I’m a mid-forties white genderqueer person born and raised in Montreal and raised again in the Mission District in San Francisco. I came from an owning-class Canadian WASP family. I can thank them for good teeth and education and vacation opportunities and also for legacies of silence, repression and anger. When I turned 25 I…
Me (Mike Gast, Co-Director of RG) asking myself a few of the questions I’ve been wanting to answer about my work and vision. Why wait! So why do you do the work that you do? What’s in it for you? I want a better life. I want a life that is full of close, loving…
At the heart of philanthropy is a great contradiction, one that our generation is struggling to resolve. Many philanthropists accumulated their wealth through disruptive innovations, ruthless business practice, or, as Balzac said, “great wealth with no obvious source is some forgotten crime, forgotten because it was done neatly.” Many of the great industrialists whose names…
Howdy! Farhad Ebrahimi from the Chorus Foundation here. I’d like to tell you a little story, if you’ve got a moment. It’s the story of how we moved our cash holdings from a large financial services company (Fidelity Investments) to a local socially progressive bank (Wainwright Bank & Trust Company, now a part of Eastern…
Two RG’ers discuss grassroots fundraising and RG. Re-posted from Theo’s new column at GIFT Exchange, the Grassroots Institute for Fundraising Training’s blog. Greetings! This is my first official post to the GIFT blog and I am grateful and excited to be writing here. In this post, I interview Monica Raye Simpson about her experience with the GIFT…
For a while now I’ve been wanting to share my story with the Resource Generation (RG) community. So much of my experience in RG has been about telling our stories and using it as the foundation for our organizing. So here goes. This is my first attempt to share my story with you all. I…
I am 22 years old. I grew up owning-class, have a trust fund, and I also stand to inherit wealth, some in the form of a family foundation. All of my grandparents were first-generation Americans and grew up in poor or working-class families, with the exception of my maternal grandmother, who I think had more…
Reposted from the Vassar Alumni Newsletter When Zoe Lloyd Foxley graduated from Vassar in 2001, she set out on a course of service to community, first as an elementary school teacher, and then, after earning a Masters from the University of Southern California’s School of Social Work, as a worker at a community mental health…
Here’s a story for all you communication geeks, you appreciators of learning moments, you RG members looking to use your privilege to fight for equity as budget cuts rage across the country. Yesterday we headed out of the Resource Generation office on East 23rd street, poster board signs tucked under our arms, and boarded the…
During the opening plenary at the 2011 Council on Foundations Family Philanthropy Conference, Agnes Gund said (and I’m paraphrasing), “It might not be proper to say, but most of my giving has been motivated by guilt.” Her comment was honest, it was real, and it came from a older women who had clearly done so much…
We hold the liberation of Black and Indigenous people as central to the liberation of all people. We know that attempted genocide and chattel slavery created the initial foundation for massive wealth disparity in the U.S. and that the continued exploitation and criminalization of those communities upholds the racial wealth divide. We believe that well-resourced Black and Native Left organizing is a critical part of how we all get more free.
We believe social justice movements need to be led by communities most directly impacted by injustice. As young people with access to wealth, we choose to undermine the pattern of funders dictating the work and instead choose to follow the leadership of transformative social justice movements and communities, led by people who are: poor, working-class, Black, Indigenous, of color, women, disabled, queer and trans.
We work towards eradicating classism and towards wholeness. We believe that all classes and communities are interconnected and interdependent and that classism has been used to wedge and divide us. We know that much is lost communally in the name of wealth accumulation and that people with wealth have a lot to gain from returning wealth to the collective and transforming our economy. We know that the current economic system is untenable, and we work to build a solidarity economy.
We believe that people ages 18–35, with wealth and class privilege, are at a pivotal stage in life to make a lifelong commitment to social movements. Youth movements and organizing are, and have been bold and visionary. We are building on the legacy of those who came before us, and we are working for a better world for those who will come after. Young people with access to wealth and class privilege need to be organized as protagonists—actively engaging in and seeking out ways that leverage and redistribute our access to power and resources within our control, and redirect resources and power within the networks and institutions we are connected to. We are committed to resisting ageist norms of people acquiring power and holding on to it and constantly doing leadership development to bring about new leadership.
We believe personal and structural change are deeply connected, and every person has the ability to heal and grow. We are committed to working towards transforming ourselves, our organizations, our communities, and society as a whole through our work. We bring our full selves, our experiences, our stake, and our strategic thinking to build cross-class relationships in working for a just and livable world.
We believe in collective and individual growth, groundedness and interdependence. We know that tensions will arise, and we will approach these with curiosity on behalf of our personal and collective wants. We will work to see tensions as generative rather than destructive and finite. We welcome principled disagreement and will strive to keep conflict generative in service of our broader goals and mission.
We believe in the power of collaboration across class, race, and movements. We know that our vision depends on our relationships with communities, organizations and people across our movement ecosystem, with whom we share similarities and differences. Through our organizing work we also seek ways to invite our families, communities, and other people with access to wealth to this work.
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