🚜 Under Construction
EO+WD Weekend Newsletter Vol. 99
🤗 Welcome Back
Next week will be the 100th issue of this newsletter! That’s 100 times we’ve gotten to share stories, ideas, and updates about shared ownership, workplace democracy, and the ownership economy—with you and from you.
We’ll be taking a short break while I’m traveling with family. But when we come back on June 9, we’ll launch the next 100 with some exciting news:
🎓 Opportunities for you to support EO+WD and (🤞) an official sponsor
🆕 A new name and expanded direction
🔎 More dialed-in content, based on your feedback
Stay tuned. And if you’ve been reading for a while, I’d love to hear from you:
👉 What’s been your favorite thing about the newsletter so far? Reply to this email with a bullet or two!
See you next week for #💯.
- Mark
📢 Top Shelf News
Two big events you might have missed this week:
The ESOP Association was all over DC (and LinkedIn)
The newly launched Ownership Project at Harvard hosted its first conference
Bill Cassidy (R-Louisiana ⚜️) introduced two new pro-employee ownership bills in DC, on top of the three others we covered in the last two weeks. Somebody’s hustlin’ out there
Zachau Construction of Maine is now 100% employee-owned; Colorado pizzeria Beau Jo decided not to
The Purpose Trust Ownership Network (PTON) made our first hire: a big welcome to Issie Corvi!
🌇 This Week in Events
Also see our full list of upcoming events
May 20 NCEO and co’s webinar on how financing ESOPs impacts sellers #how financing ESOPs impacts sellers
May 22-24: The Purpose in Business: Steward Ownership Conference in Modena, Italy
May 23: The Georgia Center for Employee Ownership, America’s SBDC, and the U.S. Small Business Administration host their Empowering Employee Ownership forum
🔍 Research, Analysis, and Opinions
👉 On employee stock ownership plans (ESOPs)
Expanding ESOPs has a new (?) newsletter
I don’t know who does Expanding ESOPs’ marketing strategy, but I love their regular local placement of op-eds by employee owners. This week they’re in Iowa, Kentucky, and New Jersey
Jason Luter and Scott Moskol write about ESOPs in the cannabis industry in JD Supra.
👉 On worker cooperatives
In The Conversation, Gregory Patmore asks whether a worker cooperative might be appropriate for workers in Australia’s Latrobe Valley
REI co-op members voted to reject recently proposed board members “in solidarity with REI union members,” which one worker described as an effort to take the co-op ‘back to its roots’
👉 On purpose trusts and employee ownership trusts (EOTs)
Common Trust, Patagonia, and Purpose Owned (led by PTON’s Natalie Reitman-White) were featured in an article by Kali Young on hacking the Business Growth Imperative in Steady State
👉 All other (alternative) business
Joseph Blasi and Jonathan Michie have a new book, Employee Ownership and Profit Sharing: Models, Incidence, and Sectors, now available for pre-pre-order
Aunnie Patton’s Innovative Finance Initiative (IFI), “a five-year effort to scale what works and unlock what’s next in the world of innovative finance” launched this week
Project Equity is announced a new partnership software company Zolidar
The Baker Project wants to see more publicly-traded companies like Charter Communications offer employees ownership
Elle Griffin asks and answers: How do the rich get rich? Equity
The Employee Ownership Exchange Network (EOX) released its Annual Impact Report
Alison Lingane and Julie Menter in Nonprofit Quarterly: How to Reduce Economic Inequality by Expanding Employee Ownership
ImpactAlpha was all over employee ownership and the ownership economy this week, with articles on exiting to employees, private equity, Canada’s path to employee ownership, employee ownership and DEI, responsible AI ownership, and financing worker ownership conversions (all paywalled)
In Time, Lynn Forester de Rothschild includes employee ownership in an op-ed on how President Trump could support working class voters
AdvisorHub’s CEO, Tony Sirianni hosts Michael Purpura to discuss ownership culture
Andy Farquharson puts some numbers to the silver tsunami and the opportunity for employee ownership
⏪ In Case You Missed It
How to Democratize the Economy, some interesting academic research from 2024
Two films our readers might be interested in. First, a still-to-be-released movie on the Wellbeing Economy Alliance:
And second, a 2015 documentary on economic democracy in Sweden (h/t Tej G.):