The architectures of shared ownership, shared governance, and shared upside

This panel explores how place-based leaders are embedding employee ownership into local economic development, workforce, funding, and community systems. Drawing on work in Colorado, Tennessee, North Carolina, and Georgia, practitioners will share how durable local ecosystems can make employee ownership a familiar, scalable strategy for building a more resilient and equitable economy.

Community, tribal, ratepayer, and local-institution ownership of clean energy and grid infrastructure.

As AI reshapes work, the central question for investors is not whether automation will create value, but who will own the gains. This panel explores how pro-worker AI, employee ownership, data rights, cooperative platforms, and shared-upside models can turn workers from displaced labor into active participants in productivity, governance, and wealth creation.

Unprecedented advances in technology and converging demographic trends are rapidly disrupting the workplace and economy. We are witnessing increasing productivity, yet many workers are not participating in this massive wealth creation resulting in increasing income and wealth inequality. I present research on the pressing need to help workers save for their long-term financial needs and the need for new social programs. One solution is to expand workers’ opportunities to participate in equity ownership. I highlight the research on various forms of employee ownership programs and policies that benefit business owners, companies, workers, and the communities they serve.

As independent contracting, platform work, and multi-employer careers become increasingly common, workers need a safety net that moves with them. This session will explore the Individual Security Account, a portable benefits model in which every company that hires a worker—even for only a few hours—contributes a proportional amount beyond wages into an account the worker can use for healthcare, paid sick leave, retirement, Social Security, and unemployment protection. Cited by President Barack Obama in his 2016 State of the Union address and proposed in several state legislatures, this approach offers a practical framework for extending economic security, agency, and ownership to 1099 workers while ensuring that the businesses benefiting from their labor share responsibility for funding the social contract.

Drawing on research into voluntary sustainability standards, employee ownership, and value-chain profit sharing, the session explores how certification, traceability, and market infrastructure could evolve to recognize not only whether a product is sustainable, but whether workers, suppliers, and producer communities share in the upside they help create.

This session will provide an update on the Ownership Economy Certification and its effort to make ownership structures more transparent, verifiable, and meaningful to workers, investors, customers, and partners. The conversation will explore what should qualify as genuine shared or stakeholder ownership, what evidence organizations should be expected to provide, and how governance, accountability, economic participation, and worker voice can be assessed without reducing certification to a box-checking exercise.

Owning the Inputs to Intelligence explores how the data that trains, audits, and improves AI systems can be governed by the people, communities, and institutions that generate it. The conversation will examine new models for data rights, privacy-preserving computation, standards, and shared value creation in an AI economy built on collective inputs.

Community land trusts, resident ownership, cooperative real estate, and anti-speculative housing models.

Legal, technical, and operating architectures for public goods, DAOs, protocols, and internet-native institutions.

Earned governance and shared ownership can be baked into the startup toolkit. Task trackers drop equity, and AI slack agents enable participatory governance as part of the daily workflow in a fast-moving startup. Reports from the field. Open source kit available.

This session will explore the American Job Quality Study (AJQS), a landmark national study examining what makes a job truly work for employees, businesses, and communities. Drawing on insights from more than 18,000 U.S. workers, Molly will discuss the five core dimensions of job quality—financial well-being, workplace culture and safety, growth and development, agency and voice, and sustainable working conditions—and what the findings reveal about the experiences of today’s workforce. Participants will consider how these insights can inform practical strategies for creating higher-quality jobs, strengthening worker well-being, and improving organizational performance.

This session will examine how a limited partner evaluates the growing ownership economy—from employee ownership and worker buyouts to community-centered and shared-wealth models. Caleb will unpack what LPs look for when assessing fund managers and investment strategies, including the strength of the investment and impact thesis, alignment between financial and ownership outcomes, evidence of benefits for workers and communities, governance, scalability, risk, and the role of catalytic capital. The conversation will offer a candid investor perspective on what makes ownership-focused strategies compelling, where the market still faces barriers, and what fund managers must demonstrate to attract and successfully deploy capital.

State of the Field: What the Latest Research Tells Us About Employee Ownership