Employee Ownership Field Needs Shared Infrastructure to Build Demand

At Aspen’s 2026 Employee Ownership Ideas Forum, Loren Rodgers used his keynote to make a concrete proposal rather than another case for employee ownership: create an employee ownership consortium, launch it in the summer, and use it to make the existing field work together more deliberately. He was not proposing another organization. He was proposing a staffed coordination mechanism among organizations that already exist.

Merrit Stüven introduced Rodgers as executive director of the National Center for Employee Ownership and a longtime employee ownership practitioner, noting that he joined NCEO in 2005 and has been its senior executive since 2011. Rodgers drew on that position not to offer another tour of the field’s evidence or stories, but to press for a practical next step. The forum audience, in his view, already knew the case.

Rodgers framed the need as a demand-side problem. Policy matters, but it is not the only constraint. The field also has to get more business owners into the pipeline that leads to employee ownership, and then nurture them once they enter it. His concern was not that the people in the room needed persuasion. It was that the movement’s current infrastructure is not organized to meet the scale of its own ambition.

He described a field with many capable organizations that too often support one another “haphazardly,” duplicate efforts, and appear disconnected to outsiders. Someone searching for employee ownership, he said, would find many organizations that “don’t seem to know the others exist.” At worst, he added, organizations “tussle.”

Rodgers did not dwell on a diagnosis of why that happens. He explicitly avoided assigning causes. The point, for him, was what to build next: a structure that could become “the hub of the employee ownership community” without creating yet another permanent institution.

The consortium he proposed would not replace the National Center for Employee Ownership, the ESOP Association, DAWI, ESCA, Lafayette Square, universities, foundations, service providers, or other actors already working in the field. It would give them a place to coordinate. Rodgers’ model is deliberately lighter than a new umbrella organization: a framework where existing entities “play nicely with each other,” understand enough about one another’s work to support it, and send people toward other organizations rather than competing for every inquiry.

The ambition behind the proposal is larger than coordination. Rodgers said the field should be aiming for “a paradigm shift” toward “an employee ownership economy.” He invoked a phrase someone had shared with him privately: building a “beloved community of employee ownership.” He acknowledged the phrase’s weight, noting its use by Martin Luther King Jr. and Josiah Royce, and said it was probably not the language to use publicly outside rooms like the forum. But he said that, in his own head, the word “beloved” would remain attached to the idea.

Loren Rodgers proposed a definition of employee ownership broad enough to include multiple models, but clear enough to distinguish ownership from looser forms of worker benefit or participation.

He was careful not to make ESOPs the whole field. Employee ownership, he said, includes worker cooperatives, employee ownership trusts, direct employee ownership, and ESOPs. He warned that the ESOP community cannot impose its definition of employee ownership on other forms. At the same time, he acknowledged a policy concern raised earlier by Jim Bonham: conflating different forms of employee ownership can create confusion when making a case on Capitol Hill.

Rodgers distinguished that policy challenge from the consortium’s purpose. The NCEO is a 501(c)(3), he said, and does not lobby. He was happy to leave lobbying strategy and policy framing to organizations he named as better suited to that work: the ESOP Association, DAWI, ESCA, and Lafayette Square. The consortium, as he described it, would serve a different function: practical field-building across models.

The outer boundary he proposed came from a summit hosted at NCEO’s conference in Milwaukee roughly a month earlier. Something belongs in the employee ownership conversation, Rodgers said, if it meets three tests: “actual ownership of shares by employees or a legally defensible right” to ownership rights; broad-based participation; and an intent to create employee economic well-being.

That definition leaves room for multiple structures. It also gives the consortium a way to talk about what belongs in the employee ownership conversation without requiring every participant to use the same model or policy vocabulary.

Rodgers paired that boundary with three operating principles for the consortium.

First, members would follow what he called simple golden-rule principles: support each other, say positive things about each other, avoid disparagement, and send traffic to one another. The premise is that one organization’s success should be treated as success for the broader movement.

Second, participation would be voluntary. The consortium should not veto anyone’s plans or constrain entrepreneurial thinking. Rodgers called bold new entrepreneurial ideas one of the field’s greatest strengths.

Third, the consortium would draw its common ground broadly enough to include “all people of goodwill” who want to be part of the employee ownership conversation, while still relying on the ownership definition above to set outer limits.

Loren Rodgers acknowledged that the field has tried to create collaborative structures before. Those efforts, in his account, did not work well enough. His proposal attempts to avoid three earlier mistakes.

The first mistake was starting from scratch with large-group blue-sky exercises: whiteboards, sticky notes, and expansive visioning. Rodgers argued that the field is past that point. He presented his own framework as a starting point “good enough” to enable a productive conversation, not as a final design.

The second mistake was taking too long to produce concrete output. Past efforts, he suggested, spent too much time on vision statements and broad thematic organization without translating quickly into action. A consortium should prove itself by doing useful things early.

The examples he offered were practical and operational. One was a shared calendar for all employee ownership events, so people could see where everything is happening and possibly coordinate timing. He suggested going beyond avoiding conflicts: some events could be designed to feed into others, with a first session at one organization’s event and a continuation at another’s.

Another area was research. Rodgers described a lot of research happening across the field, but said people could make better use of it and ensure projects are more compatible. His point was not that research is absent; it was that the field lacks enough coordination to compound the value of that work.

He also pointed to emerging issues where a field-wide statement or response could matter. Artificial intelligence was his leading example. AI, he said, could transform the role of service providers in employee ownership. People considering employee ownership should understand both the potential and the risks of using AI, and the field should get ahead of that discussion.

Governor Newsom’s recent executive order about artificial intelligence and employee ownership was another case where Rodgers saw value in a collective response. Over a longer horizon, he suggested the consortium could build “a single common web destination” for anyone curious about employee ownership. The point would not be to capture all traffic for one organization, but to give outsiders one common entry point that can then send them out to other places afterward.

He also proposed consolidating, pairing, or jointly sponsoring events. The field has too many events, he said, and they do not always coordinate well. One possibility would be combining five small events into one larger event with several joint sponsors. Rodgers acknowledged that this would be risky and expensive, requiring money, time, and staff resources. But it was the kind of concrete work he thought a consortium could undertake.

For Loren Rodgers, the third lesson from previous attempts was organizational: collaboration needs a dedicated person or entity with enough staff support to keep it moving.

The consortium would work best with a single host entity. It did not have to be NCEO, he said, but it could be. He emphasized that NCEO could not do the work alone and that the field’s success included the success of every organization in the room. Still, NCEO was prepared to commit real resources.

Rodgers disclosed that NCEO had already changed its organizational structure, though he joked that the change was “not public yet.” Tim Garbinsky, an NCEO colleague, would be shifting into a role dedicated to partnerships. If the proposal found momentum, Garbinsky would have the staff capacity and relationships to help make it happen.

NCEO was also willing to put cash behind the idea. The organization was prepared to invest some of its own funds in supporting the community, and Rodgers was optimistic about raising outside support for the longer term. In the few weeks he had been informally testing the proposal, he said, he had received more than $100,000 in commitments or near-commitments to support it.

The financial point mattered because Rodgers’ proposal is not simply a call for better manners among organizations. His version of collaboration requires infrastructure: staff coordination, shared tools, event planning, research alignment, communications work, and potentially a common web destination. Those activities require someone accountable for them and enough money to sustain the work beyond an initial meeting.

Loren Rodgers ended with a specific ask. He wanted to know who was interested in investing in the proposal with him, or at least exploring whether it is viable. His target was to convene a meeting later in the same month to move the idea forward.

He distinguished the roles different participants might play. Nonprofits and universities working to build the field should be involved in the core planning process. Service providers, companies, and foundations should provide input into how to build the employee ownership community. Those with money to contribute could help make the consortium sustainable.

The proposal’s logic is that employee ownership will not reach an “employee ownership economy” through policy alone, or through each organization separately optimizing its own work. Rodgers wants the field to build the demand side together: get more business owners into the employee ownership pipeline, nurture them once they enter it, and create shared capacity for concrete field work such as research coordination, AI guidance, responses to AI-related developments such as Newsom’s executive order, event coordination, and a possible common web destination.

Rodgers’ final formulation returned to the ambition he had set near the beginning: “Help build the demand side of employee ownership, and help us all get to where we want to be: an employee ownership economy.” The question he put to the room was whether the organizations and funders around employee ownership would now create the shared structure needed to coordinate at the level of that ambition.