Designed to be trusted for decades.
One entity exists today: Stichting UnitedPeoples — Stichting is Dutch for foundation — a public-benefit foundation (ANBI, the Dutch charity status) seated in The Hague. Notarial deed 4 June 2024; ANBI from 16 July 2024; RSIN 866620205. Everything else on this page — the company, the banks, the platform — is designed, specified and ready for scrutiny, and will be built with founding capital. That line between what exists and what is planned is held precisely throughout.
A foundation that owns the mission. A company that will fund it.
Civic infrastructure at this scale cannot be built by a charity or a company acting alone — each is incomplete for the task. A charity can hold a mission but cannot earn at the scale the mission demands. A company can earn, but bends the mission to the revenue. The answer is to use both — and to bind them with a covenant neither can revoke.
Figure · One system, two entities
Holds the Moonshot, the Tenets, the fifteen GlobalCircles and the membership — and, as controlling shareholder, the company itself. If it were ever wound up, anything left passes to a comparable public-benefit institution — never to private hands.
A company locked to the mission. The two banks are not a side business — they are the fuel: a bank is how a civic mission gains the financial power to match its ambition.
Neither entity is the institution. The binding between them is.
The mission-lock: structure, not behaviour.
Once the money is large, how does the part that earns it stay loyal to the mission? The usual answers — a committed founder, a values statement, a well-meaning board — depend on behaviour, and behaviour changes. UP's answer is built into the structure. At its centre is the Three-Way Flywheel: the company's net profit divided, by its own charter, three ways — to the foundation (the mission), to UP Ventures (the ecosystem), and to the company itself (regulated capital and reserves). Written into the Articles, not left to a board's judgement. Three locks hold it.
Divided by the company's own Articles — not by a board decision.
Split three ways, every year
Will fund the mission.
Share of net profit · Y10 → Y20
Will recapitalise the ecosystem.
Share of net profit · Y10 → Y20
Regulated capital & growth.
Share of net profit · Y10 → Y20
Modelled shares, Medium scenario — the split itself is fixed in the Articles; the percentages step by design as the company matures.
The company's Articles — its legal charter — can evolve, but never against the Tenets or the foundation's stated purpose. No shareholder vote or board decision can dissolve the mission or the Flywheel split.
The foundation controls the company as its shareholder — and a special 'golden share' binds even the foundation itself: a consent right its own charter forbids it to give away.
Audited public standards on top of the charter, judged by a body outside UP's own walls. The commitments B Corp certification requires go into the company's Articles on the day it is formed; certification itself can only be awarded after a company has traded for a year, and UP will apply as soon as it is eligible. Losing it later would be a visible warning sign.
Built for the three moments that break mission-driven institutions
There is nothing to buy that can be redirected. Purpose and profit split are fixed in the charter and protected by the foundation's consent right.
Investors' capital funds the mission's growth but carries no power to redirect the flywheel. Regulated capital is paid as a cost, on capped contract terms, before the covenant divides the net profit.
The mission does not leave with them. It lives in the charter and in a board that appoints its own successors — not in any individual.
None of this is exotic. Steward-ownership and foundation-ownership are proven legal techniques, standing behind some of the world's most durable companies.
What is new is not the lock. It is what is being locked.
Each layer bound by the one beneath it.
Read upward: each layer runs inside the one beneath it.
The culture runs inside the Constitution, the Constitution inside the Tenets, the Tenets inside the Articles. The mission-lock is that same stack, expressed as money.
The Tenets, in fullPower designed to be answerable.
The foundation's board appoints its own members — by design, so control of the mission cannot be bought or captured from outside. Seats are limited to eight years and unpaid. The present three-member board is a founding placeholder, to be renewed and expanded once financing lands. Within that frame the institution runs under a ratified hybrid Holacratic constitution — a governance rulebook in which authority sits with clearly defined roles under explicit rules, and decisions move by consent — "good enough for now, safe enough to try" — never by decree.
One point is often misunderstood: UP members are not legal members of the foundation, and not shareholders or beneficiaries of the company. The relationship is civic, governed by the Tenets. Members hold no financial claim on the institution, and the institution makes none on them.
What binds them is the mission.
Every comparator does one layer. UP will integrate all of them.
Each is strong at one job UP must do — mobilise, convene, back founders, campaign, inspire, grant, deliver, or contest power — and none is built to do them all as a single, self-funding, member-anchored institution that lasts. The honest answer to "why has no one built this?" is that the form to build it into did not exist.
| The comparator | Exemplars | The one layer it does |
|---|---|---|
| Advocacy networks | Avaaz, Global Citizen | Mobilise voice, at moments |
| Convening platforms | WEF, Davos-style ecosystems | Convene those who already hold power |
| Fellowships | Ashoka and peers | Back exceptional individuals |
| Campaign studios | Purpose, movement agencies | Run campaigns for clients |
| Idea platforms | TED, idea media | Spread ideas |
| Collaboratives & foundations | Co-Impact, OSF, Ford | Pool and grant capital |
| Major NGOs | Oxfam, WWF, Red Cross | Deliver within a domain at scale |
| Political vehicles | Parties, the SDGs | Contest power, or set goals for states |
UP is not a better version of any of them. It is the institution they each, in part, point to.
UP's value is not any single part — not the foundation, not the bank, not the membership, not the technology — but all of them joined into one system. A foundation alone is a charity. A bank alone is a bank. A network alone is a movement. Joined, they become what none is separately: civic infrastructure that can fund itself at scale.
