The objection comes fast, and I respect it, so let me put it on the table first: You're asking me to hand the keys to my billion-dollar facility to a county board that can't run a swim meet. No. I am not. And the reason that fear feels real is a confusion buried so deep in how we talk about business that almost nobody pulls it up to look at it. We have collapsed two entirely separate things into one word — ownership — when in truth they are different instruments that can be handed out separately. One is control: who decides, who hires, who runs the thing day to day. The other is economic interest: who shares in what it earns. You can give a community a great deal of the second while surrendering almost none of the first. Every sophisticated deal in modern finance already does exactly that.
My grandfather reported from where the weight falls; he called himself, plainly, a rank-and-file journalist.8 So here is the weight, plainly: a community equity deal is not a loss of command. It is a way of letting the people who host the machine share in the blood it moves — so that the resented box behind the fence becomes a thing they, too, own a sliver of, and therefore defend. Let me show you how it's done, because none of it is theoretical. The structures already exist, signed, all over the country and the world.
Start with the distinction, because everything rests on it. When a venture firm takes preferred stock in a startup, it often takes no operating control at all — the founders still run the company. When a landowner signs a ground lease, the developer builds and operates freely for ninety-nine years while the owner simply collects rent and keeps the dirt. When you hold a bond, you are owed money by a company you cannot vote on. None of these are exotic. They are the ordinary furniture of capital. The community equity deal is built from the same furniture: instruments that carry an economic interest and little or no governance right. You keep the controls. The town gets a share of the flow.
If the worry is that ordinary people can't hold a productive asset without ruining it, one state has been disproving that for over forty years. The Alaska Permanent Fund takes a share of the wealth that comes out of Alaska's ground, invests it professionally, and pays every resident a dividend. The fund holds roughly $83 billion. In 2025 it sent a $1,000 check to each of about 600,000 residents — and it has paid out every single year since 1982.1 No Alaskan operates a drilling rig. No town council sets the price of crude. A professional corporation manages the asset; the people simply own a stake in the resource that lives where they live. That is the whole idea, and it is as American as a homestead: the wealth a place produces belongs, in part, to the place.
The energy industry has spent the last decade turning that principle into standard contract language. Developers and communities now routinely choose among four templates: a joint-venture stake, where a community body is a minority shareholder; a shared-revenue model, where the developer keeps the whole asset and the community buys a slice of the income; a split-ownership model, where the community owns a defined unit; and a co-operative, common in Germany and Denmark, where residents buy shares and collect dividends.2 Scotland set a goal that half of all newly consented renewable projects carry some shared ownership.2 The frameworks are written. We are not inventing anything. We are pointing an existing tool at a new machine.
01The revenue royalty.
The simplest. You keep one hundred percent of the equity and all control; the community holds a small, fixed percentage of the facility's revenue, paid like a royalty on a song. No governance, no board seat, no second-guessing your operations. Just a check that arrives because the machine sits on their soil and breathes their air.
02Non-voting preferred equity.
If the town wants to say it owns a piece — and that word matters to people — give it real equity with no operating vote. A preferred tranche carries a defined dividend and a claim ahead of common stock, but no say over who you hire or how you run the floor. Venture capital lives on this structure. So can a county.
03The minority stake, held in trust.
Don't hand equity to the county commission directly — that is the fear, and it's a fair one. Put the community's stake inside a professionally managed community benefit trust, the way Alaska holds its fund. The trust collects the dividend and spends it on the schools and the firehouse. Its only governance right is a narrow consent on the things that actually touch the neighbors — the water cap, say — never the business.
04The ground lease instead of the land sale.
This one costs you almost nothing and changes everything. Rather than buy the land outright, lease it from a community land trust for the long term. You build and operate exactly as you would have; the town keeps title to the dirt — the one asset that outlives every server you'll ever install — plus an escalating ground rent and the reversion at the end. You wanted the building, not the topsoil. Let them keep the topsoil.
05The bill as the dividend.
The most elegant of all, because it pays the dividend in the exact currency the fight is about. A British developer has run this for over a decade: the households nearest a project get a permanent discount on their electricity bill, regardless of supplier — twenty-four projects, thousands of homes, millions paid out, no financial risk to the resident.3 Adapt it here and the line item that was going to rise on the neighbor's meter falls instead. You will not find a faster way to turn an opponent into an advocate.
Now the part that makes this a deal and not a donation. The binding constraint on your business is no longer money and no longer chips — it is permission, as the first essay argued. And permission has a price when you don't have it. A delay on a 60-megawatt build can cost on the order of $14 million a month in lost revenue while the meter of your capital keeps running.5 In a single recent year, local opposition blocked or delayed at least sixteen data-center projects worth a combined $64 billion.6 Seven in ten Americans say they would rather not host one; more than a hundred communities have passed moratoriums.6 Against numbers like those, a community stake is not philanthropy. It is the cheapest insurance you will ever buy against the most expensive risk you face.
And it is already throwing off real money where it's been tried. In La Porte, Indiana, a twenty-year revenue-sharing agreement on a Microsoft data-center campus is set to send tens of millions of dollars a year to the city and several million a year to the school corporation — recurring income, banked locally, for two decades.4 That is a town that will fight for the next phase, not against it. A co-owner shows up to the rate hearing on your side. An adversary shows up with a lawyer. You are going to deal with that community at every hearing for the life of the asset; the only question is which chair they sit in.
But don't take the data-center arithmetic on faith. The marketplace has run this experiment in the open, for decades, with some of the largest companies on earth — and the verdict is remarkably consistent. The firms that chose the public's good over the next quarter's number were repaid, with interest, in the one asset that compounds longer than any other: trust. Three cases, all a matter of public record.
In the autumn of 1982, seven people in Chicago died from Tylenol capsules someone had laced with cyanide. Tylenol was Johnson & Johnson's crown jewel, roughly 37 percent of the pain-relief market. CEO James Burke, against the advice of his own analysts and even the FBI, ordered every bottle off every shelf in America — 31 million bottles, about $100 million gone — because the company's credo said the customer came first. Tylenol's share collapsed to seven percent. Everyone wrote its obituary. And within a year it had climbed back to about 30 percent, the stock recovered its high inside two months, and a thousand dollars left in J&J that day was worth more than twenty thousand twenty years later.9 Burke spent a hundred million dollars buying back the only thing that mattered, and the market paid him back many times over.
Five years later, Merck's scientists had a drug, Mectizan, that cured river blindness — a parasite that had blinded millions in the poorest villages on earth, people who could never pay a cent for it. In 1987 Merck's chief executive, Roy Vagelos, announced the company would simply give it away, as much as needed, for as long as needed. It has now donated more than five billion treatments across sixty-two countries; river blindness has been eliminated outright in nine of them.10 Merck booked no revenue from it — and earned a reservoir of trust with governments, scientists, and the public that no advertising budget could buy. Merck's own scholars later titled the case "doing well while doing good," because it did both.
And in 2014, CVS looked at the cigarettes on its shelves and at the word pharmacy over its door and decided the two could not honestly coexist. It walked away from roughly $2 billion a year in tobacco sales — no lawsuit forcing it, no scandal, no campaign.11 Wall Street pundits called it folly. Yet that same year the company's revenue rose nearly ten percent, its stock climbed about 66 percent over the following two years, and in the markets where it was strongest, people bought measurably fewer cigarettes.11 The thing CVS gave up is precisely what made it worth more.
The pattern runs a century deep. Henry Ford doubled his workers' pay in 1914 and watched turnover collapse and a customer base appear; Andrew Carnegie turned his fortune into libraries that still carry his name in towns that long ago forgot the steel. None of it was charity subtracted from profit. It was the investment that produced the profit — the durable kind, the kind that outlasts the man. The market is slow to reward decency, and it is easy, in any single quarter, to believe it never will. But over the only horizon that finally matters, benevolence is not the price of doing business. It is the business.
A warning, because a good idea poorly built becomes its own scandal. Watchdogs who have studied these deals for decades caution that a benefit negotiated quietly, project by project, can curdle into a vehicle for whoever happens to be best organized at the table — a handful of insiders capturing what was meant for everyone.7 The defenses are simple and you should welcome them, because they protect your reputation as much as the public's purse: make the stake standardized, not a backroom one-off; make it transparent, published and auditable; make it legally binding, not a press release; and house it in a trust with a clear mandate, so the dividend reaches the schools and the firehouse rather than a connected few. A community stake done in the open is a monument. Done in the dark, it is just another deal nobody trusts. Build it in the light.
The second essay said the cure for pooled capital is not to drain it but to move it — to reopen the vessels so the lifeblood reaches the far capillaries again. This is the first vessel, and it is the easiest to reopen, because it asks you to surrender almost nothing you actually care about. Not control. Not command. Only a slice of the flow, routed back to the place that makes the flow possible. In exchange you receive the one thing your money cannot otherwise buy: a community that owns a piece of the building and therefore guards it like their own — because it is.
My grandfather walked a city whose shopkeepers, in a hard season, lettered signs by hand for workers who were not their employees and might never be their customers: "WE'RE WITH YOU FELLOWS. STICK IT OUT."8 They understood that a town is a single body, and that a stake shared is a body strengthened. Give the people a piece of the building, and you will have done more than buy permission. You will have built something they thank you for — which is, as J&J and Merck and CVS each learned in turn, the only kind of wealth that outlasts the man who made it.