Causes
Seven category funds. No free-text recipients. Ever.
The Purpose Source Association never picks a recipient by name. Everything it routes goes to one of seven public-benefit category funds, each delivered through an established, Zewo-certified intermediary under a written grant agreement. Contributors direct; the Association routes; vetted partners deliver. Neither the Association nor any repository owner can ever be on the receiving end.
The seven funds
Each fund is a pooled category, not a single organisation. What it covers is fixed in the statutes; the partners it routes through are curated by the board, screened, and published as grant agreements are signed.
Health
What it covers. Primary care, maternal and child health, disease prevention, medical supplies and the health workers who deliver them, in places where the fee-paying organisations of this network will never operate.
The kind of partner it routes through. Established medical-relief and public-health organisations with programme-level audits and published outcome reporting.
Education
What it covers. School access, teacher training, learning materials, and scholarships in under-served regions — including digital skills for people who have never had a device of their own.
The kind of partner it routes through. Education charities with audited accounts and outcome reporting per programme, not per appeal.
Poverty relief
What it covers. Direct cash-transfer and livelihood programmes, food security, and micro-enterprise support — approaches with a measured record rather than a compelling story.
The kind of partner it routes through. Evidence-oriented poverty-relief organisations that publish their cost-per-outcome and accept unrestricted grants.
Humanitarian aid
What it covers. Emergency response, shelter, water and sanitation, and support for displaced people, where speed matters more than earmarking.
The kind of partner it routes through. Established relief organisations with field presence, sanctions-screened logistics, and audited emergency appeals.
Environment
What it covers. Habitat protection and restoration, climate adaptation for communities already affected, and the freshwater and coastal ecosystems people depend on.
The kind of partner it routes through. Conservation organisations with audited programmes and independently reviewed impact methodology.
Animal welfare
What it covers. Rescue and veterinary care, humane treatment standards, working-animal welfare, and wildlife protection.
The kind of partner it routes through. Established animal-welfare charities with published governance and audited accounts.
Research
What it covers. Public-interest research in health, environment and open knowledge whose results are published openly, so the benefit is not captured by one owner.
The kind of partner it routes through. Research foundations and institutes with open-publication commitments and audited grant management.
The intermediary model
Charities want chunky, unrestricted grants with low administrative burden. The alternative — hundreds of sub-scale, restricted drips to arbitrary recipients — helps no one and cannot be diligenced. So the design is:
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Curated
A published list of category funds and the intermediaries and partners behind them, chosen by the board against written criteria — certification, audited accounts, outcome reporting, unrestricted-grant capacity. Free-text recipients never happen; a change to the list is a governance act, recorded and published.
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Pooled
Every project's routed flow is pooled by category. A fund receives one grant per period, not a stream of tiny earmarked amounts — which is also what lets an intermediary treat the money as unrestricted.
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Quarterly
Disbursements go out once a quarter, after the hold below has cleared the quarter's months. Predictable cadence for the recipient; one reconciliation event for the auditor.
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Under grant agreements
Written agreements with each intermediary carry reporting covenants and a receipt obligation. The receipts are what make each recorded disbursement independently reconcilable, and they are what the tax authority requires the Association to hold.
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Sanctions-screened on both sides
Payers and recipients — and the key people behind each recipient — are screened against the Swiss, EU, UN and US lists before any money moves, under a published standard operating procedure. This is not optional for a Swiss association routing funds abroad, and we would do it anyway.
The M+1 hold
A month's proceeds are held for one full month before they are allocated to funds, so that chargebacks and refunds resolve against the month they belong to rather than against a later one. Anything not yet allocated is carried forward as a visible roll-forward balance, never netted out of sight. The hold is boring, and it is what stops a refund in April from quietly shrinking a grant recorded in March.
How contributor votes shape allocation
Contributors hold an advisory designation right: they choose among the seven categories, never a named recipient, and the Association keeps final discretion. That is the same effective control a Swiss public-benefit organisation must keep over funds it routes abroad, so the product design and the tax design are one design.
Votes start in shadow mode: recorded and displayed, routing nothing,
until at least one quarter of reviewed shadow data exists and the allocation algorithm
has passed a published fairness qualification. Until then each project's flow follows
its default categories, set by its administrators for unclaimed shares. A project's
routing mode is always visible as project_default, shadow or
contributor_active. Companies steer between projects through their
usage declarations; they never steer between causes.
How the ledger records a disbursement
The ledger is append-only. Each disbursement becomes one row: the date, the category fund, the intermediary grant reference, the amount, and the hash of the partner's receipt. Monthly exports are immutable once written and each links to the previous one by hash, so a rewritten history is detectable by anyone who kept an old copy. Corrections are new rows; annotations render as annotations, never as edits.
What we claim about it is exact: every recorded allocation and disbursement is independently reconcilable — append-only ledger, audited accounts, partner receipts. What we do not claim is that the banking leg between the Association and an intermediary is publicly provable end to end; it is not, and we would rather say so.
Read further
Ledger and methodology How contributors vote What we can never do