{"id":220050,"date":"2022-09-26T12:01:00","date_gmt":"2022-09-26T11:01:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=220050"},"modified":"2022-09-25T03:22:45","modified_gmt":"2022-09-25T02:22:45","slug":"patagonias-billionaire-owner-gives-away-company-to-fight-climate-crisis","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2022\/09\/patagonias-billionaire-owner-gives-away-company-to-fight-climate-crisis\/","title":{"rendered":"Patagonia\u2019s Billionaire Owner Gives Away Company to Fight Climate Crisis"},"content":{"rendered":"

Founder Yvon Chouinard announced that all the company\u2019s profits will go into saving the planet.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

\u2018As of now, Earth is our only shareholder,\u201d the company announced.
Photograph: SOPA Images Limited\/Alamy<\/p><\/div>\n

15 Sep 2022 – <\/em>Setting a new example in environmental corporate leadership, the billionaire owner of Patagonia is giving the entire company away to fight the Earth\u2019s climate devastation, he announced yesterday.<\/p>\n

Patagonia founder Yvon Chouinard, who turned his passion for rock climbing into one of the world\u2019s most successful sportswear brands, is giving the entire company to a uniquely structured trust and non-profit, designed to pump all of the company\u2019s profits into saving the planet.<\/p>\n

\u201cAs of now, Earth is our only shareholder,\u201d the company announced. \u201cALL profits, in perpetuity, will go to our mission to \u2018save our home planet\u2019.\u201d<\/p>\n

Chouinard, 83, worked with his wife and two children as well as teams of company lawyers to create a structure that will allow Patagonia to continue to operate as a for-profit company whose proceeds will go to benefit environmental efforts.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf we have any hope of a thriving planet \u2013 much less a thriving business \u2013 50 years from now, it is going to take all of us doing what we can with the resources we have,\u201d said Chouinard in a statement. \u201cThis is another way we\u2019ve found to do our part.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

\u2018I was in Forbes magazine listed as a billionaire, which really, really pissed me off,\u2019 said Chouinard.
Photograph: Victoria Sayer Pearson\/AP<\/p><\/div>\n

\n
<\/picture><\/div>
<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Chouinard\u2019s family donated 2% of all stock and all decision-making authority to a trust, which will oversee the company\u2019s mission and values. The other 98% of the company\u2019s stock will go to a non-profit called the Holdfast Collective, which \u201cwill use every dollar received to fight the environmental crisis, protect nature and biodiversity, and support thriving communities, as quickly as possible\u201d, according to the statement.<\/p>\n

Each year, the money Patagonia makes after reinvesting in the business will be distributed to the non-profit to help fight the environmental crisis.<\/p>\n

The structure, the statement said, was designed to avoid selling the company or taking it public, which could have meant a change in its values.<\/p>\n

\u201cInstead of \u2018going public\u2019, you could say we\u2019re \u2018going purpose\u2019,\u201d said Chouinard. \u201cInstead of extracting value from nature and transforming it into wealth for investors, we\u2019ll use the wealth Patagonia creates to protect the source of all wealth.\u201d<\/p>\n

Patagonia\u2019s new direction is designed to set an example that disproves the old shareholder capitalism axiom that corporate goals other than profit will just confuse investors, wrote<\/a> Patagonia\u2019s board chair, Charles Conn, in an opinion piece in Fortune magazine on Wednesday.<\/p>\n

\u201cInstead of exploiting natural resources to make shareholder returns, we are turning shareholder capitalism on its head by making the Earth our only shareholder,\u201d he wrote.<\/p>\n

Chouinard and Patagonia have long been groundbreakers in environmental activism and employee benefits. In its nearly 50 years in operation, the Ventura, California-based company has been known for extensive benefits for employees, including on-site nurseries and afternoons off on good surf days.<\/p>\n

In the 80s, the company began donating 1% of its sales to environmental groups, a program formalized in 2001 as the \u201c1% for the Planet Scheme\u201d. The program has resulted in $140m in donations for preservation and restoration of the natural environment, according to the company.<\/p>\n

Patagonia was one of the earliest companies to become a b-Corp, submitting to certification as meeting certain environmental and social standards, and recently it changed its mission to state: \u201cWe\u2019re in business to save our home planet.\u201d<\/p>\n

Chouinard, the famously eccentric entrepreneur who started his business fashioning metal climbing pitons (or spikes to wedge into cracks while rock climbing) and lived out of his van at climbing destinations for many years, was horrified to be seen as a billionaire, he told the New York Times.<\/p>\n

\u201cI was in Forbes magazine listed as a billionaire, which really, really pissed me off,\u201d he said. \u201cI don\u2019t have $1bn in the bank. I don\u2019t drive Lexuses.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Chouinard family are at the forefront of charitable giving, philanthropy and trust experts told the New York Times.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis family is a way outlier when you consider that most billionaires give only a tiny fraction of their net worth away every year,\u201d David Callahan, founder of the website Inside Philanthropy<\/a>, told the newspaper.<\/p>\n

____________________________________________<\/p>\n

Erin McCormick is a California-based reporter who specialises in database analysis.<\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original – theguardian.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

15 Sep 2022 – Setting a new example in environmental corporate leadership, the billionaire owner of Patagonia is giving the entire company away to fight the Earth\u2019s climate devastation, he announced yesterday.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":220051,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[61],"tags":[232,519,401,391,1200,1557],"class_list":["post-220050","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-environment","tag-capitalism","tag-ecology","tag-environment","tag-nature","tag-natures-rights","tag-wall-street"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/220050","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=220050"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/220050\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/220051"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=220050"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=220050"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=220050"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}