How the Head of Holdfast Collective Is Giving Away Patagonia’s Profits
/
The alabama gulf goast has been one area of focus for Holdfast Collective. George Dodd III/shutterstock
After more than eight years in Patagonia’s legal department, Greg Curtis now has a very different role at the outdoor apparel company: he gives away its profits.
The one-time mergers-and-acquisitions lawyer recently marked his one-year anniversary as executive director of Holdfast Collective, the group that oversees the five trusts to which founder Yvon Chouinard and his family gifted the $3 billion company last year — and, more importantly, is tasked with making grants using the dividends paid to the trusts.
Curtis has helped the operation award $71 million between September 2022 and last month, as first reported by the New York Times, with each grant helping to preserve what the company now calls its only shareholder: planet Earth.
He is the operation’s lone full-time employee, but Curtis has been working closely with Patagonia’s long-established corporate giving team to select grantees and a series of private boards review his grantmaking recommendations. The outfit has set up donor-advised funds at the Marin Community Foundation for each of the five trusts, through which most of the operation’s 501(c)(3) grants are issued.
So far, Holdfast’s grants have focused on conservation, with roughly 70% focused on preserving either land or oceans and rivers. One top early grantee was the Nature Conservancy, which received $5.2 million to buy nearly 8,000 acres in the Mobile-Tensaw Delta in Alabama, often called America’s Amazon. Others major recipients included Arlington, Virginia-based Conservation Fund ($3.1 million) and the regrantor Re:wild ($2.9 million). According to Holdfast, 46% of its grants went to land conservation, 36% to capacity-building or general operations support, and 10% to litigation or policy. Another 4% went to dam removal.
Why did Chouinard opt for such a complex and unconventional structure instead of a single foundation? The entity consists of five separate trusts: Chalten, Sojourner, Wilder, Tail Wind and Holdfast. All are registered as 501(c)(4) groups, which can make political donations, and together they are governed by a trustee, Holdfast Collective, which is legally an LLC called Four Seas. The five nonprofits are “tightly aligned” on strategy but with “slightly different execution models,” Curtis said. “That’s what I’ll say about that.”
Look closely at the missions listed in the trusts’ newly available 990s and you’ll see one sign of their differences. Three of them use language common in progressive circles, like “extractive capitalism” and “reparations for impact of ancestors actions,” and describe a more intersectional approach, including support for Indigenous Americans, women’s rights, criminal justice reform, reproductive healthcare and more. The other two, including Holdfast Trust, which receives 77.7% of any dividend from Patagonia, use a more conventional environmental vocabulary to express their missions, highlighting topics like biodiversity and climate resilience.
The trusts receive different shares of the dividend, with the namesake receiving the lion’s share noted above. Curtis declined to comment on how the percentages were determined, other than to say they are not reflective of the prior Patagonia ownership shares of Chouinard, his wife or two adult children.
The unique structure meant the family both avoided taxes on the ownership transfer that could have reached $700 million, without any tax benefits. Instead they paid about $17.5 million in taxes, according to the New York Times. It was one of a series of similar recent moves by wealthy donors, preceded by conservative donor Barre Seid donating his $1.6 billion business to a political nonprofit, and followed by Michael Bloomberg announcing he would give 88% of his finance and media giant, Bloomberg News, to his philanthropy.
When Chouinard revealed the plan last year, announcements suggested the new operation would grant about $100 million annually. That figure was “a little bit aspirational,” Curtis said. “I don’t know what that number is going to be, to be totally candid.” But he’s hopeful that by working with the business team, with whom he has close relationships from his time as a deputy general counsel, he can avoid big swings. “You don't want to see a dynamic where you're in these boom-bust cycles,” he said. “It's really important to sort of smooth things out. But we'll see how things play out.”
In a recent interview with IP, Curtis explained who’s helped him get eight figures out the door, how he targets grantmaking to communities that Patagonia is “extracting from,” what he looks for in a grantee, and whether the operation plans to direct more money toward lobbying or electoral work in the coming years. The following has been edited for length and clarity.
You’ve granted $71 million since September 2022. How has that gone?
It's been amazing. When we got started, there were three principles that Yvon laid down. He wanted to give away everything the company was able to release each year. So we’re always in a sort of spend-down mode. The philosophy is that the faster that we can get those funds out into the world earning an environmental return, the better. There’s no desire to build up an endowment. It’s just to go as fast as we can with the groups and the fights that are available now. He also didn't want to build a team. No big bureaucracy or anything like that. We keep it as lean and mean as possible.
The other principle was to not duplicate what Patagonia was doing with its 1% for the Planet program. That grantmaking is still in place, Patagonia is still giving away 1% of sales every year, which is mandatory. The dividend, however, is discretionary and variable depending on how the business is performing and what it needs. One of the ways we’re able to keep everything lean is we leverage the 1% team, which is different than duplicating it. It has 15 team members around the world in all the major markets where the business operates. They have relationships, organizations that they know and trust, and they have access to information. So I can source out of that ecosystem opportunities that are immediately available for larger grants that Patagonia was never able to support before.
Most of the grants that are coming out of the business are not multi-year commitments. One of the things that we did early on at Holdfast was to make multi-year commitments across 40 to 45 different groups. Those were opportunities to prove to the entire network that we're here to stay, that this is not going away. If you're making progress in your fight, or there's some critical intersection that you're at — whether you need support for litigation, or to stop something that's happening, or to create a durable conservation outcome — this tool was created to provide resources to help. Leveraging the network that the Chouinards and Patagonia have spent 50 years building was just obvious.
We also were able to look at bigger projects that we never were able to participate in directly, at least from a financial perspective. We were always supporting things like public land in the U.S. and Albania, and some of these bigger protection fights, but more by using our public platform. Now, we're able to commit significant resources to protecting those lands and waters. It's been incredibly exciting, a lot of stretching in new ways and a lot of learning.
We've been so busy just getting the work done, and we’re mindful of having a record of work, that we haven't had much time to talk about communications or how we talk about these things. Honestly, that’s part of the way that we're keeping the bureaucracy lean. I do think we're going to find opportunities to leverage Patagonia's communications platform, just like I'm leveraging the 1% team. Even though we're independent, we’re inextricably linked through this ownership connection.
What’s an example of, as you say, “stretching in new ways”?
One new way is participating in large landscape-scale conservation. For example, we wrote a pretty large check for a project up toward the Klamath Basin with the Hoopa Valley Tribe, supporting the acquisition by the tribe of about 10,000 acres of ancestral land that had belonged to them for millennia. That’s a good example of how we can now take more active steps to actually create the conditions to get it done.
It’s not corporate philanthropy. We’ve created a tool that is going to be here for as long as Patagonia is going to be here. We’ll be showing up year after year, check after check, keeping as much pressure on the conservation world as possible. Yvon is a rock climber. He and the company are comfortable taking risks. So the profile of projects that we’re looking for isn’t necessarily your traditional national park, state park or private park.
Landback is certainly within the scope. Indigenous protected areas are certainly within the scope. Other examples might be logging rights or hunting rights. Anywhere we’re able to create conditions with early financial commitments that ultimately would lead to conditions that might look like a national park or Indigenous-protected conservation area. We’re pretty comfortable in taking different modes and acting early, or helping someone get over the finish line, in a way that we hope will help motivate other donors, and perhaps more conservative capital, to act quicker.
Your funding puts a lot more potential power in the hands of Patagonia’s grantmaking team than when it only made small grants. How are you navigating that shift?
Patagonia is extracting from a lot of different communities from a capitalist business perspective: Europe, North America, Australia — all those markets where we have a strong presence — and other places like Vietnam, where we manufacture goods. I look for opportunities to redirect our philanthropic work back into those communities that we’re taking from to sort of balance the ledger. That is a philosophy that we have in execution. We need to do a better job of communicating that not just with employees, but with our community.
At one level, we’re a regrantor. At another level, we’re really trying to accelerate the work that partners within the business have already got in motion. I try really hard to find and work closely with them to uplift the work they already have in progress. At the same time, I don't want to overburden this new tool by always having to work in a tight linkage with Patagonia. That wouldn't be ideal, either. We’re constantly looking for opportunities where things line up with Patagonia — and when it does, it’s really powerful. But meanwhile, you have to keep seeding opportunities in the world.
Patagonia has this vast network of past partners and your awards this year went to recipients around the world. How did you choose grantees in the first year?
How we’ve done it the first year — it's gonna evolve a lot. What we're all really keenly aware of is that the first year got done, it's been very successful, the tool works and when it's working really well with Patagonia, it’s quite powerful. The opposite side is there are hundreds of grant choices that we need to make every year. We can do this with a really lean team, but we need to start to develop a more continuous process around how to efficiently make these decisions and not duplicate evaluation processes of other trusted organizations in our ecosystem. In the first year, the way it really worked was honestly overwhelming. There's just been so much coming from within our own ecosystem, which is why we do not have any kind of RFP, open process or website.
The question off the top is: Is it an organization that Patagonia has already been supporting? Is it specifically a nature-based solution that will help to fight the environmental crisis and ecological crisis? Is it, in particular, a land conservation group, whether it's buying contract rights, true acquisition or funding a group like a tribe to reacquire ancestral land?
Yvon was very clear early on he was looking to do large, landscape-scale conservation, so that is the bulk. That's where I am doing a lot more surveying of opportunities and getting a funnel of projects from a lot of different partners to see what has an immediate need, what is an early opportunity that we can help get going, what is an opportunity we can help get done. We've got to spend all the money every year, so I'm kind of landing planes all the time in terms of the budget.
Outside of that, I really look for opportunities, whether it's litigation, funding a campaign or creating conditions that will allow me to write a check for a durable conservation outcome. I almost think about it like being an investor. Patagonia makes seed commitments. Holdfast is providing some growth capital to help extend these campaigns or to prevent a bad outcome until the conditions are ripe to create that durable outcome. That's where I try to steer this work. What is creating an opportunity for us to protect something at a bigger scale in the future? And what conservation opportunities can we invest in now? Everything else, I really look to the Patagonia team.
It sounds like no plans for a website, for instance, but perhaps more public-facing activities?
Year two will be about dialing in process and accelerating the work. At the end of year two into year three, we're going to focus a little bit more on external communications. We’ll have two years of work under our belt. We’ll have found the role we’re filling that’s different from others. The last thing I wanted was to get into a brand conversation about what is Holdfast vis-à-vis Patagonia and our grantmaking program. We may end up having our own website, we may end up having a sort of a subpage within Patagonia's ecosystem to keep costs down. It'd be nice to have publicly facing tax returns that people could go grab, and a web page makes a ton of sense to do that. So I do see it in our future. But the work comes first.
To what degree is the Chouinard family involved in grantmaking decisions? What’s their role?
I have a board, there is an institutional trustee and the family is on the board — and they provide feedback on the opportunities that I recommend. Ultimately, there are distribution committees for each of the trusts that make independent decisions on what actually gets funded. But the family is involved: They know what we're up to, just like they're involved with the business, as well. I think they feel really good about how things have gone so far this year. What motivates them is really the inspiration that helps guide a lot of this work.
The IRS filings for the trusts list only the “institutional trustee” you cited. But you also mentioned the board for that trustee and distribution committees. Why are those not public?
They don't have to be. The most important thing from a transparency perspective, for us, is what's actually happening. We don't really talk about Patagonia's board of directors, either. So it's not something that we feel a need to, or compelled to, talk about externally. But that could change over time. We'll see.
The New York Times story focused on your political and lobbying funding, which totaled roughly $1 million, or about 3% of the first round of spending. Are such awards a big part of the plan for this fund?
It could be. There's so much motivation to protect landscapes, so that's where we’re focused right now. The fact of the matter is, all of our funds are 501(c)(4) dollars — and they are really useful for lots of different purposes. I am very interested in using those dollars in as powerful a way as possible, but our top priority is protecting the planet.
We're never going to have the kinds of resources that other big political donors have to put hundreds of millions of dollars into an election. For me, it’s where can we help move the needle and create conditions for climate leaders to emerge. We'll look for those sorts of pressure points. From my perspective, you have the opportunity to more or less guarantee a conservation outcome by funding a project, versus, it's hard to know if the outcome is being achieved if you just throw money at an election. We have to be really thoughtful.
Sometimes you are going to have to make some bets. We'll look for those leaders who we can throw support behind. Every cycle that we go through, we’re going to get better at that. Also, there’s our long-term strategy and laying a foundation. Just like we're showing up now with this tool for conservation and not going away, over the next 20 to 30 years, we're going to show up for climate leaders, too.
