Profit analysis isn't (enough) power analysis

I'm worrying a lot recently about whether we're too quick to tag orgs as “good” or “bad” based solely on whether they carry a charity number or a share register. The truth is often more nuanced that this: there are non‑profits siphoning grant money into opaque overheads, and private companies embedding social purpose into their governance. Legal form alone doesn't tell us enough about who holds the levers of power, who benefits, or how decision-making works.

Take, for example, the rise of B Corps across Europe. From Berlin’s social‑housing co‑ops to Catalonia’s worker‑owned renewable‑energy ventures, B Corps marry profit‑seeking with a legally binding commitment to environmental and social performance, stakeholder engagement, and accountability. Their governance structures require boards to balance shareholder return against community impact. That's not to say they're perfect, but it shows that this should be an analysis of mission, incentives, governance and safeguards - both inside the org and in wider environments.

Blended‑finance vehicles are also getting more common - it's been interesting to see more flexibility in national development banks, pooling public grants, concessionary loans and private capital under shared governance frameworks. These consortia sometimes embed civil‑society seats on their investment committees too, which if not fail-proof as a mechanism, at least helps to diversify voice and perspective.

Any of these hybrid models seems more interesting to me than non‑profits or philanthropies that invest recklessly, or politically, and have opaque, top down executive decision-making based on funder whims. Of course not all non-profits do this - there are many visionary, astute, ethical non-profits who have positively impacted millions of lives - but it's not a given that a non-profit is necessarily a force for good. Charitable status doesn’t guarantee grassroots control or equitable benefit‑sharing, and being a company doesn't mean you have to behave in reckless, extractive, manipulative ways.

I'm worrying about all this in part at the moment because of what is happening in the United States of America - it's revealed just how fragile grants and dependent funding systems are. Some of our most important fields - science and social welfare - have been gutted, thanks to the whims of billionaires. In a capitalist macroeconomy, independence requires an income. What matters to me increasingly, then, is how to do this with integrity. Not whether an organisation pays dividends, but how it distributes power. Do the stakeholders have real agency? Are governance documents actually accessible? Is impact audited independently?

Moving beyond reductive binaries might help us to get into the real subtance - like are we building structures that really devolve power to impacted users and communities, are we devising revenue models that have missional alignment, and what are the mission safeguards we can really trust?