Draft for Discussion — April 2026
Maine enacted LD 1857, requiring business owners with 20 or more employees to notify workers 90 days before a sale and give them the opportunity to submit a competing offer. Early results show increased ESOP conversion activity and heightened worker awareness of ownership options.
Rutgers University’s Institute for the Study of Employee Ownership and Profit Sharing has documented that ESOP participants accumulate approximately twice as much in retirement savings as comparable non-ESOP workers, and that ESOPs are particularly effective at building wealth for BIPOC workers — making them one of the strongest available tools for racial wealth gap reduction. Source: Rutgers Institute / W.K. Kellogg Foundation, Building the Assets of Low and Moderate Income Workers and their Families (2019); NCEO, S ESOP Participant Retirement Survey (2018).
The Mondragon Corporation, a federation of worker cooperatives headquartered in the Basque Country of Spain, grew from a single cooperative in 1956 to a $12 billion enterprise employing 80,000 people. Its growth was financed by Caja Laboral, a cooperative bank that provided patient capital and intensive management support specifically designed for cooperative enterprise — the structural inspiration for the Minnesota Cooperative Loan Fund and, ultimately, the public bank. The management support element is as important as the capital element — and is the primary lesson for Minnesota’s program design.
The City of Preston, Lancashire — documented by the Centre for Local Economic Strategies — redirected £75 million in annual anchor institution spending toward local and cooperative suppliers between 2013 and 2017, without new appropriations. The result was measurable local economic development in a post-industrial city that had been declining for decades. Preston is now studied internationally as a model for community wealth building through procurement.
The Evergreen Cooperatives in Cleveland used anchor institution procurement from hospitals and universities to finance and sustain a network of worker-owned enterprises in low-income neighborhoods, including a commercial laundry, a greenhouse, and a solar installation company. This is the closest domestic analog to the Preston Model and is directly applicable to Twin Cities anchor institutions.
Connecticut’s baby bonds program seeds accounts of $3,200 for every child born into a Medicaid-eligible family, invested in a state-managed fund. Washington D.C.’s Child Wealth Building Act seeds accounts of $500 at birth with annual contributions through age 18. Connecticut moved to auto-enrollment after initial enrollment rates were low, producing a significant increase in participation. Both programs have demonstrated administrative feasibility and strong political durability.
The Bank of North Dakota is the only state-owned bank in the United States. It holds state deposits, issues bonds, provides liquidity to local banks and credit unions, and partners with the private financial sector rather than competing with it. It has been profitable every year of its existence. It recorded profits of $192.7 million in 2023 — its most recent record year at time of writing — and has transferred more than $585 million to the state general fund since 1919. It is governed by the state Industrial Commission and operates under both Democratic and Republican administrations without controversy. It is the operational proof of concept for the Minnesota Public Bank proposal — with important caveats about scale, capitalization timeline, and market differences (see Appendix B).
Legal & General Investment Management, one of the UK’s largest institutional investors, has pioneered pass-through voting — allowing beneficial owners to direct votes on key shareholder resolutions. The model demonstrates technical and administrative feasibility at scale, and has generated significant corporate governance engagement from institutional beneficiaries who previously had no voice in how their capital was voted.
Minnesota’s own Climate Innovation Finance Authority, created in 2023, has moved from enabling legislation to first loan deployment in under two years. Its enabling statute — a public body corporate and politic with authority to deploy grants, loans, credit enhancements, and other financing mechanisms — is the direct template for the proposed Minnesota Ownership Economy Finance Authority. The speed of MnCIFA’s development demonstrates that Minnesota’s legislative and administrative capacity can stand up new public finance institutions quickly when there is political will.
The Center for Indian Country Development (CICD), housed at the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, is the leading research institution on tribal economics in the United States. Relevant findings: tribally owned enterprises across the country span all major industry sectors, with more than 5,500 identified enterprises nationally; four of five tribal governments report enterprise revenue transfers that fund government services; Native CDFIs face persistent capital constraints that limit their lending capacity; and tribal governments pay higher borrowing costs than comparable state and local governments in bond markets. CICD’s ongoing Survey of Native Nations and Native Entity Enterprises Dataset provide the baseline data that should inform any tribal dimension of this agenda. CICD is a natural research partner for the evaluation architecture of this framework, particularly on tribal-specific outcome tracking.
The Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe, through Mille Lacs Corporate Ventures, recognized after the pandemic that an economy anchored primarily in tribally owned hospitality enterprises lacked resilience, and pivoted to building a citizen-owned entrepreneurial ecosystem in partnership with the Saint Paul-based Neighborhood Development Center. This is the clearest Minnesota example of a tribal nation actively seeking to develop the citizen-owned enterprise layer alongside its government-owned enterprises — and a direct proof point for the relevance of cooperative development capital to tribal economic self-determination.