The work of building the gold standard in ERG enablement.
Maceo Owens is the founder of The ERG Movement and creator of ERGs.io. A Gen Z global thought leader known across the industry as "The ERG Homegirl," her work supports companies in tech, healthcare, finance, government, sports, and media. She's been featured in Forbes and Bloomberg — and she's just getting started.
Since going full-time in 2023
Tech, healthcare, finance, government, sports, media
In the ERG Champs community
Inside ERGs.io
It didn't start in a boardroom. It started at the frontline.
The ERG Movement was built from the inside out — by someone who lived the work before she ever sold it.
A Black ERG leader during 2020 — in an entry-level role.
Maceo's journey in the ERG space began during the height of the 2020 movement for racial justice. While working in an entry-level support role, she helped lead a $500,000 donation initiative to external organizations — and spearheaded an end-to-end business-to-customer forum at the same time. The work was real, even though the title was junior.
With the support of fellow ERG leaders and an invested executive sponsor, the ERG work she was doing on the side became visible to leadership. That visibility translated into something concrete: her first salaried role on the People team, earned through the value she'd already delivered through ERG work. Career-wise, the ladder climb that followed was fast.
Then she became the PM. And saw what was missing.
After moving into ERG Program Management formally, Maceo saw something most companies were missing — and most ERG leaders were paying the price for: structure.
ERG programs were well-intentioned but chaotic. They were burning out volunteers, failing to deliver measurable results, and surviving entirely on the unpaid labor of people who already had full-time jobs. The will was there. The systems weren't.
Drawing from her background in business development and marketing, she started building what would become The ERG Movement — not as a theory, but as a working system. A framework with phases. A methodology with metrics. A way of running a program that didn't require the program manager to martyr themselves to keep it alive.
Today, The ERG Movement is the gold standard in ERG enablement — built by someone who lived the work as a leader, ran the work as a PM, and now equips other PMs and leaders to do it without burning out.
"Community without structure is just chaos. But community with structure is a movement."
A complete ecosystem for ERG program success.
The ERG Movement isn't a single offer. It's an ecosystem — live enablement, peer-powered development, free resources, and the platform that ties it all together. Every piece exists because Maceo saw a specific gap, and built the answer.
ERGs.io — the pipeline platform for ERG leaders.
The daily resource center for ERG leaders. Templates, frameworks, tools, vendor discovery, and ongoing development — built specifically for the realities of running modern ERG programs. The hub for everything ERG.
ERG Champs — 1,000+ leaders in ERG Champs.
A peer-powered development community where ERG leaders exchange ideas, get unstuck, and access development opportunities. Where the conversations happen that don't happen anywhere else.
The ERG Recipe Book.
Creative, high-impact programming formats — packaged into a usable, scannable library. For when the team needs ideas that actually resonate with members, not generic best-practice fluff.
Workshops, keynotes, and Fresh Start.
Maceo speaks, runs workshops, and personally consults through the Fresh Start program. The live work that takes a program from theory to traction — and gets PMs the clarity to lead with confidence.
Florida-raised. Detroit-based. Building what's next.
Maceo blends Southern roots with Midwest hustle — and brings both into every workshop, keynote, and coaching conversation. Her style is direct, data-driven, and deeply human. No corporate platitudes. No vague best practices. Just the work, named clearly, with the structure to actually do it.
On LinkedIn, she regularly shares insights and practical advice on ERG development — the kind of real talk that's earned her the "ERG Homegirl" nickname from peers across the industry.
To set the gold standard for internal community-building.
Maceo's long-term vision: make The ERG Movement the go-to platform for companies serious about belonging, impact, and scale.
The mission isn't to make ERGs nice-to-have. The mission is to prove what's already true when programs are built right — that ERGs are an essential lever for internal culture-building. And that the companies serious about doing the work deserve a system that actually works.
If the program is ready for real enablement, this is where it starts.
Whether the move is bringing Maceo in to speak, running a workshop with the leader cohort, or starting the Fresh Start program to rebuild the foundation — every path begins with a conversation.