Patagonia Founder Yvon Chouinard and his family recently announced that they are giving away their outdoor clothing and gear company to help fight the climate crisis.
“It’s been a half-century since we began our experiment in responsible business. If we have any hope of a thriving planet 50 years from now, it demands all of us doing all we can with the resources we have,” Chouinard says in a press release.
The Chouinard family will transfer ownership to Patagonia Purpose Trust and the Holdfast Collective. The Patagonia Purpose Trust was created to protect the company’s values and missions. Holding the voting stock of the company, it has the right to approve key decisions for the company’s future.
The Holdfast Collective is a nonprofit organization that fights to protect the environment and will ensure the company’s profits go toward this goal. Each year, Patagonia reports that the funds that are not re-invested into the company will help to protect biodiversity and communities.
“Instead of extracting value from nature and transforming it into wealth for investors, we’ll use the wealth Patagonia creates to protect the source of all wealth,” Chouinard writes in a letter on the Trust’s website.
While the decision means that Patagonia will avoid paying millions in taxes, Patagonia CEO Ryan Gellert says that this is not the family’s intention.
“Two years ago, the Chouinard family challenged a few of us to develop a new structure with two central goals. They wanted us to both protect the purpose of the business and immediately and perpetually release more funding to fight the environmental crisis,” says Gellert. “We believe this new structure delivers on both and we hope it will inspire a new way of doing business that puts people and planet first.”
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Photo courtesy of Geio Tischler, Unsplash
