Kaiser Permanente, one of the nation’s largest HMOs, announced that it will be encouraging its 37,000 vendors to become employee-owned. The organization said that its “Business Resiliency through Employee Ownership” program “aims to educate the health system's suppliers about employee ownership and support those firms in transitioning to such a model, in which the majority of a company's shares are owned by employees.”
The project will work through Obran, a worker-owned cooperative based in Baltimore seeking to become a cooperative conglomerate, and Project Equity, a nonprofit promoting employee ownership, will lead the project. Companies can sell to Obran or create their own worker cooperative, ESOP, or employee ownership trust with advice from Project Equity.