NCEO Executive Director Loren Rodgers Speaks at the 2025 Employee Ownership Ideas Forum

In this clip, NCEO Executive Director Loren Rodgers speaks at the 2025 Employee Ownership Ideas Forum. 

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The 2025 Employee Ownership Ideas Forum took place on April 9-10, 2025, virtually and in Washington DC. The Forum is proudly co-hosted by the Aspen Institute Economic Opportunities Program and the Institute for the Study of Employee Ownership and Profit Sharing at Rutgers University.

This year’s theme, “From Workers to Owners,” highlights how the experience of ownership changes the reality of work for workers. The forum highlights companies in a range of business sectors and explores how employee ownership fits their business strategy and approach to business leadership. We also discuss the particular role employee ownership can play in supporting business success, and we consider the role institutional investors can play in improving capital access for employee ownership conversions and expansions.

For more information about the Employee Ownership Ideas Forum, including our speakers, agenda, and additional resources, visit our website: https://www.aspeninstitute.org/events/employee-ownership-ideas-forum-2025/

Episode Transcript

(00:04):
So I want to introduce Lauren Rogers, the Executive Director
of the National Center for Employee Ownership.
He is about to have his largest conference ever next week in
Salt Lake City. A lot of us will see each other
there. So over to you, Lauren.
Great. Thank you.
And Claire, you know, I, I was thinking yesterday Jolene
McKinley when he was speaking, he, he said, hey, everybody,

(00:26):
everybody said hey back. And for me at least it like got
my blood going again. So howdy, Hey, thank you.
Even though we're in DCI went tomake an announcement about a, a
non policy issue. That's not because policy isn't
important. Everybody knows that clearly can
do a whole lot of good. We're delighted to have Hillary
here. That's an example of good policy

(00:47):
going on. Well, Jim talked well actually
Greg at the ESOP Association talked about and the possibility
of getting better regulations for ESOP valuations.
That's good policy. But it would be wrong to go
through this meeting without acknowledging one of the
terrible things that's happened on the policy front, which was
the impact of the day one executive order that ended most

(01:11):
of USAID. And that directly is either
going to destroy or almost destroy two members of the
employee Ownership 100. I'm not here to make any policy
judgments about things that are outside of employee ownership,
whether that was a good idea or a bad one.
But the way it was done was unfortunate.
So let's talk outside policy. There's a lot of stuff going on

(01:33):
in the private sector, and I want to acknowledge just a few
of them because it's really exciting right now.
One of the really exciting things and having and Claire
right here and Steve Storkin always wandering around
somewhere has been the number ofthe percent of the population in
this country that's covered by astate with a state Center for
employee ownership has gone from30% to 77%.

(01:58):
Yeah, another innovation is Kevin right here.
Well, all right. Yeah, directly, sorry to
personalize the whole EOT movement with you, Kevin, But
seeing the growth in employee ownership, trust and direct
employee ownership, this is exciting for our field that's
happening outside the policy realm.
It's also been really exciting to see all the publicity that's

(02:21):
been generated by the all the hard work of expanding Esops to
try to build a whole lot of press around this.
And I'll humbly say that the NCEO, where our mission is to
make employee ownership bigger and better is also contributing
to some of that policy solution.And Parmin, for example, with
the focus on acquisitions, we'redelighted to be rolling out an

(02:42):
acquisitions toolkit. But none of that is what I want
to talk to you about. I begged the Aspen Institute and
Records to give me 5 minutes to talk about an announcement.
And I am delighted to say that after both Leslie Koss and Sean
Matthew teased this, that two hours ago we launched a new page

(03:06):
on our website which is to allowcertifications of employee owned
companies where a majority of the shares are held by by groups
of people. For example, Lewis Tree Service
is a minority employee owned business enterprise.
They're the first company to receive the certification.

(03:29):
And I think what's interesting here is if you think about a lot
of companies, they have to decide whether they want to keep
a minority certification, a woman owned certification, or
become employee owned or at least become majority employee
owned. That's been a big barrier in our
industry. It's really unfortunate.
It's one of the reasons that a lot of ESOP conferences in

(03:51):
particular are really not that diverse at all.
So if we want companies that where the majority of the shares
are held by people who are people of color, held by women,
held by a combination, a certification like that, like

(04:11):
this is going to help get us there.
So I'll give you the website in a minute.
I hope you'll take a take a lookat it.
There's not a whole lot there, but it is the starting point for
releasing this certification. So the difference between the
certification and some existing certifications, I think Mike
from V Lab is still here. Nothing like that.

(04:34):
A bunch of, you know, certified EO.
This is nothing like that. This is not about saying a
company is employee owned or isn't.
This is about saying who the owners through the ESOP are.
Now, there's some really interesting things that go into
this and it's going to grow. One of the interesting things
about this is that there's a lotof room to grow.
I'm delighted to say, and I don't know if Julian still is

(04:57):
here, but a huge shout out to toour colleagues at Dawie because
right now the certification, thelegal work is only for companies
that are 100% owned by an ESOP. But before this month is out,
we're going to have language that also extends that to worker
co-ops. Beyond that, right now the
certification can accommodate ethnic groups as listed on the

(05:20):
EEO one form that almost all of you file.
I'm sure it's also available to shares held by women, but we're
hoping to be able to expand thatto include other groups like
veterans. And the other interesting thing
about doing all this is the sameprocess that allows us to do
this certification and say that 51% of the shares at least are

(05:42):
held by these groups is really easy to expand and add zip
codes. So if you think about zip codes,
you can do a whole lot with that.
We could set up a certified opportunity zone employee owned
business enterprise, a certifiedrural employee owned business
enterprise. It could be a forgotten city.
I don't know if some of you, anyof you are familiar with that

(06:03):
research, but there's some greatresearch on the forgotten cities
that have deindustrialized and are decaying in this country.
And there's no reason we couldn't start recognizing
forgotten city employee owned business enterprises.
I want to give a huge thanks to a whole bunch of people.
Shawn Matthew is the the genius,the extraordinarily hardworking

(06:26):
genius behind the concrete legallanguage in the certification.
My colleague Tim over there and I are the Co running this inside
the NCEOI think Leslie Koss is gone, but she and her colleagues
at Lewis Tree have been exceptionally dedicated in
helping us make this happen. Let's see, Regina is here at JP

(06:48):
Morgan. This would not have happened
without JP Morgan. And then Tommy is right back
there at at Kaiser. And I don't know if Laura's
still here, but Tommy. Oh, hey there.
Tommy and Laura have been incredibly helpful in getting
this in front of in front of theright organizations and in
giving oomph to this whole project.

(07:10):
So the next steps you can go right now to
nceo.org/certifications and you'll find, you'll find a
background information there. Mostly it's an intake form.
If you are interested or if you have clients that are interested
or people that you know who are interested, drop in your

(07:30):
information there and we'll follow up.
We are, we are delighted that that this has happened.
And I want to personally give a shout out to Bill Castellano.
We've been collaborating with with Rutgers on this and, and
Bill made it possible to make a lot of this get off the ground.

(07:51):
So I just as Sean and Leslie kind of teased this and left it
a little bit vague, I'd like to tease that there's one more
company you'll hear from before the conference is out that's
that's on this path towards certification.
And with that, just thank all ofyou for helping make employee

(08:11):
ownership grow and blossom and thrive.
And thanks to everybody who helped think this particular
certification happened.