Restoring An American Ideal

EMPLOYEE OWNERSHIP | A Gary Community Ventures Ownership Investing Strategy 

Employee ownership is a powerful wealth creation tool that has been championed by everyone from Ronald Reagan to Bernie Sanders. And yet, it’s a tool that has not been socialized to most Americans.

There have been many white papers on the subject. As it turns out, our team at Gary Community Ventures has also written extensively on the subject of ownership, as we believe owning assets that increase in value over time — such as stock in one’s company — is one of the most expeditious ways to help families achieve economic mobility. It’s why we’ve made investments in firms like Apis & Heritage Capital Partners, a private equity firm that focuses on acquiring and converting privately-held companies into 100% employee-ownership models. We think this approach has the potential to narrow our country’s widening wealth gap.  

But we’ve seen little done to humanize the concept of ownership, specifically employee ownership and what it truly means for those who work at employee-owned companies. This short documentary is an effort to change that.

As we set out to produce the film, it didn’t take long to confirm our belief about the need for this type of story. One of our first interviews was with Luis Villalobos, the commercial project manager at Apex Plumbing, an employee owned company in Arvada, Colorado. Luis isn’t just a senior manager, he’s a highly educated civil engineer with a degree from the Colorado School of Mines, one of our nation’s top-ranked engineering schools. And yet, when we rolled the camera and asked about employee ownership, even he admitted “I don’t really know what employee ownership means for me — at least not yet.”

We feel the “not yet” part is crucial.

For all of the compelling economic theory around employee ownership, we have heard few stories about rank-and-file employees retiring with millions of dollars in their bank accounts. Thankfully for us, one of those stories was floating around in our own backyard here in Colorado at a place called StoneAge Inc. — and there are many more developing within Colorado’s innovative Office for Employee Ownership.

This short film is an effort to get more of those stories out into the world.

If you’d like to join us for a future screening of the film, if you’d like to host a screening, if you’d like to play a role in the distribution of this film, or if you’d just like to gain access to this story for your own purposes once the film is officially released — please feel free to reach out to us at communications@garycommunity.org.