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The People's Endowment — Explained Simply

v0.1, 2026-07-19 Date: 2026-07-19 ·

Status: v0.1, 2026-07-19 · RENDER — derived from this library's internal records, this library's internal records, and this library's internal records (all 2026-07-18), per this library's internal records DRAFT, pre-ratification — the charter behind this page is still a proposal. The operator has not ratified it. The flagship design below is quarantined until a separate, dedicated review argues it for and against. No real dollar has been raised, invested, or given to anyone. This page changes none of that. It only explains it.

This page is for anyone who wants to know how a city might pay for its own basic needs — without new taxes and without asking anyone to trust a promise. It explains the idea without making you read a hundred-page design brief first. It covers the plan, why it matters, how anyone would know if it's working, and where it could go wrong. Everything below comes from research already done for this program. Nothing below is a promise.

What it is

Picture every dollar Toronto wastes, locks away, or lets sit idle. A school gym stands empty after 6pm. A contract quietly overpays. Savings vanish into next year's budget instead of being put to use on purpose. The People's Endowment is a plan to find that money and put it to work for the whole city, before ever asking anyone for a new tax. It isn't one thing. It's three moves, in a fixed order.

First, unlock what's already built. Before raising a single dollar, the plan wants Toronto to measure how much of its own space and stuff — gyms, halls, offices, data — actually gets used, and open up the rest. This is called the unlock rate. It's meant to be the plan's first published number, before any fund exists at all.

Second, recapture waste, on purpose. Money that's already being saved through better contracts or less waste usually just disappears into next year's budget. The plan wants to catch that money in a locked, dedicated account instead — and prove the number is real before claiming credit for it.

Third, build an honest, walled fund — smaller than the big dream, but real. Five possible funding lines are on the table. They would fire in this order. Waste and savings recapture comes first, because it's the cheapest to prove. Small community bonds come second. Third is a small ownership stake in ventures this project's own network builds and licenses to other cities. Fourth is a voluntary option letting older homeowners share some of their home equity. Last, held behind extra safeguards, is a fund built on health data — because the research says that line's value is the least certain of the five.

The fund's name isn't settled yet. Three options are on the table: The People's Endowment (used throughout this page), The Commons Treasury, and The Unlock Fund. None has been chosen.

Why it matters

Here's the honest math behind the whole plan. Toronto has about $12.3 billion saved across its reserve funds. Almost none of it is free money. Most is already promised to city projects already underway. Much of the rest is restricted by law to specific uses, like transit or water systems. Only about $227 million — less than 2% of the total — is genuinely free to spend on something new. The city has also already promised to pay out $41 billion from these reserve funds over time, more than three times what's actually saved in them today. Toronto's whole 10-year construction plan is $59.6 billion. That sounds like a lot. It is not enough.

To give every resident even a modest yearly payment, Toronto would need a fund of about $100 billion. That's just what it would take to match Alaska's real payout of $1,000 a year from its own oil fund — itself the smallest payout in that state's history, after inflation. A real income floor, something like $500 a month, would need $300 to $450 billion. Even a fund that sounds huge for a city, say $10 to $100 billion, would only pay each resident $8 to $139 a month. That's a token gift, not something anyone could live on.

This is why the plan doesn't chase a bigger fund as its main goal. Its own rule states plainly: a fund alone, at any size Toronto could realistically build, cannot carry a real income floor. So the plan flips the strategy. Instead of betting everything on growing a pile of money, it bets on shrinking how much money anyone needs in the first place. A fund that mainly makes needs disappear counts as just as big a win as a fund that mainly grows bigger.

This program is also built on a belief worth naming honestly. Some people who hoard far more money than they need might be acting from old fear, not simple greed. Many of them might take a dignified way out, if a real one existed. The program's own charter treats this as an unproven starting idea, not something the evidence confirms. The closest real evidence available doesn't test the fear-versus-greed question at all. It tests something narrower: when very wealthy people publicly promise to give money away, do they actually follow through? The Giving Pledge is the best real test of that. 256 of the world's richest people signed it, promising to give away at least half their fortune. Fifteen years later, only 9 of 256 have actually done it. The original signers who are still billionaires have grown their combined wealth by about 166% since signing, even after all their giving. One donor, MacKenzie Scott, is the clear exception — she has given away roughly 40% of her fortune in direct gifts since 2019. This program doesn't treat that as proof of why people hoard wealth. It treats it as a reason to build a real, well-designed way out for anyone who wants one, rather than assume good intentions are enough.

How would we know it's working

The plan is built in stages. Each one has to hold before the next one opens.

double-checked against real sources.

check.

anything is picked.

pass-or-fail rules set in advance.

people sign off. Only after all of that can a single real dollar move.

Before any of that, there's a trial run the plan calls the Shadow Endowment year — one full year of proving the numbers before raising any real money. It has four parts, meant to publish together, not one at a time:

1. A real, audited waste-savings number from one willing city department or partner — not a guess. 2. A real unlock-rate number for one bounded set of buildings or space. 3. A real accounting of how much need got solved without money changing hands that year. 4. One small, real community bond, proving the fund can move one real dollar through existing rules.

The plan sets its pass-or-fail line before the year starts, not after. If the waste-savings trick can't be made to actually work, or no partner will join, the plan says so plainly and re-sequences — it doesn't quietly try again and call it a redesign.

Once the fund exists, its scoreboard tracks five numbers on purpose. It never tracks the size of the fund itself.

The plan also makes one promise ahead of time. If the numbers ever show a plain city tax would do more good for people than this whole fund, the plan says so, publicly, on purpose. Staying quiet about that would break the plan's own rule just as badly as a captured fund would.

What could go wrong

The wall could fail — and if it does, the whole fund stops, no exceptions. A large pot of city money is the biggest target this program will ever build. The plan's own rule is blunt. The wall must keep politicians, big donors, and even the program's own founders from ever controlling the money. That has to be proven three ways: a legal check, a red-team attack on the design, and a test against a hostile government. If it can't be proven, the fund does not launch. This is the plan's master rule. Every other safeguard sits underneath it.

A real fund could still be slowly hollowed out over decades, even with a wall. Alberta built an oil-wealth fund in 1976 with real legal protections, similar in spirit to what's proposed here. Politicians simply cut how much went in — 30% of oil revenue, down to 15%, down to zero by 1987. They also pulled more than $45.8 billion of the fund's own earnings back out over the years, instead of letting it grow. By 2025, that fund was worth $31.9 billion. Norway, which started fourteen years later under a stricter law, is now worth more than $2 trillion. Modeled estimates suggest Alberta's fund could have reached $122 to $164 billion if it had saved like Norway did. That's a model, not a fact about what actually happened. But it shows how much a "protected" fund can still shrink if the rules aren't airtight.

The health-data piece of the plan may simply not be worth what's hoped. The idea that a city's health data could be a major source of fund income is, by the plan's own research, its shakiest piece. The world's most successful public health database earns only a few million pounds a year from research fees, against more than £300 million in donations and grants it has needed just to survive. 23andMe is a real company that held 15 million people's genetic data. It went bankrupt in 2025. Its entire database sold for $305 million — about 5% of what the company was worth at its 2021 peak. The honest read: the hoped-for number here is roughly a hundred times too high, and no real-world example shows health data working as an ongoing money-maker rather than a one-time, heavily discounted sale.

The rulebook this design borrows from has never been tested at this size. Part of the fund's governance design leans on a Nobel-winning framework for how communities can manage shared resources without a boss. That framework's own evidence never covered a group bigger than about 15,000 people. Toronto has roughly 3 million residents — about 200 times more. Whether the same rules hold up at that size is an open question, not a proven fact, and the plan says so.

A voluntary option for older homeowners could turn predatory if it isn't built carefully. One proposed piece of the fund would let older residents choose to share some of their home equity. The reverse-mortgage industry is the exact warning sign here — products sold to older homeowners that have, in real documented cases, led to lost homes and misleading sales pitches. The plan's answer is to require independent, fund-paid advice for every participant, plus a second person's sign-off, before anyone's real home equity is touched.

And underneath everything: none of this exists yet. No fund has been raised. No department, partner, or homeowner has been contacted. Every real step named above still needs its own separate, two-person approval before it moves from paper to practice.

Receipts

Everything above comes from three documents, all still marked DRAFT and not yet formally approved:

ruling that a fund alone can't carry an income floor, and the phased approval stages.

capture wall, the twin ledgers, the scoreboard, and all ten pre-registered kill criteria, argued for and against rather than settled.

source, including 18 separately graded points where credible sources disagree, and 17 honest gaps the research could not fill.

Every number and claim in this page traces back to one of those three files. If a figure above doesn't have a citable source in those files, it isn't in this page either.

There's nothing to sign up for and no money to give — this plan hasn't launched, and it touches no real institution or person yet. The one honest action available right now is to watch for the Shadow Endowment year's first published number: the audited waste-savings figure from whichever city department or partner agrees to try it first. That's the plan's own proposed test of whether any of this is real. Once it publishes, the real question is who checks it.