The Municipal Playbook for Employee Ownership

The Democracy at Work Institute and the National League of Cities have developed The Municipal Playbook for Employee Ownership to assist with integrating employee ownership into municipal economic and workforce development strategies. It offers three approaches that address specific pain points faced by many municipalities:

• Support legacy businesses in transitioning to employee ownership
• Create quality jobs for people who are left out of the mainstream job market
• Foster small business resilience and growth through secondary cooperatives

While employee ownership is not a solution for all development and recovery challenges, it can be an effective strategy for preserving jobs and businesses; addressing racial and gender income and wealth disparities; and improving job quality and access to work.

Readers seeking inspiration and examples of how employee ownership can be a tool for addressing critical community issues can read through the playbook in its entirety to learn different development approaches. Other readers that have a specific economic and workforce development issue in mind can go directly to the play that tackles the problem to learn the steps for deploying an employee ownership strategy.

Each play is organized by the problem it addresses and includes the specific employee ownership solution, the win for cities and communities, and recommendations for getting started.