For more than two decades, the Vermont Employee Ownership Center (VEOC) has worked to raise awareness and grow employee ownership in the state, including by providing technical and financial assistance to firms looking to transfer ownership to their workers. Vermont is home to several notable employee-owned companies, like Gardener’s Supply Company and King Arthur Flour, boasting one of the highest rates of employee ownership in the country, and the benefits of this shared prosperity are measurable. The state’s 55 employee-owned companies tend to have higher employee retention rates and narrower pay gaps between leadership and workers when compared to conventionally owned companies. And Vermont’s employee-owned companies report that employee ownership has improved their resiliency. The history of employee ownership in Vermont and the work of VEOC provide useful guidance and insight to those seeking to grow employee ownership and develop new state centers.

This playbook, developed by A—B Partners, is part ot the Aspen Institute Economic Opportunities Program’s Shared Success project. Shared Success is working with CDFIs across the US to help them integrate job quality into their financing and advising services. This playbook offers findings and recommendations on how best to communicate the importance of job quality to owners of small- and medium-sized businesses.

This piece is a call to action for workforce development, advocating not just for a job quality framework for the sector’s work with clients but also for the need to increase job quality for practitioners themselves.

This op-ed, originally published in the Chronicle of Philanthropy, discusses how philanthropy can help support job quality as the federal government invests in clean energy and infrastructure.

This piece reflects on the Aspen Institute Economic Opportunities Program’s event “ESOPs, Job Quality, and Wealth Inequality: The Potential of Employee Stock Ownership Plans,” which discusses the potential for ESOPs to improve job quality and build meaningful wealth for workers.

This article discusses EOP’s research and lessons learned on how philanthropy, employers, practitioners and policymakers can support good jobs for young adults.

State centers of employee ownership work to promote employee ownership and educate business owners and workers about the different avenues of employee ownership available. In this brief, the Aspen Institute Economic Program discusses the strategies and practices implemented by Colorado’s Employee Ownership Office to better understand how employee ownership can be supported and grown at the state level. This profile is a useful resource to inform other state centers’ practices and the government’s role in supporting state centers, particularly as more centers emerge through funding provided by the recently passed Worker Ownership, Readiness, and Knowledge (WORK) Act.

This piece reflects on the Aspen Institute Economic Opportunities Program’s event “Economics Reimagined: A Discussion on Building a Human Rights Economy,” which discussed how to build an economic system that values and centers the well being of people.

This piece reflects on the Aspen Institute Economic Opportunities Program’s event “The Promise of Guaranteed Income: A New Tool to Improve Jobs and Empower Workers,” which introduced the Institute’s recent work on the subject and highlighted how guaranteed income can play a vital role in helping people gain economic security and stability.

HCAP Partners – a fund providing debt and equity growth capital to lower-middle market companies – has developed this operational impact approach to assess job quality standards and improvements in portfolio companies through a quantitative measurement system. HCAP has identified five key attributes of job quality that fall within the categories of economic opportunity and health and wellness. HCAP engages with businesses to collect data, develop a baseline assessment, and build a strategic roadmap to implement and improve workplace initiatives for creating and maintaining high quality jobs. While this bespoke measurement system is designed to meet HCAP’s needs, other investors, lenders, and practitioners who work with businesses to improve job quality may find HCAP’s job quality definition and measurement framework useful in developing their own tools.