These policies will widen the already gaping wealth divide.

As young people with wealth and privilege, what role can we play to challenge policies that create further inequality, policies that also increase our own wealth and privilege?

Resource Generation and Wealth for the Common Good are getting ready to launch a joint tax campaign in early 2011 that will grapple with these very questions.

In this context, I thought it would be useful to repost this article by Chuck Collins about the tax deal and the work ahead:

Obama Tax Deal Further Concentrates Wealth and Power: Stop the Death Spiral to Plutocracy

by Chuck Collins, Originally posted at Common Dreams, December 9, 2010

In 2010, an essential moral test of a public policy choice is: Does it further concentrate wealth and power in the hands of a few?

Or does it disperse concentrated wealth and power and strengthen possibilities for a democratic society with greater equality, improved health and well-being, shared prosperity and ecological sustainability?

Does it move us toward Plutocracy or Peace and Plenty?

Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis said, “We can have democracy or concentrated wealth. But we cannot have both.”

By the Brandeis Test, President Obama’s “Tax Compromise” fails. By extending the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy and instituting a significantly weakened estate tax, more wealth will flow into the hands of the richest one percent and within that to richest one-tenth of one percent.

Most of us are aware of President Obama’s willingness to trade away his campaign promise to let the tax cuts for high income households expire. This will cost $60 billion next year and an estimated $700 billion if it is permanently extended.

But Obama also backed away from his position on the federal estate tax, which was to freeze it at 2009 levels (wealth exempted to $3.5 million, 45 percent rate). He now supports the Kyl-Lincoln amendment which would raise the exemption to $5 million ($10 million for a couple) and drop the rate to 35 percent. The cost difference between these two measures is at least $100 billion over ten years.

For the last generation, this richest one percent, with some admirable exceptions, has been using its considerable wealth and clout to push for public policy changes that have further concentrated wealth.

We are now in what I could characterize as “Death Spiral To Plutocracy.” As wealth concentrates, a hyper-organized segment of this wealth-holder class uses its wealth, privilege and power to change the rules of the economy to further concentrate wealth and privilege.

The logical progression of these policies is a society governed by wealth, a modern high-tech version of the Gilded Age of 1900.

For thirty years, liberal Presidents and Democratic Congress members have cut deals with a growing a bi-partisan (mostly Republican Party) Pro-Plutocracy faction. We’ve won victories for working families family leave, increased minimum wage, expanded health care, middle class tax cuts but the price has always been very expensive tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations. Under Clinton and Bush II, you couldn’t get anything faintly progressive done without a big bone to the wealthy or corporate class ­another capital gains tax cut or corporate loophole.

Such compromises have been central to the Obama political strategy: To get a stimulus package to save the economy, Congress allocates a third of $780 billion for tax breaks to corporations (and still didn’t get one GOP vote).

To get broader health care coverage for the uninsured, lawmakers surrender the “public option” that would have forced competition and cut into the power and profits of the health industry cartel.

To get a Consumer Financial Protection Bureau included in the June 2010 financial reform bill, lawmakers allow Wall Street to keep its risky casino operation in place ­laying the groundwork for future bubbles, meltdowns and bailouts.

This is a very costly strategy. It diverts trillions of dollars from the Treasury that could be used for long overdue investments in infrastructure, education, energy independence things that could truly boost the real economy. But worse, it sets up future political battles where the very wealthy and powerful corporations continue to have most of the ammo. In the post “Citizens United” campaign finance environment, this is premeditated surrender.

There are only a few ways to intervene to prevent the “Death Spiral to Plutocracy” and reverse course. They all require an engaged citizenry to clearly say: “We want an economy that serves everyone, not just the wealthy.”

The first intervention is through progressive income, wealth and estate taxes. We urgently need to reinstitute a progressive estate tax. Instead of cutting a deal to institute the Republican estate tax proposal that greatly weakens the law, Congress should press for the Responsible Estate Tax Act which would chip away at concentrated wealth.

The second is through robust campaign finance reform that closes the nexus between wealth and political power. Anything that puts a speed bump between wealth and political influence helps slow the Death Spiral.

The third is to mobilize the silent faction of the wealthy elites that actually see their stake in the common good. Not everyone in the wealth-holding class are actively lobbying to protect their power and privilege. We need a progressive counter-weight to organized defenders of power and privilege. The Wealth for the Common Good network is an inspiring start with several thousand business leaders and wealthy individuals advocating for policies to broaden prosperity and opportunity. They can counter the deep mythology around wealth creation and deservedness that often justify tax cuts for the wealthy and support the positions of engaged citizens.

Senator Bernard Sanders is proposing a filibuster against the tax cuts and he plans to read hundreds of documents about the dangers of extreme inequality in the U.S. Let’s all take a similar stand in our own lives and urge our elected officials to do the same.

If you’re lucky enough to know that you’ll have some money coming your way from parents or grandparents, consider talking to them about it in advance. Many families decide to pass money on to their kids and grandkids while they’re still living, not only to avoid estate taxes, but also so they can talk about how they want the money spent and give some of it away together. It might sound like as much of a challenge as deciding whether to vacation in Rome or Turks & Caicos, but navigating these kinds of intergenerational wealth transfers can be tricky, and it is a situation faced by a significant chunk of the population. The Government Accountability Office estimates that, on average, the wealthiest 10 percent of baby boomers own $3.2 million worth of assets—much of which they intend to eventually pass on to their kids.*

The group Resource Generation helps young people of wealth figure out how to wield it responsibly. Twenty-nine-year-old Michael Gast turned to the group to help him decide how to handle money he received as a gift from his grandmother. He had $40,000 left in the trust after paying for college and knew he wanted to give part of it away to social justice causes. “I wanted to align my relationship with that money to the values in the rest of my life—the values of economic justice and sharing resources—and I was really struggling with how to do that,” he says. At a workshop hosted by Resource Generation, he learned how to create a giving plan that prioritized his values. A former educator, he now works fulltime for Resource Generation as a family philanthropy coordinator in Seattle. [Update: Make that RG Co-Director!]

Later, after Michael’s grandmother passed away, he inherited an additional $50,000 and gives away 10 percent a year to charities. [Update: Mike has now given away 50% of that inheritance.] He’s now talking with his brother, sister, cousins, parents, and other family members about coordinating their gifts through matching donations to further leverage the power of that inheritance. “I’m really inspired to continue developing these conversations with my family on how we could move these resources and make plans and share them with each other,” he says.

*Government Accountability Office, “Baby Boom Generation,” (GAO-06-718, July 2006), 8.

For more info on the book, visit www.generationearn.com.

But then stuff like James Spader in Pretty in Pink just cracks me up. (Someone even made a montage!) And I used to listen to “Rich Girl” by Hall and Oates before I’d go talk about Classified sometimes, just as a reminder not to take myself too seriously. (I always thought there was more than a little truth to the line, “She’s a rich girl and she’s going too far ‘cause she knows it don’t matter anyway,” in light of some of the “brave” things I’ve done.)

Anyway, even though the seventh season of Gilmore Girls is agreed by most to be a travesty, the episode I was watching includes a fascinating scene between Rory and her boyfriend Logan in which he calls her out for being a secret rich kid. A little background info to set the scene: Rory, a college student and aspiring journalist, has just given Logan an article she wrote about a party he took her to last night.

Here’s my favorite part of the dialogue:

LOGAN: What? I’m a rich trust-fund kid. I’m not ashamed of it.

RORY: No and you shouldn’t be. That’s not what I meant. I mean, the point, or the point I was trying to make, was that people use connections to get ahead.

LOGAN: Give me a break. You act like making connections is something nefarious. It’s just people meeting people.

RORY: Well, it’s certain people meeting certain people. It’s not like anyone’s meeting Joe bus driver.

LOGAN: And you’re Joe bus driver?

RORY: Well, no, but…

LOGAN: Exactly. I mean where do you get off acting all morally superior?

RORY: That is not what I intended to say at all.

LOGAN: You clearly think you are. Why? Because you read Ironweed? ‘Cause you saw Norma Rae?

RORY: Logan…

LOGAN: Wake up Rory. Whether you like it or not, you’re one of us. You went to prep school. You go to Yale. Your grandparents are building a whole damn astronomy building in your name.

RORY: That is different, okay? It’s not like I live off a $5-million trust fund my parents set up for me.

Is it really that different, Rory? Of course, I agree with her critique about networking. Class privilege is about the access and connections, not just the cash. But what Logan is pointing out is so true: if Rory really wants to make this critique effectively, she’ll need to speak from a more honest position that acknowledges her own privilege. (Well, maybe I’m putting some of those words in Logan’s mouth. I’m not sure he actually wants Rory to make a critique at all. Have I mentioned that I always preferred Jess?)

I always found the whole premise of this show super-interesting in the way it both portrays and glosses over the inner-workings of class privilege. Rory’s mother, Loreli, grew up in a wealthy Connecticut family, but then ran away from home when she got pregnant at 16. She built a life for herself as a single mother in a small town, working her way up from a job as a hotel maid to eventually running her own inn. The show often celebrates how Loreli “made it” on her own, as if she were starting from the same place as the other maids at the hotel. As if her race and class privilege did not factor in at all to why the hotel’s owner decided to take her under her wing and train her.

Most tellingly, the show begins when Loreli wants to send Rory to private school, but can’t afford it. So she returns to the wealthy world of her parents to get their help and pass her privilege on to the next generation. A pretty good demonstration of how class and race privilege come with you no matter where you go, and how, for inheritors, you can never really give it all away. Of course, I could write a whole other post about this show’s depictions of the strings wealthy families often attach to requests for help. I have a feeling some of you out there know what I mean…

I’ve been wanting to write this post for a while. Capture my thoughts and share with my community as I set off on this new adventure.

So the first thing I want to tell you is that I never wanted to be an executive director. Never. You know why? Cause it always looked like a setup. One person. All the responsibility. Ready to lead the organization, come up with the genius strategy, work the longest hours, fundraise, supervise, support, challenge, brilliant speaker, writer and charismatic too. It all seemed like too much. I have seen so many folks get burnt to a crisp from the executive director position. It didn’t look good.

And yet I’m stepping up. I’m doing it. Willingly.

One of the major reasons is that I am so excited to work with Elspeth, my co-director. She is brilliant. Really. An incredible organizer. Smart, thoughtful, committed…and she connects the work of RG with social change movements and vision like few folks I know. I am so thankful to be doing this with her.

I also think it is a great chance to do things differently. (I’m sure you’re rolling your eyes at this point. I know. Everyone says they are going to do things differently.) I think a lot of the burnout and the long-hours and the superhero expectations on EDs come from wealthy folks, particularly wealthy donors (like myself) and foundations. I think we put a lot of pressure on organizations to look like they have figured it all out, have it all under control, know exactly what to do, and that they are running things smoothly and effectively all the time. Despite our best intentions, I think we wealthy folks can be real perfectionists and control freaks. Yup. Myself included.

And yet, I don’t think that’s what anyone, wealthy or not, really wants or thinks is best. I think so many of us are ready to let the pretense go and get involved in the messy work of organizing, movement building and social change. In fact, I know that’s just what many people with wealth have done for generations. From Harry Belafonte to Julius Rosenwald to Tracy Hewat, there are so many inspiring examples of wealthy folks dedicating their lives to the imperfect, unpredictable, wondrous work of changing the world for the better.

I’m down! Let’s do it together! I love the idea that I can be a young director, sharing my thoughts, and challenging myself and my wealthy communities to let go of our perfectionist and controlling tendancies…for ourselves and for all our friends, colleagues and partners from other class backgrounds.

I think we’re ready. I see more and more young people of all backgrounds openly sharing our mistakes, challenges and mess-ups. I think it’s one of the gifts of social media that we are all sharing a lot more about how hard it really is to figure out our lives, run an organization, start a movement, or get dressed in the morning.

In that spirit, I will now share with you some of my intentions and commitments for my time as Co-Director:

• Enjoy myself (with singing, dancing, food and friends).
• Think big. Vision long-term. Be bold.
• Ask for help. (All the time, every day).
• Share my struggles and questions. Sometimes even the embarrassing ones.
• Take risks. Big ones.
• Make mistakes. Big ones.
• Celebrate victories (with dancing and party hats and youtube videos).
• Reflect on my big mistakes and learn from them. Until I do them again.
• Don’t take myself too seriously.
• Take myself and my work seriously.
• Try new things.
• Listen. (And tell people when I’m not listening.)
• Learn all the time.
• Change my mind.

I am writing this to be one more young director trying to do things differently—and I need your help to make this list a reality. Hold me too it! Ask me what big mistake I made this week. Tell me about your victories—let’s celebrate them together. Help me change my mind.

I want to do this for myself, for Elspeth who has to work (and put up) with me, and for all my wealthy folks who really want to be beautifully imperfect alongside everyone else.

Much love,
Mike

Farhad is a man of many talents...

By Dev Aujla

A shuttle picked us up from the train in Chappaqua, NY. The driver was intent on getting us to the retreat center, racing through several small upper NY townships a tad too fast. It was the opening of the Creating Change Through Family Philanthropy Retreat run by Resource Generation, and to the driver it was obviously not to be missed. Along the empty tree-lined streets, we passed only one solitary figure trundling along the edge of the half-paved road. That brief glimpse was my introduction to Farhad. He is a musician, a road biker, a guy from Boston and someone that is transforming his foundation into an organization that not only funds good but invests in it.

Once he caught up, I got to chat with Farhad and have a candid conversation about what he does, how he does it and where he is going.

Dev: So tell me about the Chorus Foundation and what you are up to?

Farhad: The mission of the Chorus Foundation is to help consumers make the right choices to reduce their environmental footprint. We define consumers flexibly as anything from an individual, to a household, to a small business, all the way up to institutions and their procurement policies.

We tend to do project-specific grants. We do some grants that will help people’s operating costs, but usually it’s for a specific thing. And maybe that thing will happen over several years, and we’ll give each year a certain amount. But it’s all based on a specific project with a measurable outcome.

Dev: Tell me about your investments. How have they done?

Farhad: For MRI stuff [Mission Related Investing—read more here], I think we have about 30% of the endowment either invested in or set aside to be on-call for things that we would identify as MRI. Two investments make up that percentage of the endowment. Both of them actually have to do with energy efficiency and buildings. One of them was a PRI [Program-Related Investment] thing, a below-market deal that could have been a grant, but we decided to do it this way. It is trying to innovate the scaling up of an energy efficiency program for a whole city. The other deal is a top notch real estate fund that has a huge emphasis on energy efficiency. They don’t market themselves as green or anything, that’s just what they do as part of their financial bottom line, but they’re also very excited that what they’re doing is good for the planet.

Dev: So why is realigning your investments to be in line with your mission important for you?

Farhad: Part of the philosophy with Chorus is that we intend to spend everything down, and it’s going to sunset. But we’re obviously not going to do everything in one year. We’re going to give a certain amount, more than just what’s tax efficient. But since not all of it is being given, I’d really like to have the rest of the money still doing good work. We’re moving from doing negative screens to wanting to do positive screens, and then from there to investment opportunities. It’s like, let’s take our cash and put it in a bank that’s doing things in the community that we feel good about. We can certainly do some of the things that are no-brainers—moving the cash is the next objective that we have as an organization. But trying to find more MRI [Mission Related Investing] stuff—I think it’s a new field. So it’s not like there’s necessarily enough opportunities that we could put everything in.

Dev: How are your investments actually making a difference in the world?

Farhad: I think that what you can do as a flexible foundation—both with grants and investments—is that you’re essentially breaking new ground. You’re trying to do pilot programs. You’re doing things that are risky. I mean, we were talking about energy efficiency stuff, and people can’t figure out how to scale it up in the way that everyone wants to. So I think that one thing foundations can do is sort of philosophically similar to what venture capitalists can do: there’s something that you think can become a big thing, but it needs help at the beginning. Someone’s got to come in with the resources and give a push to create momentum. Once people figure out how to scale up energy efficiency, the rest of it—the job generation, the environmental issues—will all be moved forward, once we figure out how to get people to want to have this work done on their homes.

Dev: Are you able to find investments where you don’t have to sacrifice financial performance for social good?

Farhad: It’s difficult to say, the foundation being only three years old and having gone through a couple of years of economic collapse. A real estate fund emphasizing energy efficiency is not a super-revolutionary thing, but it’s still a more popular thing now. The newness combined with the economy makes it hard to judge how we might actually be doing. But to me, energy efficiency remains at its core a really good investment. Lending to people to do work [on their homes to make them more energy efficient]—you know they’re going to be able to pay those loans back because of all the utilities savings. So I think that we should be able to continue to find things like that, that will make sense as investments. There won’t be that much of a compromise, if at all.

Dev: So do you find there is more being talked about today in relation to MRI?

Farhad: Definitely. There’s more being talked about, and I see a lot more interest in it at conferences. I mean, if you look at Confluence Philanthropy, and Dana Lanza—I’ve seen her make presentations at a few different conferences, and it always seems like the interest level is high, and it gets higher and higher every time she does it. It’s really exciting to see from the side of the foundations; there’s more and more interest there.

Dev: How has Resource Generation helped you move your Mission Related Investments forward?

Farhad: One thing is that it’s gotten me to events where people like Dana are presenting. And it was funny, Dana and I were joking for a while, I’d see her a couple times of year. We would joke, she’d be like, “How’s it going with MRI stuff?” And when you see someone a few times a year, it’s like, okay, I’ve got to do this now. And so I invited her to come and talk to the Chorus Foundation board, along with David Wood from Initiative for Responsible Investment. Having RG make it a visible thing—it seems like a priority for them to have Dana always be here at these kinds of events, and thus it’s always on my mind.

Dev: So tell me where you’re going? What is the overall goal?

Farhad: If we can do 100% MRI, that would be awesome. It would be putting more of our resources towards our mission that I feel very passionate about. We have a board that’s very interested and supportive, and has a lot of investment expertise. Most boards meet with resistance. They’re like, “We want to do this, but we don’t want to call it that,” or, “We’re going to lose money,” or someone had a bad experience once and they never want to do it again. Whereas we are all like, “Yes, we want to do this.” We don’t know how quickly we can do something so ambitious, but we want to do all the things we can do this year, and start doing them right away. Like move the cash to a community bank, things that we can get done in the next couple of months easily. I would say that in 10 years we should be able to do 100%. Sometimes it feels bold saying it, but think of what you can do with 10 years. You can learn a lot. The whole environment of these investments will be changing; there will be more of those opportunities out there.

Dev: Have you found peers that have similar goals and that are moving towards MRI through Resource Generation?

Farhad: Definitely. I think that Jason Franklin [as a chair of the board's Finance and Investment Committee at North Star Fund] and I both have 100% MRI as our goals. And so that was cool. I thought I’d say something, and it’d sound like a bold plan but Jason is saying it too, and that’s awesome. Hopefully there are more people in the group who will go for that, too. Even if it’s not 100%, every little change is a change for the better. To get excited by other people and get other people excited is important.

“Freedom is what you do with what’s been done to you.” – Jean-Paul Sartre

There’s a new book about freedom. It’s called Freedom. It’s not a political book. It’s a novel, written by Jonathan Franzen, who last month’s Time magazine cover proclaimed to be the “Great American Novelist.” (Who knew that there were still novels? Let alone novelists? Let alone great ones? But that’s another entry for another forum for another day…) I have not read the book – novel, sorry. Nor do I plan to. My literary ADD requires that my reading diet consist almost exclusively of nonfiction (a societal problem Franzen speaks of in the Time piece). But I did enjoy the cover article very much, finding the portion of its discussion of freedom, Freedom the idea, Freedom the ideal, Freedom the bumper-sticker phrase, to be particularly poignant for the RG community. For who has more freedom than the financially privileged? The freedom to choose what to do and what not to do, how to do it, and when. The freedom to cultivate a life of one’s own choosing.

“It seemed to me,” Franzen tells article author Lev Grossman, “that if we were going to be elevating freedom to the defining principle of what we’re about as a culture and a nation, we ought to take a careful look what freedom in practice brings.”

From Rage Against The Machine to the Tea Party to Mel Gibson’s William Wallace, the one thing we all want is freedom. Or more freedom. Or as much freedom as possible. But there’s little societal discourse on what one should do when they have that freedom.

“The weird thing about the freedom of Freedom,” Grossman notes of the characters in Franzen’s new novel, “is that what it doesn’t bring is happiness.” Ironically, freedom has its limitations. “For Franzen’s characters,” continues Grossman, “too much freedom is an empty, dangerous, entropic thing.”

Freedom can be debilitating. Resulting in a sort-of enervation that is the exact opposite of effective activism. There is an ever-present “agony of being connected to everything in the universe,” as the subtitle of Andrew Boyd’s book (not a novel, though filled with many novel ideas) Daily Afflictions suggests. To amend this slightly for the financially privileged, there is an agony of benefiting from the systemic everything in society. And this reality can be a debilitating, enervating, entropy-destined one to (attempt to) negotiate.

But does it always have to be so agony-inducing? Not according to Grossman, who suggests that “there is something beyond freedom that people need: work, love, belief in something, commitment to something.” (I could put in a pitch to become an official member of the RG community here, but I won’t.)

I’ve always been struck by the relationship between freedom and responsibility. How the more freedom one has, the more responsibility they need to use in conjunction with that freedom. And that the less freedom one has, the less responsible they are for all those areas of their life where they are not (as) free to cultivate as they might wish. (Ironically, those with the most freedom, who often use the least amount of responsibility in its cultivation, seem to talk/complain endlessly about the lack of responsibility used by those with the least amount of freedom in our society.)

So while everyone seems to want freedom, the correlative responsibility that goes along with that privilege isn’t quite as popular. This has been demonstrated several times by various societally-enhancing or detracting moments, including, not most notably, the wah-guitar inspired chorus to 1990s pop music hippie-worshipping sensation The Soup Dragon’s, hit “I’m Free”:

I’m free
To do what I want
Any old time

A nice notion, to be sure. But the unfortunate thing about one’s freedom is that it affects everyone around you. One person’s freedom is another person’s problem. And ignoring this interconnection can only get one so far. After all, “no one is freer than a person with no moral beliefs,” notes Grossman. Again, freedom has its limitations.

But, if freedom isn’t a sufficient enough route to happiness, either of the personal or societal variety, than what’s a wannabe-responsibly-privileged person to do?

Maybe we’re never truly as free as we are when we’re being responsible, or at least intentionally attempting to be responsible, with our freedoms, with our privileges. “It’s what you do with freedom,” Grossman suggests, “what you give it up for – that matters.”

A point that is reflected in Boyd’s Daily Afflictions. “Being happy requires the rarest of things: to lose yourself in a task, to squander yourself for a purpose, to surrender to love.”

Or, as John Mason Brown suggests, “The only true happiness comes from squandering ourselves for a purpose.”

This seems fairly counterintuitive. We live in a nation of hoarders, encouraged to save it for a rainy day, a societal landscape dotted with storage facilities and closet organizers. In many ways, there is nothing scarier than squandering ourselves, even if it is for a purpose.

But this idea of squandering seems especially pertinent for the RG community, as we work collectively (and individually) to leverage our privilege for social change, to most effectively squander ourselves for our purpose/s.

What we willingly give up our freedom for defines who we are, as individual people, as a community, and as a society.

In the end, “money and fame are mediums to be used, like paint or steel or ideas,” notes Santa Fe artist Zane Fischer.

Squander away …

Over the last few years, as anti-capitalism has become a part of my politics, I have started to think about what to do with this money and how to approach it. My first reaction to learning how much money I would be inheriting was to feel really ashamed and not talk about it with anyone. Then a friend told me that she was in a similar situation, and we started talking about inheriting money, giving away money, and how to do that. She has been really important to me in this whole process, as someone to process, think, and strategize with. I hope to be organizing with her someday! Last summer, I also got into reading the blog Enough. It was so exciting to see a whole world of possibilities, ways people interacted with money, and different ways of living anti-capitalist politics. My partner at the time and I talked a lot about class and money that summer. More than anything, this was the emotional work of trying to understand my family’s history and growing in my own politics and relationship to myself, my family, and money. It’s hard now to separate what happened when, but through the summer and fall I came to a clearer understanding of what I believed. I knew that I did not believe in capitalism, and more and more it became clear that that meant I didn’t want to keep the money.

There has been a lot of distance between not wanting to keep it and letting it go, which is a process I have only just started. Part of that has been strengthening my political awareness through reading and talking with other young people with wealth who I had met in workshops or was organizing with. But a lot of it was internal emotional work. I think that a lot of what allowed me to believe I needed to keep the money was a deep doubt in my self-worth and ability to take care of myself. Believing that I might not be able to provide for myself was a big part of being raised as a white woman in an owning-class family. This was true even though I have received an elite education at all levels and many opportunities that have made it easy for me to get jobs. The feeling of not being capable can be hard to excavate because it is wrapped up in a lot of pain about sexism and heterosexism. The strong and wonderful womyn in my life raised me to believe that I could take care of myself and did not need a man to make that happen. But I saw these same womyn always connected to men, and often in financially abuse relationships with men. Coming to identify as queer meant a sense of power in regards to being able to choose partners who I could equally share power with. But it did not get rid of my sense of being incompetent.

Last winter, I started to realize this connection. It was probably the most intentional emotional process that I have been through to decide to see myself as competent. Having a personal sense of being competent had not been enough motivation to change my understanding of myself. But if it was going to keep me from giving away money, I had to get rid of it, gosh darn it! So I am working on it. I feel proud of how far I have come in feeling competent. I know that all of this, of course, is connected to messages I got from family, friends, and teachers about my class and whiteness and the power this gave me. I am working to come to a sense of brilliance, beauty, and power that is not based in race or class but in my inherent goodness. I don’t mean that I will get rid of these messages and how they affected me, because I’m still getting them and they’re very much a part of my identity, but I want to try and base my sense of self-worth in something else, and something that tells me that I don’t need to keep money that other people need in order to be sustained.

There was also a lot of what I see as spiritual work involved in shifting my politics and my practices. To feel like I didn’t need the money (which I absolutely don’t, as I am sure is clear to anyone who is not me and reading this, but this has been my journey to understand that), I had to have a deep sense of community as my main source of stability and security. I am working to feel as loved and as in community as I am. I love giving my energy to building community with my dear ones where I am and the ones I am far away from. I am learning to be open to receiving from this community, and opening myself to knowing I will be taken care of by them. Hoarding money is tied to me to a sense of individualism and fear—like, I never know what will happen, I better keep this because if I don’t, no one will look after me! Yes, I don’t know what will happen at all. And yes, money does provide a serious cushion and protection for a lot of things. (And, no matter what I do with inherited wealth, I still come from a wealthy family that can provide help in all kinds of hard circumstances.) But I have to remind myself—there is a lot that money just can’t protect me from, I’m gonna get hurt, and if I think the money is protecting me from interpersonal hurt, I gotta just accept the hurt and find other ways to help me get through it. Money doesn’t protect me or people I love from abusive relationships, from death or terminal illness (though it sure does help keep us in healthy shape), from loss of friendships or relationships, from bad feelings about myself, from depression and other kinds of mental and emotional hurt. This is all complicated because it surely does help with those things, and it can make them a lot easier. But the idea I am trying to lose is that I will be safe if hoard money.

So I try to cultivate in myself appreciation of community and a sense of abundance. I am surrounded by my community—with close ties with my immediate and extended families, with friends of all ages, with different faith communities. Abundance is a reality in my life and also a way of seeing the world that makes it easier to receive and give freely. I read a wonderful speech yesterday by U.S. Rep. Keith Ellison in which he talks about abundance and the story of the loaves and fishes. He says of the disciples who said there was not enough to go around, “Or maybe what happened is that the disciples’ perception of scarcity was misinformed and actually there was more than they understood there to be. Maybe there was abundance. Maybe there was radical abundance, though they saw scarcity.” And then he goes on to say, “There is enough, everybody! There’s enough for you. There’s enough for me. We don’t have to throw anybody under the bus. We don’t have to chase anybody out the door. We don’t have to say who doesn’t belong and who’s not included. There is enough!” I love that! It makes my soul calm down if I say there is enough, there is enough, and think in terms of abundance instead of scarcity, and pay enough attention to feel the abundance present in my life.

The other spiritual work I have been doing is about my belief that nobody should have this much money, and also opening my heart to feeling connected to the injustice of wealth distribution in the country and world. I was raised to distance myself and my access to resources from the realities of injustice and poverty. But of course they’re as connected as two sides of a coin. The times when I’ve beat myself up and felt that this injustice is my fault have been parts of my journey, but they haven’t been times of me being active—guilt is pretty paralyzing. But if I can leave my heart open to how having resources is connected to not having resources, my sense of urgency (in the positive way, not like panic) is a lot stronger and more useful.

So I haven’t said what I’ve actually done with this thinking and learning. I started last summer (of 2010) planning to give away all the money by the end of the summer. It turned out that wasn’t a really reasonable goal emotionally or practically. There were too many conversations I had to have. I was waking up with panic attacks feeling inadequate because I thought I couldn’t do it. So I adjusted my goal. I talked to both my parents and a few friends and a few really really wonderful wise “young elders” (young people with wealth who were thinking about the same things). After I talked with Karen Pittleman, I came up with a plan to give $100,000 to a community and activist-led foundation. After talking with her this felt a lot more doable than giving smaller amounts to individual organizations. I was never going to give much of it away if I did that, I felt like. Also, it felt good to just let go of the money and let people who were really thoughtful and experienced and involved decide where it should be going. If part of what I was trying to do was let go of owning-class control of resources, that felt like one way to do it. (And I certainly don’t think that that—or any of this of course!—is the only way to do it. It just felt right for me.) It felt great—like breathing out, letting go, letting money find its way back to the communities it was stolen from. I chose a foundation that gives to organizing in the Appalachian region, where the steel industry had a big impact.

And after that I haven’t done much since. The week after I gave the money, I moved to Mexico for the year to teach. I don’t want to put everything on hold for the entire nine months, but I am giving it a bit of a rest for now in terms of acting on giving money away. The emotional impact of it on people in my family has to settle—and who am I kidding, probably for me too—so that they can feel I am taking good care of myself and not acting rashly. I still plan to give all or most of the money away, and I am trying to figure out what I think about saving some part of it for graduate school for teaching or medical emergencies or possibly buying a house some day. Also I don’t know what I think about saving in general—will I want to save for retirement? Or will I want to give money to where it can be useful now, and trust that others will take care of me when I can’t take care of myself? (There was a great interview about this on Enough with Jason Lydon.) I’m not sure. So I’m trying to open myself to learning and to receiving.

For me, giving away money isn’t organizing. Organizing is organizing. Giving away money is just something that I do so that, literally, my money is where my mouth is. It feels important to me to be reaching out to, getting support from, and supporting other people with wealth in working for moving money, and I want to be organizing with other people with wealth as well, people of all ages. And of course, cross-class coalition building is so important. Groups of people with wealth need to be accountable to working-class and poor people. So those are all things I’m working on as I build my life, and as I let go and let my life take me places. That’s what’s going on with me.

Close to three years ago, I stumbled into the organizing world for what was originally supposed to be a getaway in West Virginia for a conference called ‘Leveraging Privilege for Social Change’. I was expecting a week away from email, time commitments and speakers. What I left with was a whole new outlook on what privilege meant and an understanding of the importance of peer-organizing.

I realized that ‘leveraging privilege for social change’ is much more broadly applicable and reaches beyond the typical domains of wealth and class that often come to mind. We all have communities of which we are a part and we all have privileges that only we have permission to speak about. Our privilege may lie in our relationships, our time, our energy or it may be our skills, abilities or resources, regardless we often need a little help to put them to use. We need a peer network to support us, to help us realize that not only do we have something to give, but that it is possible to make a difference.

I recently met with Kyle Thiermann who embodies just this. Kyle is a professional surfer from Santa Cruz and he decided to mobilize his community — disengaged surfers. After a trip to Chile, Kyle learned that a proposed coal power plant, funded by the Bank of America, was going to ruin the surf breaks and local culture. He began to mobilize his community, to shoot videos and to advocate in telling people to move their money from the Bank of America to local banks. With his enthusiasm, the campaign grew; this was Kyle’s community, this was his privilege. As a direct result of his organizing, he has been able to document that over $110 million dollars of lending power that has been moved from the bank. This is the power of organizing.

It has been amazing to see firsthand the similarities between the organizing that Kyle has done and the organizing done when more classic understandings of privilege are at play. Upon returning from West Virginia, I became involved with Resource Generation, an organization that helps people leverage their financial privilege for social change. Resource Generation works with young people with wealth to help them give more, give smarter and to encourage them to move their investments towards mission and social-related investing. The principals and in this case, even the results such as moving money from big banks to local banks, remained the same.

The results and methods of such organizing are the same because the inherent power of this organizing can be reduced to a simple idea — friends. Just like everyone else, I listen to my friends because they understand me be it the multitude on Facebook or my few old college roommates. I have their ear and they have mine. It is this permission to speak that peer networks and peer organizing relies on — and it works. The power of creating these networks specific to your own group of friends is up to you. So ask yourself… “What is my privilege? What resources or skills do I have that can be leveraged for social change and how can I enable my friends to realize and act in the same way?”

It is by answering these questions, together, with our friends, that we can make a difference and, fortunately, our friends are probably close by.

Dev Aujla is the Founder and Executive Director of DreamNow

Courtesy of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation / Diane Bondareff

Lately some big names beyond just our Resource Generation community have been pushing the idea of giving. Warren Buffett with Bill and Melinda Gates have been, “driving to get the super-rich, starting with the Forbes list of the 400 wealthiest Americans, to pledge at least 50% of their net worth to charity during their lifetimes or at death.”

You have to have respect for the donor-organizing skills demonstrated by Buffett and the Gates family with the giving pledge (http://givingpledge.org/) they organized.  However, a lot of the advice they’re offering isn’t too different from what we talk about at RG. Be thoughtful, but also don’t be afraid to dig in and figure it out. Be bold, give now, take action.

(In fact, those skills and similarities are no coincidence. Bill and Melinda Gates were inspired by our partners at Bolder Giving. Look out for an upcoming blog post telling the story.)

Those taking the pledge have plenty of concerns: “What does going public with big gifts do to the peace in your life? Won’t pleas from charities be unending? How do you deal with giving internationally, which too often seems like throwing money down a hole?” Nevertheless, when commenting on dinners discussing the pledge Bill recalls, “No one ever said to me, ‘We gave more than we should have.’”

Buffett, for his part, warns against delaying the decision of how and when to give: “If they wait until they’re making a final will in their nineties, the chance of their brainpower and willpower being better than they are today is nil.”

Of course, philanthropy and “charity” aren’t by any means guaranteed to do good; there are lots of ways that these systems can replicate the problems they aim to solve. There are also precious few ways that foundations can be held accountable to their intent to do good.  So we have to hope that they listen to the wisdom of groups like The National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy.

Even with my reservations, I feel a sense of hope at seeing a number of the super-rich being willing to let go of the game of wealth for the sake of wealth. Many of us here know from personal experience both the scariness and the importance of the first step towards moving money to do good in the world.

(Quotes inline from the original Forbes article)

I remember thinking that I had been hired to teach them something.

I was a sophomore in college and I had been hired to be a Summer Resident Assistant for a youth program that wanted to save 100 “at-risk” young people of color in Dallas, Texas. I had been hired to transform the lives of these young folks and I had one summer to do it!  I thought it was possible. I was nineteen years old. I had a lot to learn.

Imagine this: Day 1, 100 thirteen and fourteen year olds are arriving. I decided that I needed to be tougher, a little rougher in my walk, talk, and attitude. So I chose right then and there to bring out my inner rap star and picked up the fakest slang imaginable. It was an absolute disaster. In the first 10 minutes one of the young guys heard me talk and asked, “Rodney, why are you talking like that? You can be who you are man. We’re going to like you no matter what.”

Jinkies!

I learned they were here to teach me something. I realized that I didn’t have to hide in my life and that the lessons would come.  I just had to be open.  That experience truly changed my life and helped me learn to be me! It was my first experience of a job opening me up to myself.

And, now there’s Resource Generation.

I’m grateful for my time at Resource Generation, the past year and 1/2 has been nothing but amazing. I am thankful for the many lessons that I’ve learned while working with some of the most brilliant people in social justice philanthropy. My time here has been nothing less than stellar – and I am thankful for the opportunity to learn about what it means to be a young black man with privilege and how to use that privilege to change the world.

I am looking forward to seeing how this organization continues to thrive in the hands of Elspeth Gilmore and Mike Gast as they steer RG into the next phase of growth and power!

Please feel free to stay in touch. You can reach me at: abshu27@gmail.com

Much Joy,

Rodney McKenzie, Jr.