A Low Interest Loan for the Puente Human Rights Campus Margi lives in Colorado, she discovered RG a year ago and attended the 2013 MMMC. Margi works as an environmental educator, and her focus on education access stems from an overarching desire to align her money with her values. As a young person with access to…
By Katherine Wolf I joined Springboard Giving Circle (in part) because of a New Year’s resolution. Risk-taking in all the ways – political, social, interpersonal, creative – was going to determine my attitude towards new endeavors and potential opportunities in 2014. Since MMMC, the desire to become more involved with RG had also snowballed into…
By Alok Vaid-Menon of @DarkMatterRage This past month I had the privilege to help fundraise for some movement organizations that I love (including Audre Lorde Project, Queer Detainee Empowerment Project, Streetwise and Safe, Sylvia Rivera Law Project, and FIERCE!) as part of GIVE OUT DAY an annual day of supporting LGBTQ organizations. All of these…
By Jay Saper, Margot Seigle & Andrew Meeker We are involved in a new Resource Generation member-led project called ReGenerative Finance, which formed last fall out of the Making Money Make Change conference. We are a commitment to fundamentally changing the very shape of the economy by intervening at the scale of finance: by shifting…
Special thanks to Mac Liman, who really pushed my thinking on this and also was a superb and frequent editor. One of the first questions we always get asked on the tax team is: why should we fight for higher taxes to go into government funding when the US government is so terrible? After being…
Have you ever wondered about giving circles? What are they? How do they work? How do you start one? Are you in a giving circle and wondering how others are doing it? In these interviews, RG folks share their experiences with and reflections about participating in giving circles. We have interviewed young people with wealth who have…
There were six of us. Katherine Orr, Julia Read, Michelle Rider, Ellie Weiner, Nickerson Hill and myself. We’d formed a group with the expressed purpose of pooling a large amount of money to give away. But why were we doing this? Why was group giving so important to us? Isn’t giving money supposed to be…
Another version of this post originally appeared on the AAPIP blog. It is probably no surprise that there is a long-standing need for funding for organizations that support Asian American and Pacific Islander LGBTQ communities, but I was surprised by just how little funding these organizations get. The numbers tell the beginning of the story:…
“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…
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 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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