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The Media Economies Design Lab traces its roots to 2018, when it helped a locally-owned Colorado news outlet establish collective governance so that journalists had a voice and a vote in their workplace. Since then, our Lab has continued experimenting with ways to embed broad-based ownership and governance into organizations, with particular focus on the digital economy. From platform cooperatives to user-owned DAOs on the blockchain, a centuries-old offline idea is finding new life in cyberspace: users, producers, and workers create value online, and something powerful happens when they own it.

A timeless adage captures it well: "the master's eye fattens the horse." Put simply, it's about taking care of what's our own. When people behave like owners, their work grows. And there's no better way to instill that ownership mindset than through actual ownership. People with real skin in the game are aligned in wanting their venture to thrive.

Long before lines of code and software protocols, a Colorado native and alum of our school created a plan to give every family a real stake in the economy. Louis O. Kelso pioneered the Employee Stock Ownership Plan (ESOP), believing that as businesses grow and contribute to the economy, workers should have a seat at the table and prosper alongside their workplace. Today, this employee ownership model, together with cooperatives, is at the forefront of community ownership pathways for closing the gap between people and the economy.

Honoring this vision, Colorado became the first state in the country to establish a statutory office for advancing employee ownership. The timing matters, as most business owners are approaching retirement on the cusp of the largest wealth transfer of our generation, and for too many of these businesses, there's no succession plan. The usual outcomes are devastating: the business shuts down, taking decades of knowledge, relationships, and jobs with it, or it gets acquired by a larger competitor, sending tax dollars out of state and consolidating market power in fewer hands. But there's another path. When workers, the people who already know the business and are rooted in the community, acquire ownership of their workplace, the founder's legacy continues, jobs and tax dollars stay local, employees gain real wealth and stability, and our economies remain resilient.

Over 200 employee-owned businesses already operate in Colorado, and the aim is to strengthen this succession path and open it to many more companies by simply making it easier. Tax credits cover up to 75% of conversion costs, cash collateral positions the state as a guarantor to facilitate financial deals, and a network of practitioners and service providers works through pathways to remove barriers to implementation. At MEDLab, we add to the chorus, contributing thought leadership on how to embrace exits to community, expand the repertoire of collective governance, and facilitate community rule-making online.

Yet one particular challenge remains: more people need to know this is happening at scale. Community ownership isn't new. Electric cooperatives drove rural electrification nationwide, financial cooperatives became the backbone of consumer banking through the credit union system, and worker-owned cooperatives trace back to the 1700s in this country. But most people remain largely unaware of the recent efforts in Colorado to extend ownership rights to workers at their workplaces.

In 2025, MEDLab leadership joined Governor Jared Polis at an employee ownership event in Denver that identified public awareness as one of the open challenges in this developing ecosystem. It has since become a priority in the Colorado Employee Ownership Office's 2026 strategic plan.Ìý

The literature has been flagging this for years. In mapping the barriers that hold cooperative formation back, for instance, argues that the rarity of cooperatives stems not from any inherent inefficiency but from the disproportionate costs of starting one, and among these, unfamiliarity with the model is especially consequential. Because most prospective owners have had little exposure to the form, they first need to learn what a cooperative is, how it works, and how it can outperform investor-owned alternatives. Unfamiliarity thus functions as both a direct barrier and a compounding force, reinforcing a cycle in which the scarcity of cooperatives limits public awareness, which in turn discourages the formation of new ones. historical study of African American cooperative movements points in the same direction. She shows that successful co-ops have consistently depended on deliberate awareness-building, education, training, and orientation processes to cultivate democratic participation.

Drawing on our framework of community engagement and ecosystem-building, the Lab has been tinkering with the idea of a statewide media project to raise public awareness of the diverse modes of community ownership. Housed within the College of Communication, Media, Design, and Information at ÐÔÊӽ紫ý, MEDLab already produces a radio and podcast show on KGNU, a local community radio station, and is well positioned to leverage its resources to advance shared priorities across the ecosystem. In this spirit, we have started designing a student cohort to lead a strategic communication initiative that brings community ownership into mainstream entrepreneurship. Guided by faculty from media and advertising programs, students will produce multi-platform social media content, branded storytelling, and industry-specific narratives that make shared ownership visible, accessible, and aspirational to younger, digital-native audiences, while building their own portfolios in the process.

In May, MEDLab joined the International Centre for Co-operative Management's International Symposium on Co-operative Identity and Energizing the Co-operative Brand, bringing visibility to this strategy and to the importance of energizing community ownership among younger generations by meeting them where they are, with messaging for them, by them. The convening also helped us think through how to move from local to movement, exploring how this media campaign might align with the broader co-operative identity to strengthen the co-op brand at the local level, and how the work could scale beyond Colorado to contribute to the wider co-op movement.

To get this off the ground, MEDLab has been awarded a ÐÔÊӽ紫ý Impact Grant to seed the project. It's a meaningful first step, and we're actively fundraising and building partnerships across the ecosystem to turn this vision into a sustained statewide effort. We've also begun nurturing a collaboration with the Colorado Employee Ownership Office in support of the project, through which commissioners and partners will mentor students on sector-specific messaging around employee ownership, directly advancing the office's strategic priorities.

Over the summer, MEDLab is partnering with The Brand Studios at CU to design the branding of this campaign. Working with graduate students in the Brand Design for Sustainable Futures course, we are developing a dynamic visual identity, one that adapts across contexts. The aim is a brand system that does what social movements need branding to do: make the cause visible, emotionally resonant, and easy to spread. The process will begin with a workshop led by MEDLab's associate director, designed to ground students in community ownership, with the program manager of the Colorado Employee Ownership Office joining to share the office's priorities.

This media project lives at the intersection of what our Lab knows best: community ownership, media ecosystems, and design for collective futures. It draws on MEDLab's roots in helping organizations build broad-based governance, on Colorado's leadership in employee ownership policy, and on the growing recognition that the next chapter of this movement depends as much on storytelling as on statutes. By pairing rigorous research with creative practice, this work aims to make community ownership not just a policy option, but a shared cultural imagination of what the economy could look like when more of us own a piece of it. Because in the end, that's the story we're trying to tell: this economy isÌýOurs To Own.