#54 – Ownership Works: Shared Ownership at Work

“To increase prosperity through shared ownership at work”

— by Ownership Works, a New York nonprofit founded in 2021 by Peter Stavros and a group of partners working to rethink ownership at work.

Ownership Works operates on a simple but radical premise: who owns the value created at work matters as much as how that value is created.

The organization partners with companies, private equity firms, and institutional investors to extend equity participation to employees at all levels, not as a symbolic benefit, but as a real mechanism of wealth creation.

The goal is explicit: make broad-based employee ownership a standard practice, not an exception.

Since its launch, Ownership Works has supported programs reaching tens of thousands of employees, generating billions of dollars in wealth-sharing outcomes through structured ownership plans tied to company performance.

These are not theoretical models; they are embedded in real transactions, governance frameworks, and exit events.

Its purpose statement challenges one of the most persistent assumptions in modern capitalism: that value accrues primarily to capital providers, while labor is compensated separately.

Instead, it reframes the company as a shared economic system, where alignment between employees, management, and investors is not just cultural, but financial.

This is not philanthropy. It is culture by design.

When culture is intentionally designed, and ownership is shared, value doesn’t just grow, it is distributed differently.