Merrit Stüven
Merrit Stüven is an associate director at the Aspen Institute Economic Opportunities Program and Future of Work Initiative, where she manages projects and conducts research on job quality, economic security, worker power, and equity for lower-income workers.
Five Proposals Target the Scaling Bottlenecks in Employee Ownership
At the Aspen Institute’s 2026 Employee Ownership Ideas Forum, five speakers argued that expanding employee ownership is less a matter of promoting a single model than building the institutions that let ownership endure and scale. Sara Horowitz, Esteban Kelly, Sean-Tamba Matthew, Ginny Vanderslice, and Felipe Witchger each identified a different bottleneck — from weak membership structures and bespoke co-op development to seller-exit barriers, neglected ownership culture, and risk-averse capital.
Employee Ownership Field Needs Shared Infrastructure to Build Demand
Loren Rodgers, executive director of the National Center for Employee Ownership, used his keynote at Aspen’s 2026 Employee Ownership Ideas Forum to argue that the employee ownership field needs a staffed consortium, not another standalone organization. Rodgers said existing groups are duplicating work, missing referrals, and presenting a fragmented face to business owners; his proposal is to coordinate events, research, communications, and demand-building across ESOPs, worker cooperatives, employee ownership trusts, and other broad-based ownership models.