The thesis that the same business generates more profit under charitable ownership than under conventional ownership.
Project COA exists to prove and quantify the Charitable Ownership Advantage: the thesis that the same business generates more profit under charitable ownership than under conventional ownership.
A Profit for Good business is one whose ownership structure permanently directs a substantial share of profits to charitable purposes — large enough and structurally permanent enough to constitute a credible commitment rather than a discretionary practice. The specific allocation varies: some commit 100% of profits to charity, others split residual profits between charitable distributions and employee profit-sharing, others reserve a portion for management equity. The defining characteristic is structural commitment to a large charitable share, not a single fixed percentage.
The change is in who receives the profits, not in how the business runs. Under charitable ownership, profits flow to charity rather than to private shareholders — but the business operates identically. Same products, same prices, same supply chain, same management. The advantage operates at the ownership layer rather than the operations layer. The economics that follow can change — that is what is being tested — but the deliberate change is in where the profits go.
When customers, employees, suppliers, media, and other stakeholders can see that profits flow to charity rather than to private shareholders, documented preferences activate — improving demand, hiring, retention, supplier relations, and earned media. The effects need not be dramatic. Most businesses operate on thin margins, where even modest input changes compound into large profit effects. A few percentage points of better customer acquisition, lower employee turnover, and stronger supplier terms can stack across the P&L into outsized profit gains.
A substantial research base and large-scale precedents — Bosch, Patagonia, Humanitix, Newman’s Own — point in this direction. What has not been done is a program of deliberate before-and-after conversions on ordinary businesses, instrumented from the start and measured against pre-registered predictions. Project COA is building that program.
Project COA is closing that gap through research and instrumented acquisitions that convert profitable businesses into Profit for Good companies under irrevocable charitable ownership. Measurement is pre-registered, and results are published regardless of outcome. The first acquisitions target Australia, where charity-owned businesses pay no corporate income tax under Division 50, producing roughly 33–43% more distributable cash than conventional competitors before any stakeholder effect. That floor bounds the downside and gives the tests a clean baseline.
If charitable ownership shifts profit margins by even a few percentage points — through stakeholder effects on consumer demand, employee retention, supplier terms, earned media, and B2B relationships — philanthropic capital gains access to returns conventional owners cannot access, credit markets follow demonstrated performance, and a substantial share of global business profit can be redirected to effective charities.
The underlying preference is one most people already share. Given two equivalent options — same product, same price, same quality — most people would rather their money help solve real problems than enrich private shareholders. The same holds for jobs: given two equivalent offers, most people would rather their work generate profits for charity than for outside investors. Extend the same logic to suppliers, lenders, and media, and the pattern holds. People prefer the option that helps.
The question is whether that preference becomes competitive advantage when a business can offer it credibly and without friction. That is what Project COA is testing.
Across field experiments, labor markets, and institutional procurement, the pattern holds: when price and quality are equal, stakeholders prefer businesses whose profits go to charity. Consumers choose charity-linked products more often at parity — in one widely cited eBay field experiment, charity listings showed roughly seven percentage points higher sale probability than identical non-charity listings from the same sellers (Elfenbein et al., 2012); the same pattern appears across adjacent ethical dimensions, with Fair Trade labeling producing roughly 10% sales lifts at price parity in controlled field experiments (Hainmueller, Hiscox & Sequeira, 2015). Employees stay longer at mission-aligned organizations, accept measurable wage differentials for mission alignment (Burbano, 2016; Macpherson et al., 2024), and arrive more productive when attracted by prosocial job framing (Hedblom, Hickman & List, 2019). Corporate and government buyers systematically favor suppliers with credible social credentials when commercial terms are comparable, with weak sustainability performance penalized more heavily than strong performance is rewarded (Zhan et al., 2021). When Patagonia transferred ownership to a climate trust, purchase intent and job applications both rose with no product change and no price change — the structural ownership announcement itself drove the response. These are measured behaviors, supported by survey data pointing in the same direction.
These existence proofs operate at different levels. Bosch (94% foundation-owned, €90+ billion in annual revenue) and Newman’s Own ($600+ million donated while competing on mainstream grocery shelves for 40+ years) establish that foundation ownership is compatible with commercial success at scale — durability, not causal mechanism. Humanitix is closer to direct evidence of the mechanism: it competes head-to-head against incumbent ticketing platforms at lower fees while directing 100% of profits to charity, and event organizers choose it at least partly because its fees fund classrooms rather than shareholders. Patagonia’s 2022 ownership transfer produced measurable lifts in purchase intent and job applications with no product or price change — an uncontrolled but suggestive before-and-after. These cluster at the high end of the charitable commitment spectrum, consistent with the prediction that stronger charitable commitment produces stronger stakeholder response. None of them is a pre-registered, instrumented conversion test. That is what’s missing.
These existence proofs are real, but they emerged from idiosyncratic governance histories, not from deliberate before-and-after conversions instrumented for measurement. Patagonia is a famous activist brand with decades of preexisting goodwill; its transition effects can’t be cleanly separated from the brand it already had. What is missing is the same kind of test on ordinary profitable businesses, with pre-registered protocols and rigorous measurement of what changes when ownership becomes charitable. The preferences are documented. The precedents are real. The operating leverage math is clear. The experiments that connect them have not yet been run. That is what Project COA is building.
Acquire an ordinary profitable business. Convert it to irrevocable charitable ownership through a charitable trust that holds the operating equity. Make that ownership visible to customers, employees, suppliers, and the public — visibility activates the mechanism. Measure customer acquisition, employee retention, supplier terms, earned media, and financial performance against pre-acquisition baselines using pre-registered protocols. Project COA designs, instruments, and measures the tests; the trust holds the equity; professional management runs the business. Publish the results regardless of outcome — successes, failures, and what they tell us about what to change.
The first acquisitions target Australia, where charity-owned businesses pay no corporate income tax under Division 50 of the Australian Income Tax Assessment Act. Retaining the 25–30% corporate tax rate produces roughly 33–43% more distributable cash than a conventional competitor operating identically, before any stakeholder effect activates. That structural feature bounds the downside: even if the stakeholder mechanism produces nothing, the foundation still owns a business generating substantial above-market charitable distributions. See Q8 for the full mechanics.
Project COA can be funded through three pathways:
Philanthropic finance is the practice of using philanthropic capital to access financial returns that only philanthropic capital can access — returns generated by the charitable identity of the owner itself. As a deliberate strategy rather than an accident of governance history, it is largely unexplored territory. Project COA is the first systematic effort to map it.
The primary offering is a structurally advantaged investment opportunity. In the first test jurisdiction, this begins with a structural floor: charity-owned businesses in Australia pay no corporate income tax under Division 50, producing roughly 33–43% more distributable cash than conventional competitors operating identically — an advantage available to philanthropic capital that no non-charitable investor can replicate. On top of that floor, if the Charitable Ownership Advantage holds, charity-owned businesses generate additional returns — through stakeholder effects on demand, retention, supplier terms, and earned media — that conventional owners also cannot replicate. Both sources of advantage share the same structural feature: the mechanism requires the owner to actually be charitable, which means the moment profits are redirected to private shareholders, the features producing the advantage disappear. Philanthropic capital deploying into these businesses captures financial performance conventional capital structurally cannot reach.
Several implications follow. Credit markets can finance these acquisitions, because the underlying cash flows — including the Australian tax floor — support debt service coverage even when the stakeholder mechanism underperforms. Impact investing’s standard constraint — the limited supply of deals combining market-rate returns with significant impact — weakens, because any profitable business can become a philanthropic finance target once impact flows from ownership rather than from operations. And existing philanthropic assets — foundation endowments, donor-advised funds, investing-to-give portfolios — gain a new deployment pathway producing more charity per dollar than conventional investing-to-give.
