From Founder to Future: A Roadmap to Implement Longevity and Employee Ownership
By Tom & Carol Braford
As Carol and I round out our 70s and look down the barrel of our 80s and beyond, we are facing our next chapter, as are over 3 million other small business owners.
We are joined nationally by 32 million employees and investors who have helped build these companies. The pictured book by our long time friend, John Abrams, is a welcome roadmap for what ideally could be next for us and other silver-haired tsunami owners in St. Louis. We face the prospect of either being picked off by hedge fund profiteers or joining the movement to preserve mission, jobs and community.
We brought John to St. Louis several years ago shortly after he had written his first book, The Company We Keep, which is about how he and his handful of employees had completed transferring the ownership of his successful design/ build company, South Mountain Company, to a worker-owned cooperative. They then took on the task of planning how to transfer leadership to the next generation.
He presented to a standing room only crowd at Schlafly Tap Room, which still had power, even though most of the City had lost power from a big snowstorm.
Recently, we were thrilled to discover that John was presenting at the Co-Op Cincy, 1 worker 1 vote, biennial worker-owned co-op conference in Cincinnati that we were headed for. We were also excited that he remembered us and is now fully retired and eager to work with us on our project in St Louis.
Ours is more of a ground floor workforce training and development pathway to worker co-op ownership. We are nearly ready to create a conglomerate of worker owned co-ops to use our suite of breakthrough technologies to build out our prototype projects. These Islands of Coherence Communities of Practice have the potential to transform St. Louis, Civilization and the Planet by restoring our democracy, our climate and a sustainable just economy from the bottom-up. Our goal is to achieve contagion in St. Louis, and then to become endemic in our region by 2035 and pandemic in the world by 2050. This is fully in alignment with John’s goal of 40 million worker owners in the US by 2040.
Please reach out to learn more and to get involved! You can contact us at braford@sbcglobal.net or at www.ArizmendiEcovillage.com.