By Peter Dreier and Chuck Collins This piece was originally posted on boston.com on December 20th After five weeks, Harvard students just evacuated the tents they had pitched on campus as part of the Occupy Wall Street movement. Their protest helped persuade the university to raise wages and benefits for the college custodians. The students…
“On Saturday at noon,” Tiny said, “please stop wherever you are and light a candle and say a prayer for Homefulness. That’s when we at POOR will be dedicating and blessing the land at 8032 Macarthur Ave.” Tiny, aka Lisa Gray-Garcia’s voice, fierce and scratchy and so familiar after two years of conference calls, pulled…
Often people refer to the Resource Generation “community,” roughly defined as young people with wealth who are committed to social justice and are connected on a national level through the RG network. In the past, I’ve found the use of this word a bit problematic and have been thinking about how we can truly claim…
Reposted from the GIFT Blog.I attended my first workshop on disability justice facilitated by Mia Mingus and Stacey Milbern, two Korean queer women with disabilities, at the United States Social Forum in 2010. Sitting in a room with others wanting to talk about disability and ableism within a social justice framework was like coming home for me….
Taij Moteelall, RG’s former director, shares some reflections on her time with RG below. Reposted from the Power Up Networks Blog. As the Occupy Wall Street phenomenon grows in NYC, spreads throughout the United States and across the globe, I wonder what kind of a world will be rebuilt post-corruption, greed, and injustice that sparked this movement. How…
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…
It’s early wintertime outside. A collection of soaked boots crowd the tiny vestibule. The cat is buried underneath a small hill of coats on the bed. The apartment smells like cayenne and tomatoes, warm broth and buttery onions. Barely eaten containers of hummus, salsa, guacamole and other dips crust slightly at the edges amongst the…
We’re writing with updates from the RG Migrant Justice Solidarity Working Group, recently renamed the Hummingbird Collective. (Much less of a mouthful, right?) This funding project was born out of an idea at last year’s Making Money Make Change, and has grown and developed in ways we couldn’t have imagined when we first sat around a table together…
Several members of the Migrant Justice Solidarity Working Group (now renamed Hummingbird Collective) recently attended a fundraising training at RG’s New York office. The training was facilitated by grassroots fundraising smarties Yasmeen Perez and Emily Nepon, both of whom have been doing grassroots fundraising for over 10 years, and who have done this work professionally for FIERCE and Sylvia Rivera…
Back in April, I received a couple of phone calls from my sister, Sonja, the current family philanthropy organizer at RG, urging me to attend the Creating Change Through Family Philanthropy retreat in Petaluma. I didn’t give it much thought beyond my being busy with food justice conference organizing and questioning if a few days…
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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