RG Alumni Oona Coy talking about her experience becoming part of the Tracies, a team of major donors who have committed to giving at least $10,000 a year for at least three years to RG. During the first year, the group voted on a name and decided to call themselves The Tracies, in honor of…
dis/abilityabilityablei am able to do somethingi am not able to do somethingclass privilege is an abilityable-bodiedbody is able to do somethingbody is not able to do somethingif i am able to do somethingit takes a lot of things,people,privilegesto make that happenit helps if you’re whiteit helps if you have moneyit helps if you speak Englishit…
I, anna winham, an undergraduate student at Dartmouth and current RG Bay Area intern, recently wrote this piece in The Dartmouth Radical, identifying my struggles to reconcile my politics with my background, my identity with my identity. I worry about how to stay out of “false generosity” territory while still leveraging my class privilege. My pal Paulo tells…
Holly Fetter, an undergraduate student at Stanford and praxis group leader, originally wrote this piece in STATIC, a site for Stanford activists to connect and create.Holly writes of her piece: “This piece was written when I was first coming into my class identity and accompanying consciousness. Though my ideas and actions around class have shifted in the past…
Re-blogged, due to our partnership with Bolder Giving:Elspeth Gilmore, current executive director of RG, writes in Bolder Giving about coming to terms with class privilege and inheritance. At age 33, I’m at last coming into my own about my wealth. I’ve made mistakes. I’ve learned a lot. I’m finally clear that, for me, using my resources to…
On February 20th, Resource Generation members around the country participated in a national day of action to stop “fiscal cliff” cuts to social programs and call for higher taxes on the rich. (You can find information about the impacts of the sequestration cuts in your state here, courtesy of the Coalition on Human Needs.) We submitted more…
For a long time, I thought that as a white, wealthy woman, there was no role for me in working to end racism and economic injustice. I tried doing service provision in low-income communities of color, and the “white savior” dynamics of that work felt disheartening. I was involved in anti-violence and queer organizing on…
Last week, I had the pleasure of spending two days on Bainbridge Island at the beautiful IslandWood retreat center with Resource Generation (RG), a social sector organization that organizes young people with wealth to leverage resources and privilege for social change. I am so grateful to RG’s National Organizer, Nitika Raj, for her invitation not only to this year’s…
Guest blog post from Dr. M. Starita Boyce Ansari from MSB Philanthropy Advisors. Fifty years ago, Americans from community after community came together and committed to a vision for justice and equality. People fought. People died. People transcended the small interests of their own needs, as Blacks, Jews, women, gays and lesbians, took real risks…
I grew up in a middle-class household with two working parents, weekly budgeting, coupon-clipping, and a 30-year mortgage on our small house. My brother and I knew that we had the privilege of an inheritance, but that it came in a different form than money: learning union songs on long car rides to our family’s…
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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