Patagonia Org is the nonprofit arm of the Patagonia sportswear company. It supports the company’s avowed left-of-center environmental activist principles by making donations to left-of-center organizations, particularly environmentalist groups, around the world. ¹

Background

Patagonia Org is a private foundation created to advance the left-of-center environmental advocacy goals of the sportswear manufacturer Patagonia. ¹

Founded in 2007, Patagonia Org predates Patagonia’s 2022 announcement that “Earth is our only shareholder” and its associated pledge to devote all corporate profits to environmentalist causes. ² This resulted in the company becoming a registered “B” corporation, a designation in California law that creates a parallel legal obligation for the corporation to pursue profitable and environmentalist goals. ³

As of 2025, the president of the foundation was Hans Cole, Patagonia’s vice president of environmental activism. ⁴ Patagonia founder and socialist billionaire Yvon Chouinard and his wife Malinda Chouinard were both directors of the foundation. ⁵

Grantmaking

Patagonia Org’s charitable giving strategy is to make a large number of relatively small grants. It made 457 grants in 2024 totaling $12,800,000, with more than 80 percent of its disclosed grant amounts being between $10,000 and $15,000. ⁵

Of that $12,800,000 in total grants, more than $4.8 million was distributed through organizations that serve as pass-through funders or fiscal sponsors for the ultimate recipient organization. Its largest donation in 2024 was a $4,160,000 grant to Charities Aid Foundation of America (CAF), an intermediary organization that allows American donors to make charitable donations to foreign nonprofits. ⁶ Patagonia Org also reported paying CAF $231,728 in consulting fees in 2024.  ⁵

Its second-largest 2024 grant was $656,000 to the Makeway Foundation (formerly Tides Canada Foundation), a pass-through funder for American donors to support Canadian environmental organizations. ⁷

It donated $75,000 to Resources Legacy Fund, a left-of-center environmental group that serves as a fiscal sponsor for environmental groups that do not have tax-exempt charitable status from the IRS. ⁸

One of two six-figure grants to recipients other than passthrough funders in 2024 was a $100,000 grant to the Environment America Research and Policy Center, the 501(c)(3) sister organization to 501(c)(4) environmental advocacy group Environment America, which in turn grew out of the Public Interest Research Group (U.S. PIRG) network. ⁷ The other was a $100,000 grant to AmeriCares, a global disaster relief organization. ⁹

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2. “Yvon Chouinard Donates Patagonia to Fight Climate Crisis.” Patagonia, September 14, 2022. https://www.patagonia.com/ownership/.
3. McKinnon, Patricia. “Patagonia’s Strategy, 10 Times it Stood Out from the Pack.” Indigo Digital. September 14, 2021. https://www.indigo9digital.com/blog/patagoniastrategy.
4. Cole, Hans. “Hans Cole – Patagonia.” LinkedIn. Accessed November 24, 2025. https://www.linkedin.com/in/hans-cole-4a2aa819/.
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6. “Charities Aid Foundation (CAF) – We Make Giving Count.” CAF. Accessed November 24, 2025. https://www.cafonline.org/.
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8. “What We Do.” Resources Legacy fund. Accessed November 24, 2025. https://resourceslegacyfund.org/what-we-do/.
9. “Disaster Relief & Global Health Organization.” Americares. Accessed November 24, 2025. https://www.americares.org/.