SPEAKER_00 0:37

Hello, you're listening to the Philanthropisms Podcast. This is the podcast where we try to put philanthropy in context. I'm your host, as ever, Rod Davis, and we're back after a short break over the Christmas and New Year period. I'm finally getting my uh act together again to put out some new episodes. So to kick things off, we've got a bit of a an in-depth uh deep dive episode, and then following that I've got some great interviews lined up for coming weeks, so lots to look forward to. But this week I wanted to take a little bit of a look at philanthropy and business and the relationship between the two uh and kind of what people have said about it and why that relationship is often quite a complicated one. I guess the you know the basic starting point is to say, well, business is how lots of people make their money. Uh, people need money in order to give money away, therefore, business is the source of the money that people give away um when it comes to philanthropy, and that is certainly true. It's a sort of unavoidable truth, certainly in terms of the world as it stands at the moment, that uh business in a certain sort of capitalist sense uh is a kind of inescapable fact when it comes to philanthropy, and you kind of need to make your peace with that. But I think there's a lot more to it than that, and I want to look at it in a few different ways. So the first thing uh that I want to look at is the question of why it is people have often said that philanthropy or philanthropic organizations need to be more business-like themselves or operate more like businesses, which, if you hang around for more than five minutes in any event on philanthropy or meeting about philanthropy is something that you will probably hear, people very confidently asserting that, you know, all the problems of charity could be sorted out if they were just a bit more business-like. But what does that actually mean? I mean, which businesses are we talking about here? Are we saying that charities need to be more like Apple? You know, they need to be more like Tesco, that they need to be more like my local bakery. I mean, the idea that business represents some sort of homogenous uh sector in itself is nonsensical. So actually, I think you kind of need to break it down into something more meaningful and be more specific about what kinds of businesses, what size, what scale, what sectors you're actually talking about. But even beyond that, what what is it about businesses and the way they operate that is seen to be desirable and uh applicable to the work of charities? You know, presumably it's not that they're profit-seeking, because that is precisely the difference in definition, surely between for-profit and not-for-profit entities. But is it something to do with the fact that they're more competitive or that they're more supposedly streamlined or efficient? Um, or is it to do with the way in which they're structured? I think you know, you've you hear all of these things essentially being either stated or implied at various times, and you know, there's a kind of long history of this. Um, I mean, one that you will hear coming up quite a lot when people start to talk about uh charities being business-like is the question of overheads or perceived overheads. So things that are not directly spending on the provision of the services or getting somehow directly down to the front line and being uh used for the charity's mission, but are merely uh things that are part of the kind of infrastructure for providing that service. So, you know, that might be administrative costs, it might be office costs, it might be things like salaries for staff members, which, you know, it in a way it's very odd to see that as an overhead, because surely having the staff to deliver a service is a sort of you know fundamental core requisite of any organization. But since people often have it in their heads that charities operate on a voluntary basis, people do get quite frustrated about the idea that there is a certain amount being spent on uh on the salaries of staff. And you will often hear, you know, this kind of I mean, what people in the non-profit sector would call the overhead myth, and what other people, you know, from the outside might say is um, you know, kind of a more business-like focus on on efficiency. And that's very far from a new thing. Um in the late 19th century, for instance, um E. H. Bailey, uh, who was uh an MP, I think, but also certainly a social critic, um went on a sort of one-man crusade against the Royal National Lifeboat Institution or the RNLI, um, criticising their leadership, I mean partly I think for their sort of perceived ineffectiveness, but also he criticized the amount of money they were getting paid, particularly in uh relation to the amount of money that people actually going out on lifeboats have been paid. So, you know, the idea that um charities are wasteful and have huge overheads uh has a very long history, and that's often compared unfavorably with businesses. Again, I think that assumes that all businesses are extremely uh efficient and effective, which is obviously not true. I think those who argue that would say that, well, obviously the thing is that market forces mean that those businesses that are ineffective and have overly high overheads will be less effective and less able to compete, and the natural process of market selection um will mean that they potentially go by the wayside or don't do as well, whereas those market forces are not present when it comes to the work of charities, so the argument goes you can get away with being that much more flabby and inefficient as an organization. But actually, in terms of where this idea that charities need to be more business-like comes from, again, it's you know it's one that has a long history, and there's some interesting potential answers to that question. So, one um view in a book by Peter Shapely about charity um in Victorian Manchester, he argues that actually um it was essentially just a reflection of the fact that the middle classes were the driving force behind the huge growth in voluntary associations, and they basically had a bit of a lack of imagination when it came to how to run organizations or what it meant to be a good organization. So they just brought over with them the mindset that they had from how they'd made their money in the first place. And so he says, you know, part of the reason for adopting a business ethos and appointing experts in key administrative positions may lie in the fact that voluntary charities were an expression of middle class culture. Charities were not necessarily viewed as a form of proto business. Those involved could be seen to have simply transposed their knowledge of administering a business organization onto the structure of the voluntary charity. The organization of the economic sphere may have been viewed as the obvious means of imposing organization on urban society. And I think a similar thing can be seen in other areas, and certainly in the the US, there's there's a great quote from the sociologist Thorstein Wieblan, basically kind of complaining about the fact that business principles and people from a business background are given so much more respect than anyone else, and he's talking particularly in the context of higher education institutions, and he says it follows as an inevitable consequence of the current state of popular sentiment that the successful businessmen among the alumni will have the deciding voice, insofar as the matter rests with the alumni. For the successful men of affairs assert themselves with easy confidence and they are looked up to in any community whose standards of esteem are business standards, so their word carries weight beyond that of any other class or order of men. Business principles are the sacred articles of the secular creed, and business methods make up the ritual of the secular cult. So he's sort of saying, you know, poking fun in a way at the idea that somehow men of business have anything kind of particularly uh above and beyond, you know, anyone else to bring to the party, but we've just kind of fallen into this position where um they believe that um, you know, we all kind of led to believe that business and business acumen is somehow a kind of higher form of knowledge, and so that all that's required in the non-profit sphere is that we tap into that knowledge and apply it directly in these different contexts. But that being said, uh even though we might want to resist the idea pushed from the outside that charities simply need to be more business-like, the reality is that often they have been remarkably commercially savvy and often, you know, arguably kind of led the way uh in terms of innovation ahead of the private sector. So certainly if you look at the Victorian era, some of the uh innovations in forms of kind of marketing and commerce um were found first in the fundraising work of charities. So the Salvation Army is a particularly interesting one, you know, big organization uh founded by uh Major Colonel William Booth, who uh sort of led this army of army. It's an organization that's essentially kind of muscular um proselytizing Christian organization which modelled itself uh on the idea of an army and there was a uniform, and people would go out and fundraise and they would uh hold kind of marches through towns, putting forward their views on things like temperance and abstinence from alcohol and all this kind of thing, in the course of which they gained many members. They also made themselves unpopular with with plenty of people. But they Booze particularly was extremely canny when it came to uh marketing himself and his organization. So he did things like he was one of the earliest people to put out um phonograph records of his own speeches, which he sold to raise money for the Salvation Army. Uh he endorsed various products, including things like car tyres. He was you know basically would put his name and his face to pretty much anything. But also, more interestingly, the army themselves produced um products for sale that interestingly kind of combined the desire to raise money for the organization, but also some of its underlying principles. So in particular, um there was a campaign uh called In Darkest England, which was based on Booth's own book, where he'd written a book called In Darkest England and the way out about what he saw as the ills of society in that time and a kind of prescription for what could be done. And this was particularly applied to uh the problem of match girls. So these were young women who worked in match factories, where at the time they were using a form of phosphorus in making matches, white phosphorus, which is a horribly poisonous substance, and it had the particular effect of basically kind of dissolving people's lower jaws and leading to these the lower jaw becoming kind of have gaping holes in it and even being sort of eaten away, and it was a condition known as fossy jaw. And Booth and the Salvation Army came up with an a new um line of matches called Lights in Darkest England, so sort of combining uh cleverly using the title of his very widely known book. And these were safety matches made without white phosphorus and in better working conditions, and they were marketed on that basis. So it's essentially an early form of kind of ethical consumer spending where the Salvation Army was selling money to raise for its own mission, but it was also saying, look, you want to buy matches, you need matches to light candles in your home, but you can buy these ones maybe for a little bit more than the cheapest ones, but safe in the knowledge that the the women who are working in the factories we use are not subject to the same terrible working conditions, um, and you know, are not susceptible to problems like Fossy Jaw. Um, so it's a really kind of interesting example. And then lots of other organizations, um, well-known ones, have kind of used the language of business and commerce in terms of selling what they do charitably. Um, so I came across this Christmas a great um uh fundraising advert in in a Christmas edition of the Times where they often have uh pages of sort of charity appeals. But this one from 1925, I think, um is for the Boy Scouts, and the the headline on it says a profitable investment, and then it goes on to say is to send a Christmas gift to the Boy Scouts. To do so is a business proposition. The Boy Scout movement, being preventative, inevitably reveal relieves pressure on all institutions of a curative character, hospitals, jails, reformatories, charitable institutions and all kinds, etc. It demands support from all who desire the end of race animosity and bitter class hatred, inefficiency, selfishness, and ill will, which collectively are sowing the seeds of further wars. So in actual fact, thinking about that, this is during the war period, so I think this one is from um nineteen forty two, possibly. But yeah, it's a really interesting attempt there, partly to take on the language of war, but as you can say, to kind of, as you can see from that, to kind of claim all sorts of preventative benefits and thereby appeal to people's, you know, presumably a kind of rugged economic uh self-interest and and uh rational, market-driven kind of desire to maximize their own utility rather than stucking at their heartstrings. So very much kind of uh positioning the work that the Boy Scouts do, which looks on the face of it, kind of the textbook example of straightforward voluntary provision and and uh association as something that is kind of hard-headed business, which I thought was fascinating. I'm just going to come on in a moment after a short break to take a look at a slightly different angle, which is okay, we've looked at how we make charity or philanthropy more businesslike. What about coming from the other direction and making business more philanthropic? Um, so stay tuned for that.

SPEAKER_03 14:20

At Meeting of Industrial Leaders in Washington, here's Julius Rosenwald. Most people are of the opinion that because a man has made a fortune, that his opinions on any subject are valuable. Don't be fooled by believing because a man is rich that he is necessarily smart. There is ample proof to the contrary.

SPEAKER_00 14:52

Okay, so as mentioned just for that short break, I want to turn now to the question of rather than make of whether rather than making philanthropy more business like, our focus should instead be on combining the two in a different way by making business more philanthropic. And I always think this one is really interesting from a historical perspective, because I think what you'll see hopefully is that the lesson we should take is the idea that there is there are any meaningful, firm dividing lines between philanthropy and business, and that we therefore need to kind of bridge that gap somehow by taking blended approaches, that in itself is a relatively new idea. And actually the idea that we could divide the two is a relatively recent invention. When you look back historically, people didn't really see that many distinctions between philanthropy and business. They were often just reflections of the same uh individual's desire to achieve something in the world. You know, this is particularly true if you look at people like some of the great Quaker figures. So the Quakers are obviously a dissenting Christian denomination, and you know, they were shut out from many of the sort of mainstream circles of the economy, so they were forced to kind of carve their own niche in society. And also an important part of Quaker teaching was about uh you know having a strong work ethic and and being involved in business and kind of making money was seen as something that was good if it was done in the right way. And so, very much from the outset for these Quaker businesses, their the combination of their Christian beliefs and their social purpose and their business was was there to be seen. Most famously, I guess, this is in the form of the a number of uh Quaker worker villages for organizations run by Quaker business people, particularly in the confectioner industry. So you have uh the Cadbury family near Birmingham, who built the uh model village of Bourneville for their workers. Um, but there are others as well, up in York, there's the uh village of New Earswick, which was built by the Roundtree family, and then there are other examples where they are not necessarily Quakers. So the the Lever brothers um up in uh Port Sunlight in on the Wirral built that, and also Titus Salt built Salt Air, which is up near Leeds, I believe. Um so there are a number of examples there. And these are I mean, they're obviously philanthropic, they're driven very much by a desire to ensure that the people working uh for them and their employees had better living conditions than were available at the town, and they were undoubtedly you know a huge improvement on the sort of urban tenement slums that lots of people otherwise would have had to live in in the working class if they were working in factories. Instead, you could live in these planned communities where you often had a small house with a garden and outside spaces and maybe kind of shared institutions like a library and you know, places where you could have uh entertainments and arts and culture. This did, it has to be said, often come along with a certain degree of paternalism. So uh there were obviously they would quite often impose temperance rules or curfews on the people living in these uh towns. Um they had quite strong views about what were healthy recreations and pastimes and what were bad ones. So that was you know, the price that the workers had to pay was that there was a definite sort of um sense of paternalism on the part of some of these donors. But they they certainly reflect the fact that uh a lot of these Quaker business people saw their business and philanthropy as inseparable uh and kind of you know built the philanthropy into the model, uh and in fact spread it more widely than that. So most of them would also see very little dividing line between their business and philanthropy and politics, or the media on another hand. So George Cadbury and Joseph Roundtree were both newspaper proprietors as well, and Cadbury certainly, I think, at one point was an MP, and they just used all of those different approaches to um try and achieve the same set of social goals uh driven by their religious belief, and they didn't really see any of those dividing lines. So the idea that you would have had to blur them in any way just wouldn't really have made sense to them. Um I think another you know a similar thing is true in a slightly different context. Um on the podcast before we had as a guest um Tyrone McKinley Freeman, um, whose work on Madame C.J. Walker and the book he wrote is absolutely fascinating. And one of the points that comes across very strongly in that book is that Madame Walker very much kind of blurred the lines between her business and her philanthropic interests, and that this wasn't necessarily very surprising. Um and the point that um that Freeman makes in that book is that it wasn't really a choice for African Americans at that point in in the Southern States of America under Jim Crow and segregation, they were excluded from you know the mainstream economy, and so they didn't really have any choice but to to kind of work with each other and thereby sort of have a blend of economic incentives but also you know social and charitable incentives and campaigning incentives based around sort of civil rights, and that this mixture of of all three was perfectly natural and probably unsurprising. And so I think it's something we often see from more marginalized groups who've been excluded from the mainstream, or maybe there are more divisions between commerce and philanthropy, actually, when you don't have the luxury of engaging in in those sort of mainstream markets and following those mainstream models of philanthropy, you just kind of do whatever you need to, uh, and that crosses all of those boundaries quite naturally. But then, you know, latterly the model in the 20th century certainly became one where increasingly you saw for-profit corporations being seen as something separate and probably getting away from any sense that they had a kind of uh inherent or necessary um social uh purpose or social responsibilities, and then that being kind of tacked back on again in the form of things like corporate social uh responsibility and latterly uh kind of shared purpose and all these sorts of things. Um and that has always annoyed some people. I mean, most famously Milton Freeman, uh Friedman the Economist, had uh an article and sort of series of papers in the 1970s where he basically said, you know, the idea of social responsibility for business is nonsensical. The only social responsibility of business to his mind um was to increase its profits. In fact, that that is exactly the title of the piece he wrote the New York Times in 1970. It's called The Social Responsibility of Business is to increase its profits. So he says in that he says, When I hear businessmen speak eloquently about the social responsibilities of business in a free enterprise system, I'm reminded of the wonderful line about the Frenchman who discovered at the age of 70 that he had been speaking prose all his life. Businessmen believe that they're defending free enterprise when they declaim that business. Business is not concerned merely with profit, but also with promoting desirable social ends. The business has a social conscience and takes seriously its responsibilities for providing employment, eliminating discrimination, avoiding pollution, and whatever else may be the catch words of the contemporary crop of reformers. In fact, they are, or would be if they or if they or anyone else took them seriously, preaching pure and unadulterated socialism. Businessmen who talk this way are unwitting puppets of the intellectual forces that have been undermining the basis of a free society these past decades. So you want him to come off the fence and say what he thinks. But yeah, no, I mean Friedman's very much at that point, and he did row back a bit on these views in later years, it has to be said, but at that point he was very hard line on the view that the only responsibility of a for-profit business was to maximize profits, um, and that you know any social good would come naturally from that through economic empowerment and kind of trickle-down effects of generating uh further growth, and that the idea that businesses have any sort of separate social responsibility as entities is nonsense. And he argued that you know, particularly any money given away from a company to charity or for philanthropic purposes was essentially stolen from the pockets of shareholders. I mean, these days not many people take that kind of hard uh Freeman line on things, and really the direction of travel over the past few decor decades has been very much towards the rediscovery of blurred lines. I think the sort of bringing back together of um of philanthropy and social purpose and businesses. And we've seen that you know take kind of tangible form uh in things like B corporations, so sort of new legal models that actually enshrine the idea that there is a social purpose. So we're not kind of relying on a company to make money and then tell us that it's doing good. You can choose to have uh a legal model where that social purpose is enshrined within it. And even for those companies that aren't taking a B Corporation form at the moment, I think it's really interesting to see how many companies put social purpose very much at the forefront of what they do, both in speaking to potential employees, I think. Um, and certainly there's kind of anecdotally lots of people say that there's a generation of younger people coming into the workplace who, you know, one of the first things they'll look at is what their company does in terms of uh CSR and corporate philanthropy and social purpose, and that's a big selling point for them. But also if they are customer-facing businesses as well and consumer-facing, um, when they talk to them. So I think it's really notable, and again, this is you know based on an entirely unscientific anecdote of me noticing it when I've been uh watching TV or listening to the radio, how many adverts for companies and their products don't really talk very much about the company or the product at all these days. They talk more about some bit of work that an organization's done with a charity partner or you know the voluntary work of people who work in in the company, or you know, that that's the thing that they put first and foremost is this the societal good that the company's doing, not how much money it's making and how amazingly successful it is. And I think you know that's broadly a good thing. I think if companies feel the onus is on them to demonstrate that they do have a positive social purpose, you know, great. The danger, I guess, and where where we find ourselves now is when those lines become blurred, you know, is there the risk that we get kind of the the broader equivalent of of greenwashing? So, you know, where companies claim to have strong environmental credits, but actually all the money has gone into sort of PR, uh, and the reality is that they're still as you know polluting and damaging to the environment as they as they were before. Is there a sort of broader phenomenon of purpose washing where companies claim social purpose and put a lot of money into sort of generating case studies of great work that they've done and what their employees do and funding they've given to different things, rather than actually addressing any negative impacts that that business might have on society. And I think even at the level where we're talking about companies that have taken the step of uh of opting for specific legal forms like B Corps, there are still some controversies um swirling around. So there are examples already of B Corps where people have said, hang on a minute, you know, this company is a B Corp and they're using that as a sort of kite mark of them being a good company, but actually in terms of what they're doing and the way in which they're treating staff and and customers and whatever, they're terrible. So um this blew up a few years ago around the brewing company Brewdog, which is you know very much in its marketing and its self-presentation, very much kind of I mean, they call themselves, you know, sort of punk beer company, but it's very much like supposed to be anarchic and anarchistic and driven by the people who've invested in it and very much kind of you know social purpose first and foremost. But then there were various articles, a slew of articles sort of pointing out that actually the there were lots of um issues with the way that it treated its employees and lots of kind of issues there around the leadership and some people calling for for Brudog to be stripped of its B Corp status. Similarly, there's a a content modern uh moderation company called Sama that works with Facebook, although I think very recently Facebook might have ended their contract with them. And certainly Sama was accused um in the work that it did in uh sub-Saharan Africa, and I think in Nigeria in particular, of you know, quite poor employment practices and not paying people there and essentially running a kind of content moderation sweatshop. And again, Sama at that point was a B corporation, and people again were sort of saying, well, you know, you need to be careful because it makes the very idea of this kite mark meaningless if you allow companies to behave like this with no risk of having uh having that status taken off them. And then I guess just finally on this section, the other line of argument that we get today that I think is important to take into account around making business more philanthropic is almost coming back to Milton Freeman's point of view, but with a slight tweak, which is the line that you hear from some people when they are pushed on, you know, why they or their company is not doing more philanthropically, to say, well, actually, you know, the best philanthropy that we can do and you know is is to make more money and to do more of what we're doing. And I think the original Friedman version of that would have been mostly around the idea of it's you know, it's good because we are generating economic benefits and economic growth, and you know, that then is enough in itself. And this was heard a few years ago, or sort of eight, nine years ago, from the Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim Helu, and he was the richest man in the world, and he came under fire a little bit for not doing as much as some of the other richer people in the world um when it came to philanthropy. And he expressed his scepticism largely about um charity and philanthropy and said, you know, it'd be it's better for me to focus on creating profitable businesses than to go around acting like Santa Claus. And then the the version of that that I think has evolved um over the last decade or so, particularly in the technology industry, is is perhaps even more problematic in a way, which is not just that I am making money through my business and that in itself will have knock-on effects that are better than philanthropy, but a belief on the part of people who have set up and founded tech companies that what they have done in their company is itself at least as much of a social good as any philanthropy that they could do. And and certainly this was um something that you heard from Larry Page, one of the Google founders, um, sort of eight or nine years ago, when asked about philanthropy, eventually sort of saying, Well, you know, I think the work that I've done through Google uh and all the other kind of for-profit work I'm doing is at least as good. And if I was gonna um focus on anything else, it would probably be on, you know, trying to do manned missions to Mars rather than traditional philanthropy. And I think that this argument's really found its kind of apotheosis in Elon Musk, who, when asked about philanthropy, will quite regularly say, actually, all of the work that he's done with Tesla and Neuralink and SpaceX and others, that is in itself philanthropic in his mind and probably more effective than any form of traditional philanthropy that you would care to choose. And I think that is, you know, that's a difficult argument because it's allowed people to kind of co-opt the idea of social good and redefine it so that it essentially just applies to what you were doing anyway that made you fabulously wealthy in the first place. Um and that's something we'll come back to later on, whether actually in blurring the lines between philanthropy and and business in a way that brings a lot of benefits, the danger is that you go too far, you allow it to the definition to get so broad that virtually anything you know can be reinterpreted as philanthropic or having a social purpose, and thereby it becomes almost meaningless. Okay, uh take a short break there, and then I want to come back in a minute to talk about a specific example of making business more philanthropic, which is about examples in which for-profit businesses actually end up in the ownership or controlled by philanthropic entities, which was something that kind of came to the forefront of discussion and just before Christmas when the owner of Patagonia, Yvonne Schuinard, announced that he was handing over um almost total control of that company into the own uh into the hands of a kind of newly created non-profit, although as we'll see, there's some complexities to that story. But I wanted to talk a bit about the wider context for this in the history and what it kind of uh tells us about the the good and the bad sides of of doing that. So stay tuned for that.

SPEAKER_03 32:23

Back where I come from, there are men who do nothing all day but good deeds. They are called filip uh filip uh uh good deed doers.

SPEAKER_00 33:05

Okay, um, I just want to go on in this section to talk a bit about the idea of the philanthropic ownership of businesses themselves. So when you have examples where businesses are set up or transferred into the ownership of non-profit entities, and this is something that has, as I said before the break, come back to attention in recent months because of the story of Yvonne Schuinard, who founded the outdoor clothing company Patagonia, uh, and announced um in sort of October, November last year that he was handing over ownership of the company into the hands of a newly created non-profit entity uh and a trust uh as well. Um, and that this was part of uh a plan to ensure that the company's social mission was continued into the future. Um, it should be said with Patagonia, this hadn't come out of nowhere. This is a company with a long track record of being kind of socially minded. Um, it was one of the earliest companies to adopt B Corporation status. Uh, long before that, um, even in the 80s, it had established a program where I think it was on a sort of 1-1-1 model where 1% of profit, 1% of employee time, 1% of assets were all dedicated towards social good, particularly environmental causes in this area. And in the the Patagonia example got a lot of attention, I think, just from people being, you know, surprised by the scale of it. And, you know, broadly, I think it was a really positive story. I think the thing that um subsequently some people kind of took issue with, myself included, was the sense from some of those people reporting it, and particularly the original New York Times article that reported the story, that this was somehow a kind of incredible, unprecedented move on the part of Patagonia, and that the idea of handing over a corporate entity into non-profit ownership was some sort of radical, unprecedented thing that had never been seen before in the world. Whereas actually the reality is, even today, if you look around the world, outside of um the US, certainly, and the UK to some extent, it's not that uncommon to see companies owned by non-profit entities. And that isn't just lots of sort of weird companies you never heard of. It's actually some pretty big household names. So IKEA is owned by a non-profit uh foundation, Heineken, Carlsberg, uh, Robert Bosch, they obviously make sort of tools and things like that. There are um other companies like Bertelsmann, the publishing company, Rolex, the watch company, as well as it has to be said, quite a lot of banks in countries such as Italy and Denmark, um, where for historical reasons and whatever, non-profit ownership of banking organizations is relatively common. Um, and then outside Europe, there are well-known companies like Tata and Sons, which for decades and decades has been owned by a non-profit trust. It is unusual in the UK. Um, there are still a small number of examples. Um, an interesting one, particularly that I came across last year, is the Robertson Trust, um, which owns Erdington, which is a brewing company or distillers, which owns brands such as the famous Grouse, the McAllen, and Highland Park. But that was handed over into non-profit ownership back in the 1960s when three sisters uh inherited the company but decided you know they were very sort of strongly uh socially minded people, and they handed it over into non-profit uh ownership at that point, and it has has remained as such. And then actually, if you look historically in the UK, again, this was relatively common. So if you look at historical examples, the Wolfson Foundation for a long time was uh the majority shareholder in Great Universal stores and obviously was kind of set up with that money. Um the Rank Foundation was majority shareholder in Rank PLC, uh the Ganeke Trust, majority shareholder in Bell's Whiskey, and then Grove uh charity was the majority shareholder in George Wimpy, which was a construction company. Now it has to be said, all of those major shareholdings have been sold up over the years. Not necessarily, I think, because the laws changed to mandate it, but just because at some point a decision was taken to cash out. Uh so it's less common now, but obviously kind of historically it was quite a big deal. But the history in the US is really interesting because I think a lot of the comments on this naturally came from the US, and there the sense was, well, this is never something that's happened in the US, you know, therefore it is unprecedented, because if it's even if it's happened elsewhere, that's sort of irrelevant. But actually, even that betrayed a lack of understanding of the history of philanthropy in the US, where actually non-profit ownership um of companies, and the other way around, um, non-profits being the majority shareholders in commercial ventures was was, if anything, the norm up until the 1960s, when, as we'll see in a moment, a deliberate uh attempt, a successful one, was made to limit that ability and introduce a new law which limited the ability of um non-profit entities and private foundations to hold shares in individual companies. Um and it's that which has subsequently kind of held back this as a model. Um, in fact, actually looking at that history, um, it was so commonplace that Ben Whitaker, who um wrote a great book about foundations in the 1970s, he claimed that actually by 1964, he says the investments of half the 50 largest foundations, including at least nine of the 12 which are biggest of all, were overwhelmingly dominated by one donor stock. So, you know, the biggest foundations in the US, the way in which they made and maintained their fortunes was to be the majority shareholders in the companies owned usually by the people who had set them up. And this led to growing criticism, I think, that this was not necessarily a purely altruistic or healthy relationship. So as far back as 1950, you've got President Harry S. Truman in a message to Congress saying that the exemption accorded to charitable trust funds has become a cloak for speculative business ventures. And the same year you've got the House of Representatives Ways and Means Committee saying that frequently families owning or controlling large businesses set up private trusts or foundations to keep control of the business in the family after death. And they proposed that no charitable deduction be allowed to a contributor if the contributor and related parties control the trust or foundation to which the contribution is made, and also control the business corporation whose stock is contributing. So this was essentially a problem that was known as self-dealing, where you as an individual, as a family, could set up a big charitable foundation, give over a large proportion of the stock of your company to that foundation, um, and thereby get, you know, shield it from tax and get quite significant tax benefits. But if you controlled that foundation as well as the company, you were essentially able to still uh take all of the decisions that you need to to maintain the strategic direction of the company. So you really weren't giving up anything in any sort of meaningful sense. And a long-running campaign against self-dealing and more broadly a private foundations, um, was led um particularly by a man called Drake Patman, who was a Democrat senator, a sort of populist Democrat of a sort you don't necessarily see uh anymore. And actually he was a notorious pro-segregationist and kind of avowed racist as well. I think he was a pretty deeply unpleasant man. Um but he had a huge impact on the philanthropy sector in the US because of this campaign that he led for reform of the tax treatment of foundations in particular. Interestingly, again, in Ben Whitaker's book, anecdotally, he he claims there that Patman's dislike for foundations stemmed from the fact that as a child, um, his family's grocery store in Hartford, Connecticut, um, had been taken over by Hartford AP stores, which was owned by the Hartford Foundation. So his his kind of hatred of the uh corporate the relationship between corporate entities and non-profit entities and foundations apparently sort of stemmed from that childhood experience. Whether that's true or not, uh I don't know. But eventually, um, over a sort of decade or or more, Patman's uh campaign was was successful and it eventually led to the introduction of the 1969 Tax Reform Act, um, which had a number of very significant rules um affecting philanthropy. It particularly introduced things like um limiting the tax relief that individuals can get for donations to their own foundations, introducing a payout rule on foundations, but most relevantly for this conversation, it also introduced a new rule that limited foundation ownership of company shares in an individual company to 20% of the overall shareholder. And so for a long time it just wasn't really possible to follow that model anymore. Now, interestingly, Patagonia seems to have bucked that trend, but it's not necessarily coming out of nowhere. In actual fact, much less heralded, but only a few years ago in 2018, there was quite a significant change in the law as a result, as part of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act um introduced under uh former President Trump. And there there was a new thing, there was an exemption made, which was actually called the Newman's Own exemption, uh, named after the foundation linked to Newman's Own, which is the um salad dressing and source company set up by Paul Newman. And for a long time, the the inheritors um of uh the family uh fortune there, who who controlled the company, had been arguing that the rules that had been introduced that restricted um foundation ownership of company shares were unfairly penalising them when their company was one that had been explicitly set up from the outset to have a social purpose. Um and they eventually successfully argued for an exemption, a carve-out. Now, the criteria on which that carve-out applies currently are it's set a pretty high bar. I think there's all sorts of rules about the nature of the relationship between the non-profit and the corporate entity, and uh trying to ensure that the corporate entity uh that the non-profit that the corporate entity itself does have a social purpose and all these sorts of things. But but even before the Patagonia example, actually there had been a softening of the rules that once again allowed the prospect of um non-profit foundations being the majority or sole shareholders in companies. I think the Patagonia example brought this even more to the fore. Um it's a slightly different example for a technical reason in that the there isn't actually any ownership by a traditional foundation. The the ownership of Patagonia has been transferred into the hands Of a traditional trust vehicle, which is not a philanthropic vehicle, and that owns, I believe, 2% of the shares, and 98% of the shares have gone into the hands of a new entity, which is what they call a 501c4 entity, which is a type of non-profit, but it's not the same designation as a public charity, and it's certainly not a private foundation. And interestingly, actually, even though 98% of the shares have gone into the hands of this new non-profit, all of the voting shares are to be found in the 2% that remain with the trust vehicle that is owned by the Schuinard family. So they're not really giving up that much control over their company. But besides, you know, that bit of that bit of quibbling, I think it's going to be really interesting over the next few years to see what this means in terms of whether other donors look to this as a model where they are business owners and founders or they have a family business and they want to use that business for philanthropic purposes and they want to find some way of ensuring that that continues over the long term. Because often one of the problems, as we've said before, comes when you have the transition of uh family business between generations. And there's always, you know, the um if you have shareholders as well, there's always the um potential for takeovers by other corporates or investors, and then that original social purpose gets lost. So I think this is the sort of broad point about why you would even want, as a company or as uh as a philanthropist, to do this, to kind of to put your company into the hands of a foundation or another nonprofit entity. The main one is that you want to enshrine that social purpose and your values in some sense where they are protected above and beyond just trusting that everybody's on the same page and they will keep things going on that line. I think, you know, as I said, particularly when it comes to the transfer between generations, for that reason and others, it enables uh continuity often. And also, more pragmatically or cynically, there are tax benefits to it. Even if it's not necessarily that important in the sense of uh offsetting anything against income tax because people at that level of wealth don't necessarily have income in the way that we understand it, there are significant advantages in terms of shielding from other forms of taxation if you hand over a corporate uh entity into the hands of a non-profit. Now, critics of this model argue, sort of along the lines that Milton Friedman did, that the problem with this is that you undermine the kind of basic logic of uh kind of market mechanisms. And if you make, if you put companies into non-profit ownership, that inevitably makes them less successful because the incentives to generate profit are weakened because shareholders and those working for the company aren't incentivized because they're not able to extract profit from that company. But actually, the interesting thing, and you know, probably the thought on which to leave us is that research shows that isn't really the case. In fact, when academics, and there's been a few studies on this, have looked at comparisons between corporate corporate entities that are owned by non-profits and those that are sort of more traditionally just straightforwardly for-profit, the non-profit-owned companies actually tend to do pretty well, particularly when you expand over longer time horizons. Because they tend to have more stability and they're able to take a longer-term view, they do tend to grow more slowly, maybe because that initial kind of drive to growth based on the individual incentives and shareholder incentives isn't there. But actually, that tends to see them quite well over the long over the longer term. And actually, when you look back at that list of companies that we talked about at the beginning, like IKEA and Heineken and uh Robert Bosch and Bertelsmann, they are all companies that have been around pretty stably for a pretty long time. So, you know, they're obviously doing something right. Okay, in the next section, I just want to move on uh to talk about the the history of the ways in which people have sought to actively combine profit and purpose uh in the forms of social investment and social enterprise. So stay tuned for that.

SPEAKER_04 48:12

Yet today is not far distant when the man who dies leaving behind him millions of available wealth, which was before him to administer during life.

SPEAKER_00 48:59

Okay, we're back, and in this final section, uh I just want to talk a little bit uh about the examples where rather than trying to make charity more business-like or trying to make businesses more charitable, people have from the outset not really seen any dividing line between the two and have kind of combined profit and purpose in models that um that are sort of blended between the two. And I guess there's there's two. I want to focus mostly on the idea of using money for that that purpose, but inevitably there's also the question of what sort of activities that you can do that that kind of allow you to invest in that way. So I think on the one hand, we have kind of social investment or social finance, and then we also have social enterprise, but they're kind of natural partners. And this again, you know, I hate to be a stuck record on these sorts of things, is one of those areas where my central point is any assumption that this is somehow a new phenomenon, which it very often is presented as, particularly around social finance, is absolutely, you know, doesn't reflect the reality of the history in this area. Where again, the idea that we need to make active efforts to combine profit and purpose in fancy new models ignores the fact that the idea that we could separate them in the first place is a relatively recent idea. And in fact, historically, people were kind of you know combining philanthropic and for-profit motives willy-nilly from the outset. So going as far back as we can, if we look back to the classical world, there's even examples. Um I came across one in a letter from Pliny the Younger in the first century AD. So he's talking to his friend Corinus, uh, and he says, you know, greetings from Pliny to his friend Corinus. You raise the question about uh as to how the money which you have offered to our townsmen for a feast is to be safeguarded after your death. So somebody wants to give money to the town but sort of worried about it being wasted. And Pliny's suggestion is he says, suppose you pay over the money to the state, there's the fear that it will be misdirected. Suppose you hand over land, then once it's become public it will be neglected, you know, he's identifying the problems here, saying, For my own part, I find nothing more expedient than what I myself have done, for instead of the five hundred thousand cisterces which I'd promised for the maintenance of free born boys and girls, I made over to the administrator of public lands a piece of land for my estate, which was worth considerably more, and then I took it back again, burdened with a ground rent by which I was to pay thirty thousand cisterces annually. In this way the amount due to the state is secure and the financial returns not subject to variation while the land itself, because of the very fact that it yields greatly exceeds the rent, will always find an owner to work it. So this is quite a convoluted idea, but essentially Pliny saying if you want to give the money but you're worried about maladministration and it not being spent, and you don't want to give land because you're worried that once you give it over again that won't be looked after properly, why don't you give over a gift of land from your estate, then rent it back at a reduced rate, so you're paying some money to the state, but you're maintaining ownership over the land. So it's a sort of complex social finance deal, essentially. And then, you know, whiz forward from here a thousand years, and you see the start of something that that then goes on to have a long history. So um Bishop Michael Northberg, who was the Bishop of London, said on his death from the plague in 1361, uh, he left a thousand marks of silver for the establishment of a fund in old St. Paul's Cathedral that would lend money on pawned objects without interest for a year, at the end of which the loan was to be repaid or the pledge claimed. So people could essentially give over some of their valuable items, they'd get a loan, which was interest free, at the end of the year they either had to come back and pay that money back, or the object that they'd pawned would be taken by the church. And this model of charities making loans was pretty common, uh pretty common and sort of spread throughout England. So um, just from various papers on this, it's saying, you know, many English communities in fact did develop a system for lending money, which fulfilled some of the purposes of uh of the Montiti Pieter, which is something we'll come on to in a moment. Credit was made available to small and moderate borrowers in a large number of English parishes by the simple device of employing local charitable endowments as a source of loans. Um and there's two ways in which they did this, interestingly. So there is this sort of specific loan charity of the sort that Michael Northberg set up there, and there are other examples as well, like the charity of Sir Thomas White, which uh made loans to young uh students, particularly I think sort of cloth workers who wanted to go to university. But the other model, which I think is perhaps less known, is that actual charitable endowments themselves just made kind of quite commercial loans uh on the basis that this was one of the few ways at the time in which they could actually get a return on their endowed assets. And so again, from a really interesting paper on this, it says the regular loan charities are the most obvious and best known example of the use of charitable funds as a source of credit before the age of modern banking. But they weren't the most important such source in the 17th and 18th centuries. Far more significant, at least outside of urban centres, was the practice of employing the parish stock and other charitable funds for purposes of local credit. So essentially, you know, foundations or you know, trusts as they were at the time and sort of parish funds, they would lend them out, not particularly on a social basis, to those who were in great need, but just to the middle classes as a source of fluid capital, and that would then be repaid, hopefully, in the form of loans with some sort of reasonable level of interest. And actually, before there were stock markets and other ways of investing, if you think about it, that's one of the only options that was available to the people kind of administering those funds for getting some sort of return. Otherwise, it would just be sitting there. So this was something, as it says, that was quite widespread in England. Now, a slightly different model that is more like the loan charity model, but that really took off in continental Europe was a thing that I mentioned very briefly before called the Monte di Pietra or Mound of Piety. And this was an institution that was originally quite linked to the Catholic Church and sort of emerged in Italy at the end of the Middle Ages. And the the idea essentially was that you would have a fund set up that people would pay into, so it wasn't a standalone endowment that was then making uh loans out, it was more sort of a mutual fund in that people would also have to contribute to the fund, but then it would make below market rate loans out on a sort of semi-social basis to people who otherwise wouldn't be able to access that loan capital. And this was, you know, the reason this took off perhaps was despite ongoing concerns about the fact that the church had very serious strictures against usury, which was originally just making loans and then subsequently became more understood as making loans at unacceptably high rates of interest. The Pope decided that these Monte to Pieta were fine, perhaps because you know they were owned and controlled largely by the church and they were a good way of making money. And so, you know, with with that kind of uh in premature of the Pope, it was fine, you know, to to set up these Monti to Pieta and use them to make loans and as a source of loan capital for individuals. So actually they became hugely important players in the sort of financial infrastructure uh across continental Europe. They didn't really take off in any meaningful way in the UK, and for for a sort of interesting reason. It's one of those examples where there was nothing fundamentally wrong with the model by any means, but there was a particular example, and the first sort of big high-profile example of trying to bring the model over to the UK ended in such a god-awful disaster, uh, as we'll see, that everybody was put off the model pretty much forever. So the story is the one of uh what came to be known as the Charitable Corporation, but it was originally known as the Charitable Corporation for the Relief of Industrious Poor by assisting them with small sums at legal interest, which is uh catchy name. Um, but that was incorporated by Royal Charter in 1707. Um, it was the brainchild of a man called William Higgs, um, and the charter originally stated that, you know, the argument was the poor are oppressed by exorbitant rates of interest, and the idea was that this charitable corporation would would set out to save them from all of these terrible, unscrupulous pawnbrokers that were around at the time. There was a legal limit at the time of um 10% interest, so it's a kind of rule against usury, but in practice, often it was said that pawnbrokers would charge, you know, 30% or more, and the corporation set itself up with um a kind of limit of charging no more than six pounds in hundreds, so six percent interest. So on a really interesting paper by Brerley on on this, on the history of the charitable corporation, which I'll put a link in the show notes to, he says, you know, what makes the corporation particularly remarkable is that it didn't simply follow the blueprint its predecessors had established, but forged ahead in a bold new direction. In essence, while some of its antecedents had reluctantly adopted some commercial characteristics, the corporation was a for-profit business run for a charitable purpose. So this is where it differed a little bit from the Monte Di Pieta that had existed across Italy and uh Spain and other countries, that it was much more towards the sort of finance first end, as modern terminology would probably have it. And actually we'll see that's you know, therein lay the seeds of its own destruction. So, you know, even at the time there's there's Benjamin Kirkman Grey writing in his um History of England, which he wrote at the end of the 19th century, it's a really interesting book, sort of tells the story of philanthropy from the time of the Reformation up to the start of the 19th century and the taking the first census. But he he writes about the history of um charitable corporation, and he says, you know, from another source we learn that the motives of the shareholders were not regarded as entirely disinterested, and low criticisms were aimed at them as incorporated pawnbrokers and 10% philanthropists. And actually there's a great criticism from the time um from a man called James Hodges in 1710, where he's he's basically going on to say, you know, moan about the fact that all charity by this point needs to have an element of kind of returning some kind of financial return and that the shift towards social finance has gone too far. He says, and I humbly suppose that all proposals of charity without that necessary ingredient, in an age where the worshippers of mammon as a being omnipotent have become so universal, are like to be as little regarded upon the account of public as they are on account of religious benefit, and that where the proposals and promises of God to reward the charitable themselves and their seed with great blessings are so much flighted, any proposals for public benefit, at the expense of private purses, without any visible return, must probably make but a small progress. They're sort of saying people, you know, now that they know that there is the possibility of getting a financial as well as a social return, they become greedy, uh, and that this model essentially kind of crowds out traditional charitable giving or philanthropy. Now, there was no particular reason that the charitable corporation should have kind of lived up to or lived down to these expectations, but unfortunately it went above and beyond to do that. So it wasn't just that it was overly commercial, it was actively fraudulent and corrupt. So there's a quote from the director of the charitable corporation, Dennis Bond, who's reported to have said, damn the poor, let us go into the city where we may get money. So, you know, rapacious capitalism took over pretty quickly. But then also it was reported in the paper from Briley, he says, you know, this was the generation of the South Sea and Mississippi bubbles, and a parliamentary investigation after 1731 revealed that the charitable experiment had become a giant swindle. Out of 944,688 pounds, which had supposedly been lent in good faith, according to the first estimates, three hundred and fifty six pounds and six uh three hundred and fifty six thousand pounds had been loaned on fictitious pledges with the collusion of corporation officials. Eventually the loss to the stockholders was placed at nearly half a million pounds, and a lottery for that amount was authorized to permit them to recoup their losses. When the lottery was held it yielded only seventy nine thousand pounds, so that the final loss appears to have been over slight slightly over four hundred thousand pounds. It would seem that the unhappy history of the venture discredited the movement to establish a regular mont in Italy. So this is the problem is that people were put off the idea of Monte di Pietra because their experience as part of the, you know, with the charitable corporation had been so bad and so many people had had their fingers burned. But as I say, this wasn't an inevitability of model. This was sort of more of a historical quirk that has, you know, had a big impact on the growth of blended models in the UK. And actually elsewhere the story was different. I mean, Monte di Pieta continued across continental Europe, and there are still many of them today, although they sort of take maybe slightly different forms. And interestingly, in the US, they kind of bypassed the problems that we'd had with the charitable corporation. And again, at the end of the Breary paper he says it was all a different story across the Atlantic, where several semi-philanthropic pawnbrokers along the lines of the corporation were successfully established. Founded in 1893 by several prominent businessmen, including JP Morgan and Corninius Vanderbilt, the Providential Loan Society of New York became everything the corporation had hoped it would be. It did huge volumes of business and delivered healthy returns to its investors and still survives today. You know, this indicates that, as mismanaged as it was, there was nothing inherently flawed about the charitable corporation's aims or its business models. It or another organization like it might have flourished had the experience not created the impression that these types of institutions will always end in financial scandal. And so, you know, that's the reason that we the model of the Monte di Pieter didn't take off in the U in the UK. But but I think, you know, that's not the end of the story of social finance in the UK, and just to throw in another kind of important element of it that we need to be aware of, towards the end of the 19th century, a different approach to blending profits and purpose became quite popular, particularly around the area of housing. And this was what became known as 4% philanthropy or 5% philanthropy. Um, and it was essentially where housing pioneers, people like Octavia Hill and uh Edmund Guinness, Edward Guinness, sorry, they decided to build affordable housing for the working classes. But instead of doing it as a sort of purely philanthropic thing where there was no expectation of return, they would build the housing, good quality housing, and then offer it at below market rates to the working classes. Um and the idea was that the philanthropic element of it was essentially how much money they were willing to forgo below market rate. So if you could build housing and could have charged 10% interest on it, and actually you only charged 6% on it, that would essentially be kind of 4% philanthropy because the philanthropic bit is what you are giving up. And that, you know, that's an idea that kind of still carries over today, where doing things at submarket rate isn't viable and kind of valid form of uh of social finance. But there was quite a lot of scepticism at the time of this. Um, and I think you know that kind of brings us back round to what history tells us about some of the ongoing problems with social finance and impact investing and attempts to combine pottery and purpose. So there's an article in the FT in the late nineteenth, right at the end of the nineteenth century, I think. So he says there are at least six of these undertakings of companies for housing the industrial classes at work in the metropolis. Most of them have been heavily capitalized at the hands of the charitable public. They're fully equipped with handsome offices, they are managed by directors who draw fees from many other companies as well, and must therefore have great experience. They pay good salaries to well dressed staffs. The brass counters in the offices are kept as bright as ever. Um the smartly groomed young men behind them have the wherewithal to go to the Empire and the Pavilion, and the directors draw their fees with punctuality. So, you know, this is essentially kind of scepticism that you can ever genuinely combine profit and purpose in these sorts of models because inevitably profit wins out because it's a sort of stronger driver of human behaviour, and that people end up becoming greedy, both at a sort of organizational level, so they start charging higher rates of interest or looking to get more return from their investments, or only making investments or offering loans to those with lower risk profiles, so you know the money doesn't really go to where the greatest need is, or that the percentage that ends up going towards paying salaries and funding the lifestyles of the people working in these organizations becomes too high, and you get the old sort of overhead criticism coming back in. And I think that's you know, feels very relevant still for the current context and some people's kind of discomfort with modeling. Such as impact investing. And that brief thought on the lessons that we can take from some of this history about efforts to combine profit and purpose and business and philanthropy today. I just want to try and pull things together in the final section and with a couple of thoughts on what we might think as we look ahead to the future.

SPEAKER_02 1:06:21

Genius billionaire playboy philanthropist. Genius billionaire playboy philanthropist. Genius billionaire playboy philanthropist. Genius billionaire Playboy Philanthropist.

SPEAKER_00 1:06:51

Okay, so I guess we've come pretty much to the end of things there. As with these things, I've tried to tell a bit of a story. It's not necessarily a linear story, it's a thematic story, and I've tried to pick various different ways in which the relationship between philanthropy and business can be understood. And I've obviously kind of cherry-picked examples from different bits of history that I uh have found interesting that I think are relevant. You know, if you want to follow up, I'll put links in the show notes to places where you can pick up on any of those particular stories and kind of you know fill yourself in a bit more and try and kind of get more of the linear sense of how this history is played out. But I think in terms of what it means for current practices in philanthropy, I think there are a few things. I mean, the most basic one, as with so many things, is that I think it pays to understand that these things have happened before and they've been around before, and that like you know, most things in philanthropy, it's cyclical, and that very rarely do we have a kind of uh Whiggish version of history where everything has developed in a linear fashion up to a point and you know got better and better, and that's the kind of the inevitable march of progress. What actually happens is that things tend to wax and wane, um, and certainly when it comes to the idea of combining business and philanthropy or profit and purpose, it's something that I think was very much more the norm at certain times in history and then kind of goes in and out of fashion for whatever reason. And we're currently at a point where I think we're slightly rediscovering that idea of of blurring those lines, and that's good, but I think in doing so the danger is that if if people you know get too carried away with with the idea that this is unprecedented and that it's something we've never seen before, not only is that not actually true and does a disservice to the history, but we're potentially missing out on important lessons about you know how to do things well and how not to do them, uh, potentially. You know, as an example of that, I think if you look at the history of you know social finance that we've been talking about and the the charitable corporation and the role that that played in making it making sure that the model of the Monte de Pieta never took off in the UK, the lessons from the charitable corporation are fairly timeless ones that if you're going to combine profit and purpose, you need to make sure that the you know greed and the desire for profit doesn't crowd out the the social purpose, and that if you are ostensibly setting something up for a social purpose, that needs to be reflected in the ways in which you um deploy finance, uh, you know, in terms of the rates uh that you set in in interest or the rates of return that you're expecting, it it needs to be reflected in terms of the sorts of people or organizations that you are seeking to offer that finance to. So if you want an overly high rate of return as a social finance organization, and that thereby means that either you ask too much of organizations that can't really afford it, or you end up just giving to organisations that are essentially in themselves commercial so that they can generate those kinds of returns, are you really meeting the original goal of combining profit and purpose? And that seems to me a lesson that is as important for today's impacting impact investing industry as it was back in the 18th century. And similarly, I think, you know, the the inward-looking lesson about the organizations themselves that again concerns about the the the cost of deploying that finance and the the cost in terms of you know administration and overheads and salaries have have often been overblown when applied to charities, but actually maybe there's more substance to them when they've been applied to organisations seeking to combine profit and purpose, because actually the difficulty is when you have those two motivations, sometimes that can be a little bit unbalanced. I think you know there's also a lesson that there there's a danger of the tail wagging the dog, and that if again you want to combine profit and purpose, but instead of your starting point being the purpose and then thinking about how you can add some element of generating a financial return into that so that it makes it more sustainable, or because that is something that genuinely meets the needs of the people or communities or organizations that you're deploying the money to, you instead start from the point of view of, oh, I want to generate a return, but let's bolt on some sense of a social purpose. The danger is always that that becomes uh a bit meaningless, or that um it looks tokenistic and as I say, there's kind of the tail ends up wagging the dog rather than than the other way around. So I think there are there are all sorts of lessons there. Um I think from other areas where we have considered on the podcast today, so the the the history of non-profit ownership of corporations, I think again, in the wake of what's happened with Avon Schuinard and Patagonia, I think this is something where we will potentially see many more examples in coming years of business owners looking to transfer ownership of their businesses into the hands of private foundations and and other kind of non-profit vehicles. And I think understanding the history of that and and why it has taken off in some places and is continue to be a model, for instance, in continental Europe, and why it isn't so commonplace in the UK and for a long time was actively prohibited in the US, I think understanding that history is really important so that we don't make all of the same mistakes again. And I think just fundamentally, you know, the point that I will leave you with is as we move into a future where we're once again sort of discovering the idea that you cla can burn blur the lines between profit and purpose, and that you can have uh uh mixed models of social investment and impact investing, and you can have businesses that claim to have a social purpose at their very core, but in a way that's very healthy. It expands the landscape of options when it comes to doing good and the tools that are available for consumers and for philanthropists when it comes to trying to achieve good in the world. I think the interesting question to me is what in that context is the unique value still of giving and giving money away without a um an expectation of a financial return. I think the danger is if that often it ends up getting seen almost as an either-or, and it's kind of if you can find ways of combining profit and purpose, then that's better, and that the end result of all of this should be that everything is done on a social finance or a social enterprise basis. But it seems to me there will always be some problems that are that don't lend themselves to those kinds of models, and where more traditional philanthropy and grant making remains the best approach. And also that there might be actual advantages to a more sort of seemingly altruistic model where there isn't an expectation of return because there is something fundamentally this it fundamentally alters the nature of the relationship between the giver and the recipient when there is an element of expectation of financial return and a commercial element as well. And what what does that mean in terms of where it is appropriate to use one model rather than another? It's a good question, I think. It's not one to which I have an answer, but it keeps me uh keeps getting me up in the morning and working, so I'll continue thinking about it and see whether I can come up with any interesting thoughts for future episodes. Okay, well, there we are, we've managed to get to the end of that one, potentially uh a little bit on the rambly side, but hopefully there's some been some interesting stuff in there. As ever, I'll put links in the show notes to places where you can read some of the sources that I'd referred to and kind of other interesting things on this topic. If you're interested more broadly uh in issues around philanthropy and civil society, do check out the website at www.yphilanthropymatters.com where you can find all the back episodes of this podcast as well. Uh do follow me on social media. I'm on Twitter at Rogery underscore H underscore Davis or at Philiteracy. Uh I'm also on Mastodon, I'm sure you can find me, and LinkedIn and YouTube and various others, I'm sure. If you've got ideas for people that we could talk to on the podcast or topics that we could cover in future, do get in touch uh via the website. You can find all the contact details on there. Other than that, just like, subscribe, uh, tell all your friends about it. If you know people that you think would be interested in the podcast, do share it with them, and I'll see you next time. Bye.