If you were not in Kansas City last week for the 2023 Employee Ownership Conference, I want to share an announcement I made:

The most important thing you can do to support employee ownership is to make your company great. Nothing is as powerful as a good example.

But please also find the time to contribute to the larger employee ownership community. When you see a request to fill out a research survey, take a few minutes to fill it out. If a prospective employee-owned company wants to learn from you, take the call. If ESCA or the ESOP Association or the Democracy and Work Institute ask you to call your senator, then call your senator. If you see a tweet from a Rutgers researcher that you like, retweet it.

Employee ownership is a big community with a big tent. Almost 30 support organizations are here with us in Kansas City today. All of them share a common core belief: that employee ownership is good, and we need more of it.

I want to call out one of those organizations in particular: the Employee Ownership Expansion Network, or EOX. The EOX is rooted in the simple idea that people need to hear about employee ownership in person, and the best way to do that is through a local presence. State centers now cover 70% of the U.S. population, and the EOX has created 12 of these new state centers in the past four years.

So, it is my pleasure to announce right now, for the first time in public, that the NCEO and the EOX are establishing a formal collaboration. The NCEO and the EOX are jointly launching the NCEOX Initiative, which will strive to drive the growth of all forms of employee ownership.

Let’s imagine what happens when the EOX’s local, in-person network of professionals and volunteers makes maximum use of the NCEO’s research, stories, volunteers, and stature. That’s the right message, the right data, and the right messenger, with an on-the-ground presence.

In some ways, not much will change: the EOX and NCEO will still be autonomous entities. The EOX will keep supporting state centers, and the NCEO will keep doing events, publications, research, education, and community-building.

But we have some big ambitions, and you will be seeing new things from us in the coming weeks and years.