Meet the Man Who Turns Patagonia Profits Into a Global Climate Action Engine

As an avid runner growing up in Columbia, Md., Greg Curtis fell in love with the brand Patagonia. He’d flip through the apparel company’s catalogs, admiring its products, articles and photographs. A couple of decades later, Curtis has not only secured a job at the famed outdoor brand, but is also in charge of an effort to funnel the bulk of its profits back into the environment, carrying out the vision of Patagonia’s founder, Yvon Chouinard.

Chouinard, the rock climber who founded Patagonia in 1973, shocked the world in 2022 when he unveiled plans to transfer ownership of the apparel company to a group of 501 c(4) organizations known as the Holdfast Collective. “Earth is now our only shareholder,” said Chouinard in his announcement, which laid out his plans to transfer 100 percent of Patagonia’s non-voting stock to the Holdfast Collective and pay it annual dividends.

“The idea is to convert Patagonia into a perpetual mission,” Curtis, who serves as executive director of the Holdfast Collective, told Observer. The outdoor company is the same “dedicated, committed organization that it’s always been—but with that excess financial value that’s generated to be deployed around the world for environmental causes and protection.”

Roughly 98 percent of Patagonia’s stock is non-voting stock, now in the hands of the Holdfast Collective, with its remaining voting shares funneled to an entity known as the Patagonia Purpose Trust. “We really decoupled power and economic benefit,” said Curtis, 49, who noted that the Holdfast Collective, which receives all of Patagonia’s annual profits that aren’t reinvested into the company, has no decision-making power over the size of its dividends; while the Patagonia Purpose Trust is in charge of business decisions but doesn’t receive financial benefits.

The Holdfast Collective comprises five nonprofit groups: the Holdfast Trust, Chalten Trust, Wilder Trust, Tailwind Trust and Sojourner Trust. The Holdfast Trust is the largest of the entities, receiving roughly 77 percent of Patagonia’s dividend funds and focusing on large-scale projects such as conservation acquisitions, dam removals and multi-year programmatic work, while the smaller trusts fund grassroots-level grants.

To date, the collective groups have received $210 million in dividends from Patagonia and deployed roughly $175 million of that capital. The bulk of its resources—between 60 and 70 percent—go towards land conservation ventures, said Curtis, who noted that the Holdfast Collective uses its funds gradually, making decisions every six to eight weeks, in order to ensure that it doesn’t use up all its capital at once and can respond to urgent needs.

In 2025, for example, it funded the acquisition of an 8,000-acre property in Georgia containing the Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge that had been threatened by the development of a titanium and zirconium mine. “That was something we were quietly able to get involved in, in response to a direct threat of an extractive industry and development,” said Curtis. “We like to be able to be responsive to those kinds of things.”

Deploying all of its available capital by the end of the year, however, remains one of the Holdfast Collective’s three guiding requirements, alongside stipulations to avoid building a big bureaucracy—Curtis is the Holdfast Collective’s sole full-time employee—and to steer clear of duplicating the grassroots environmental giving that Patagonia already engages in.

Curtis, who earned a law degree from the University of Connecticut, began his career at law firms in Rhode Island and Palo Alto before becoming in-house counsel at United Technologies. In 2014, he secured a role as assistant general counsel at Patagonia, and in 2021, he moved up to deputy general counsel. “They were on the front edge of really interesting corporate governance issues,” said Curtis of the apparel company, citing its forays into multi-stakeholder capitalism, B Corp certification and annual grants via 1% for the Planet.

During Curtis’s time at Patagonia, he was also given the “opportunity of a lifetime” to help navigate the company through its ownership transition. Working closely with Chouinard, the founder’s family and Patagonia’s board, Curtis helped engineer its unique philanthropic structure and built up trust with the company’s top leaders. When it came time to select someone to lead the Holdfast Collective, he was tapped.

Outside of navigating the unusual structure of Patagonia and the Holdfast Collective, Curtis’s legal background still comes in handy. “A lot of the projects that we get involved in, there’s a very inherently legalistic element to it,” said Curtis, who cited the structuring of grant agreements and international movement of funds as examples.

The latter, in particular, is key for the Holdfast Collective, which deploys much of its capital around the globe. It is particularly interested in giving back to countries where Patagonia has eaten up resources or local economic benefits, such as Chile, Argentina, Australia, New Zealand, South Korea and Japan, as well as areas in North American and Europe. “We look to redeploy and support work in places that the business is really extracting from,” said Curtis.

One of Curtis’s favorite projects thus far took place last year, when the Holdfast Collective helped fund the preservation of a 325,000-acre wild valley in Chile’s Cochamó Valley. The region, located in the Chilean Patagonia and home to thousand-meter granite walls, groves of alerce trees and endangered species, was officially transferred to a Chilean nonprofit in December after a long campaign over its ownership. “It’s not always going to be like that, but maybe once or twice a year—maybe every other year—we’ll find that really powerful throughline,” said Curtis.

For 2026, the executive director hopes to continue supporting land conservation initiatives and dam removal projects, in addition to funding regulatory fights to defend against federal overreach around extraction projects and supporting politicians who can serve as climate leaders. “We certainly need some federal allies in Congress who can help to defend the environmental regulatory framework and public lands,” said Curtis.

Amid a pullback in federal support for climate partners, the need for support from players like the Holdfast Collective has only accelerated, according to Curtis. “There’s a sense of crisis,” said the executive, who added that there has additionally been a recent increase in so-called “green hushing” among organizations and companies that have decided to abandon their former climate commitments.