for families, providers pay low wages, and highly trained staff often make less per hour than workers at McDonald’s.

Financializing a broken market

Thirty percent of childcare centers are independent for-profits, and for owners who want to retire, private equity can seem like the only option. Today, of the 10 largest childcare companies in the U.S., eight are currently owned by private equity investors, and private equity has steadily claimed roughly 10% of the American market since 2010.

One driver has been the allocation of public funds to the sector in states including New York, New Mexico, Massachusetts, and Colorado. This increase in public funding has attracted investors seeking buyout targets with guaranteed revenue. The situation mirrors the conditions known to draw investors to healthcare and elder care businesses: consistent, high demand paired with federal and state funding.

Community Change, National Women’s Law Center, Open Markets Institute, and Americans for Financial Reform Education Fund compiled a recent report on private equity and childcare. While the report is focused on childcare, its authors look to outcomes in other industries like elder care and health care that have seen heavy private equity investment as a warning sign for where childcare is headed: “well-documented experiences from the other industries that have seen significant private equity investment … show that private equity-owned businesses are more likely to push down the quality of the services they provide, the wellbeing of their customers and workers, and the competitive health of local markets.”

The possibility of employee ownership

That gap between what families can afford and what the people providing the care are paid is where employee ownership can be most powerful. In a market where families have limited choice and many businesses are privately run, employee ownership not only protects the business, but it gives the people doing the work a stake. Instead of handing ownership to investors far away from the communities where their portfolio companies are based, employee-owned companies also keep jobs and assets local.

All this was true for Imagine. The ESOP model was a way for the founder to reward the people who made the company successful while ensuring the business remains a resilient, stable childcare company rather than one focused on short-term profits and external shareholders.

Workers’ experiences at the company have been positive as it has transitioned to 100% employee ownership. Educator salaries range from $37,000 to $90,000 depending on seniority and tenure. While the wages are similar (in some cases higher) to pay at other centers, the ESOP layers a wealth asset on top of that pay. According to Imagine leadership, employees at Imagine have ESOP account balances ranging from $1,484 to $167,000. The shares increase with tenure and company growth. As of right now, the company is performing well, expanding from 12 to 14 centers in 2026. Specifically, Imagine was recently awarded a contract for The Little Apple, New York City’s first free, full-day, year-round childcare pilot program for municipal workers.

Imagine employees report that the ESOP education programs the company implemented have helped staff actually understand what ownership means in practice. In an interview, one teacher described going from “whatever, I don’t own anything” to feeling like “you’re the CEO of the place you’re at” after going through training. And workers report that they're given more control over their work, that they have a voice in the direction of the company, feel trusted in curriculum development, and are given a credit card to make direct purchasing decisions for classroom supplies.

According to Imagine’s annual employee survey, 83% of staff report being satisfied with their jobs, and 81% of staff say they see themselves working at Imagine in two years. All of these outcomes align with the benefits that employee ownership advocates and researchers promote.

What the industry needs from donors, investors, and policymakers

Imagine’s employee ownership success story didn’t come easy. If advocates want employee ownership to become a viable alternative to private equity ownership, especially in childcare, the industry needs more support, starting with access to financing that doesn’t depend on the original owner absorbing the risk alone. In the case of Imagine, the founder is holding the majority of the debt so as not to overload the business with high-interest loans.

To advance employee ownership in human services industries like childcare, employee ownership advocates and developers need to work in tandem with the government to make more shared ownership possible. Three solutions would support that expansion across the childcare industry:

Access to Capital. Investor-backed childcare providers have access to large amounts of financial capital, especially from debt. Private and employee-owned centers can’t easily compete for that same capital, in part because traditional lenders require personal guarantees that low-wage childcare workers are poorly positioned to offer, and because thin margins make these deals less attractive to lenders weighing them against higher-yield loans. To create a level playing field, community development financial institutions and other mission-driven lenders need to originate more debt for childcare conversions. Impact investors are already showing they’ll supply that kind of capital: Impact Charitable’s Catalytic Capital Partners, established in 2023 in partnership with Mission Driven Finance, has deployed over $16 million in impact-first investments, integrated capital funds, and flexible grants. These funds haven’t gone toward an employee ownership conversion yet, but they have supported the childcare space and provide an example of how mission-driven capital is already moving through structures that could support an employee-ownership conversion.

Additionally, de-risking tools could make lenders willing to say yes: loan loss reserve funds that spread default risk across a lending pool, collateral support programs that offset the guarantee gap like those the State of Colorado offers, and revenue-based financing structures that convert to worker ownership over time instead of requiring debt upfront.

A Solution to the Real Estate Problem. Childcare providers name real estate as one of the biggest barriers to growth. To make it easier for providers to access space for their businesses, groups like Mission Driven Finance are standing up programs like Care Access Real Estate (CARE). CARE acquires and develops child care facilities, then leases them to experienced operators through long-term agreements. This establishes and protects purpose-built facilities for providers that enable stable occupancy and predictable income.

Shared Infrastructure. Investor-backed childcare benefits from centralized business operations like accounting, marketing, procurement, and human resources. More shared services platforms need to be developed to limit overhead on childcare providers. CoRise is a great example of what this could look like. CoRise Cooperative helps home-based child care providers form cooperative networks for shared purchasing. The core project, CoRise Illinois, is a partnership between The ICA Group and SEIU-HCII (a union representing 35,000+ child care providers in the Midwest). More investment needs to be made to fully build out large-scale shared services that multiple childcare centers can leverage across the employee ownership types, and more work could be done to take advantage of the scale that unions offer to expand this work.

Imagine’s success shows the model works, but it worked because the founder absorbed the debt herself, sparing the business from high-interest loans. That’s not a repeatable condition; most retiring owners don’t have the option to finance their own employees’ buyout. Access to capital, real estate solutions, and shared services infrastructure are what make that choice available to the next owner, and the one after that.

Employee ownership can be a viable option for the childcare industry, but only if they have the financial infrastructure to compete on the same terms. Imagine is proof of concept. The test is whether the field can build the infrastructure to repeat it.

This story builds on earlier reporting for The74 that examined how employee ownership could improve worker retention in childcare in New York City.

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

• Handled most of the back-end of our ongoing summer subscription drive

  • (Thanks, btw, to , 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!

Subscribe now

🥃 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 + Opportunities

• Employee Ownership
  ESOPs + Employee Ownership Trusts + Worker Cooperatives

• The Ownership Economy
  Community Ownership & Wealth + Ownership on Purpose + Workplace & Economic Democracy

• Academic 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 its 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

You’ve stumbled across an experiment: an effort to see what a newsletter might look like that covers all the ways owners commit their businesses to a purpose, from nonbinding public statements all the way to irrevocable purpose lock-in.

Each week we’ll share news on all the things we’ve spotted. For more, subscribe here:

Subscribe now

One Big Thing

• Luxury travel company Black Tomato converted to an employee ownership trust, with founders retaining 25% ownership and decision-making control

Upcoming Events

• Aug 25: Institute for Family Governance’s lunch presentation with Newman’s Own Foundation in Miami

• Aug 26: NCEO’s 2026 NCEO Forum starts in Phoenix; day one features an intensive workshop on employee ownership trusts

News this week

• Pennsylvania software company LockData converted to an employee ownership trust for its 13 employees, as reported by Roodgally Senatus for ImpactAlpha (paywalled)

• Founder Miren Oca shares how converting to an employee ownership trust resolved her exit strategy concerns with the women of Entrepreneurs’ Organization

• From Project Equity, Courtney Kemp publishes an in-depth white paper explaining Employee Ownership Trusts (ht David Gray)

• 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 on Everytable’s social equity program trains frontline restaurant workers to become business owners

• 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