TL;DR: Gander Social is incorporated as a Benefit Company: a for-profit business with a legally binding public benefit.
Our public benefit is to build trustworthy social infrastructure that protects user dignity, digital sovereignty, and democratic participation.
As a Benefit Company, we’re legally obligated to consider users, communities, and the public interest alongside profit, and we must publish an annual public Benefit Report.
This structure shapes how we fund and build Gander, including equity crowdfunding, community co-design, and treating accessibility and accountable spaces as core requirements, not optics.
Read on for more details…
Becoming a Benefit Company
Back in June, we incorporated as a Benefit Company.
Even though we were just getting started, we were already asking some big questions:
- How do we keep Gander in Canadian hands long term?
- How do we prevent values drift when financial pressure inevitably shows up?
- And what happens if there’s some dramatic board takeover that installs Cyril Sneer at the helm?
Short of finding a raccoon in a hockey jersey to thwart his plans, we realized that if we wanted to build a different kind of social platform, we had to structure it differently from day one.
So, what’s a Benefit Company?
In Canada, benefit company status is still new and, for now, only available under British Columbia’s Business Corporations Act (see Part 2.3 Benefit Companies). That’s why we incorporated in B.C.
A benefit company is a for profit corporation with a specific public benefit written into its articles. In practice, this means:
- We are required to pursue our stated public benefit.
- We must consider the public benefit and a broad group of stakeholders—not only shareholders—when making decisions.
- We must publish an annual report showing what we did and how we measured progress.
- We remain a for profit, taxable business, not a charity or non-profit.
We still have to earn sustainable revenue and run a healthy company. The difference is that delivering a better social media experience for Canadians is part of Gander’s legal foundation—not a slogan, not a side quest, and not a gimmick.
Our Public Benefit: Trustworthy Social Infrastructure
We believe that if this platform is a place for people to communicate, organize, and participate in public life, then our commitments should be clear, durable, and open to scrutiny.
To that end, we designed a benefit statement to reflect what we believe are our core universal commitments:
To build trustworthy social infrastructure that protects user dignity, advances digital sovereignty, and strengthens democratic participation in the digital public sphere (the “Benefit”).
In pursuing this Benefit, the Company will conduct its business in a responsible, transparent, privacy-respecting and community-guided manner. The Company is also committed to Canadian stewardship, governance and ownership to ensure long-term accountability to the public interest.
We’ve written this commitment into our incorporation documents to guide what we build, who we partner with, and how we operate.
Setting ourselves up as a Benefit Company with a measurable public impact was step one in ensuring we lived up to that.
Pros from Cons
We’ve already encountered situations where our structure doesn’t fit neatly into existing boxes. Some government funding isn’t built for us, and most venture capital investors pause when they hear “public benefit”.
That’s all good though, because the (ahem) benefits far outweigh the friction:
It Protects Our Mission
Good intentions are easy. Protecting them as we grow is harder.
As a Benefit Company, our directors are legally obligated to weigh the public benefit and the interests of users, workers, communities, and shareholders together. It also ensures Gander stays in Canadian hands.
It Keeps Us Accountable
We talk a lot about data privacy, sovereignty, and healthier online spaces, but talk isn’t enough. Our status requires us to:
- Embed the benefit into our legal documents.
- Make decisions aligned with it.
- Publish a public annual report explaining what we did, what changed, and how we measured progress.
It forces us to reflect, assess, and improve. Publicly.
It INPIRED US TO EXPLORE NEW Avenues for Funding
If Gander is built in the public interest, ownership and governance should reflect that. This is one reason we’re doing equity crowdfunding: more Canadians get to own a piece of the platform they use.
It DRIVES US to Build With Community
Being a Benefit Company means community involvement isn’t a marketing campaign—it’s a requirement. This means:
- Running participatory design and co-design sessions.
- Sharing what we hear from users.
- Closing the loop by showing how feedback shapes features, policies, and roadmaps.
It embeds inclusion into platform design. Accessibility, multilingual support, and accountable online spaces are not “if we have time” items. They are must-dos.
Please Hold Us Accountable
We know trust in social media has been eroded by over a decade of extractive business models… in some cases by companies that had the best of intentions.
So we chose this model as a starting point to protect the people who use Gander from the people who own it.
By embedding our commitments into our legal foundation, we’re making privacy, equity, Canadian ownership and public good non-negotiable. They’re obligations, not branding.
Is it bullet-proof? Not at all.
But it will keep things in-line while we work to design more guardrails.
And in the meantime, when we inevitably F-up something at some point, to some degree, in someone’s eyes, we invite you to call us out for it.
We may not be able to make everyone happy 100% of the time, but we sure are going to do our best to acknowledge our mistakes with humility, and meet as many needs as we can while delivering a fun platform you can trust.
