Organizational Accountability Practice

Community organizing with wealthy people presents many beautiful challenges.

How are we accountable to poor and working-class organizations? How is our majority poor, working and middle class staff accountable to the base we organize and how is the base accountable to staff? In short, we do this all imperfectly and are always learning and shifting. 

Below are a few of the practices we use to maintain perspectives from and accountability to various communities: 

• We are a multi-class, multiracial organization. Resource Generation was founded by a group of social justice funders led by multi-racial and multi-class teams of people, along with a group of young people with wealth. From its founding, Resource Generation has always had a board with members from poor, working class, and middle class backgrounds.
• We generally maintain a board that is half current constituents and alumni, and half representatives of the broader social justice movement. This includes representatives from our campaign partners, the Popular Democracy, and the Movement for Black Lives.
• It is an organizational priority to recruit, retain, and center the leadership of young people of color with access to wealth in Resource Generation. Because of racialized capitalism and due to white folks disproportionately holding the wealth in this control, we will always ensure that white RG members are committed to wealth redistribution. 
• On the chapter level, many RG chapters collaborate with social justice community foundations and grassroots organizations led by people of color and poor and working class communities. We aim to have every Resource Generation chapter working in partnership and accountable relationships with frontline organizations through long-term collaborative campaign work. 
• Our dues-paying membership is multiracial and multi-class, including advocate members from poor, working class, and middle class backgrounds. 
• We work to compensate labor at a fair living wage, including staff, interns, advisors, consultants, workshop and conference presenters.
• We pay land taxes to indigenous-led organizations everywhere we have staff and wherever we host national retreats and conferences. 
• Our multi-racial and multi-class staff brings perspectives from their experiences in other movement organizations. We have an internal staff anti-oppression leadership team responsible for ensuring our organizational practices reflect our anti-oppression values.

Practicing accountability means working together in cross-class relationships: showing up day after day, listening and learning from mistakes, making repairs and continuing to show up to build collective power each day.