Fallback Image

A Community and Culture of Action at MMMC 2015

Picture 45 (2)

by Zak Wear, RG member

Resource Generation’s 2015 Making Money Make Change conference brought me back to my home state of Maryland. I was excited to take the week to see my people, rake mom and dad’s leaves, eat, and get to know the people of RG.

Everyone has great ideas and wise words to share at a given conference. MMMC is certainly worthwhile for the purposes of intellectual, professional, activist or philanthropic development. If you’re considering going next year, I’d suggest attending for a much more fundamental purpose: come home to a community that shares confidence, clarity, and vision for a more just and sustainable future. There’s nothing too-cool-for-school about it– just be with us as we embark on the very personal work of bringing that future ever closer.

I couldn’t sleep on the second night at MMMC. Our retreat had a long, pitch-black road that dripped with the warmth of Chesapeake rains. As I ran the road my eyes adjusted and I saw the blonde, rolling fields glowing behind fully silhouetted forest. I know what my mind was doing up at 2am, running this run—it was trying very hard to reject the safety being shared by this group of people, to reject trust and belonging. It is comfortable to not be “enough,” to be incapable, to rest in the nihilism of wealth and class privilege. The impulse is to run away, to seek the familiar safety, to stand outside love and wonder and the spirit of rendering the impossible, possible–and instead rest in the validation by one’s status in the growing socio-economic dominance over the global 99%. To end my run in what the aristocrat in Les Matins du Monde anxiously referred, “the violence,” among the rural woods, and return to the keep. It’s a familiar story.

One peer shared, “I am wealthy and I don’t feel free, I don’t feel safe…” Conscious or not, we are all shouldering an incredible weight and trauma that is the unsustainable fever of globalized, vulture capitalism. In addressing this, I found myself moved by a profoundly compassionate organizational character that holds both this ongoing systemic violence of which we are all a part and a healing, bold culture of action that walks each with their own journeys for restorative justice.

Personally, I respond to that culture of action. Since MMMC I’ve been drafting a 5-year plan that will stretch every skill, resource, and experience I have to the purpose of delivering a new worker and community-owned economy. That vision pending, I’ve re-committed myself to a year-long campaign to deliver rent control to my community. As part of RG, I will be participating in my chapter’s campaign to build sustainable housing with families of color. Every one of these increments are real and they are only possible if we run towards community, rather than away.

In building the foundation of a new economy, in pursuing systemic change, holding a sense of hope and determination is challenging enough to do alone, MMMC is a space where we get to embark on this work together. It’s a space where stories are shared, anxiety is released, and challenge comes in hearts, not darts. It’s a step, not a solution, and I invite you take it.

Related Stories

Fallback Image
|

RG Launches Tax Justice Campaign and Platform!

Dear RG community, Last week the stock market hit record highs–but President Obama still released a budget that would cut Social Security and Medicare by hundreds of billions of dollars.    In this context, on Tax Day, we launched RG’s  new Tax Justice Platform, and a campaign to eliminate a special low tax rate for rich people by taxing Capital Gains and Dividends–profits…

Fallback Image

Why Resource Generation is Committed to Racial Justice

Although racial justice has always been an important part of RG’s analysis, until now we haven’t clearly articulated why. In 2007, the CORE advisory committee set racial justice goals for RG and launched our young people of color with wealth organizing initiative. And in 2009, we hired our first young person of color with wealth…

Fallback Image

New Paradigms: How Mission Investing is Transforming Philanthropy

With the Occupy Wall Street protests ongoing, the movement for re-aligning investments with social change values is more relevant than ever. While corporations essentially own the US government, it is the stockholders—i.e. foundations and the “1%”— who own the corporations.There is a lot of power in this ownership, but not enough people owning up it….

Fallback Image
| | |

Build *movement* electoral power, not donor electoral power

As activity across the country is ramping up for the November 2018 elections and the social movement organizations that many Resource Generation members are in relationship with step up their civic engagement activity, we’ve been getting a lot of questions about how to apply Resource Generation’s values and social justice philanthropy principles to elections.

Fallback Image

Full Circle: RG's first Alumni Retreat

I’m just recently back from a great Alumni RG Retreat! What a wonderful opportunity to get re-engaged! I was active with RG 15 years ago. It’s hard to believe how quickly the time has flown, and not only that I aged out (which happened a few years, ago, and was a big bummer), but also,…

Fallback Image
|

American Dreams

Looking back at 2010, I’ve been thinking a lot about the recent tax cut battle and our role in it as people with wealth. I was inspired by groups like Wealth for the Common Good, organizing the wealthy to speak out against the cuts they would benefit from. I’ve been wondering, too, about the underlying cultural currents that made it possible for policy like this to pass.