In November 2006, the Employee Ownership Foundation reached its goal of a $1 million dollar endowment with the help of a donation from Houchens Industries of Bowling Green, Kentucky.

   “This is incredibly exciting for the Foundation,” said Waite Dalrymple, Chair of the Employee Ownership Foundation.“We have been working towards this goal and to finally reach it means more research and programs for the employee ownership community. There is still much work to be done and we hope to see many ESOP companies follow in the footsteps of Houchens and support the Employee Ownership Foundation.”

   Spencer Coates and Jimmie Gipson of Houchens Industries presented Waite Dalrymple with the $100,000 check at the Employee Ownership Foundation Luncheon at the Annual Las Vegas Conference & Tradeshow.Mr. Coates’s remarks regarding why Houchens is supporting the Foundation can be found on the President’s Page column on page 2 of this issue.

   The mission of the Employee Ownership Foundation is to support programs that will increase the level of awareness and appreciation of the benefits of employee ownership and increase the number of employees who have access to this benefit. Over the years, the Foundation has supported the following programs:

• The Foundation awarded 56 $1,000 Charles Edmunson Scholarships to ESOP companies to send average pay employee owners to educational programs.
• The Foundation was the lead monetary grant to Rutgers University for research by leading employee ownership researchers Dr. Joseph Blasi and Dr. Douglas Kruse which compared 1,100 ESOP companies to their non-ESOP counterparts.
• The Foundation was a major source of funds for a series of questions on the 2002 and 2006 General Social Survey which is conducted by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago and is widely used by academics and the media. The questions were aimed at finding out how widespread employee stock ownership is in America. Similar questions were asked in 2005 and 2006.
• For the 15th consecutive year, the Annual Economic Performance Survey was conducted by the Foundation to determine how the share value of ESOP companies performed in comparison to the public stock market.
• The Foundation assisted in the creation of a CEO Program with the University of Pennsylvania for CEOs of employee owned companies.