How profit travels from enterprise to public benefit

“Profits return to the public good” is a sentence, not a mechanism. The mechanism is duller and more important, so here it is in full.

The four steps

• The enterprise closes its period and its accounts are reviewed independently of the people who ran it.
• The project retains what it needs to stay solvent and to fund the next stage of its own work. This comes first, because a project that cannot sustain itself stops returning anything.
• What remains is transferred to the foundation as distributable surplus.
• The board allocates that surplus to public-benefit initiatives and records the reasoning for each allocation.

The second step is where most of the disagreement lives, and it is where we expect to be questioned hardest. Retaining too little starves the enterprise; retaining too much turns a public-benefit institution into an ordinary company with a good story.

The point of the cycle is not that money moves. It is that we can show where it moved, and say why.

So the retention figure will be published as a figure, next to the reasoning that produced it—not folded into a total where it cannot be examined.