As activity across the country is ramping up for the November 2018 elections and the social movement organizations that many Resource Generation members are in relationship with step up their civic engagement activity, we’ve been getting a lot of questions about how to apply Resource Generation’s values and social justice philanthropy principles to elections.

Resource Generation’s social justice philanthropy principles call us to focus on the root causes of social, racial, economic and environmental injustices. How we get to those root causes and who is making strategic choices along the way matters too. The principles also call us to support the leadership of those most directly impacted by harmful systemic oppression and exploitation. Fighting back against those harmful systems and building new ones can often include blocking or moving specific pieces of legislation, and blocking or moving specific people — elected and appointed officials — who create, change and enforce them

If a donor directs a contribution to a candidate directly, the candidates would be accountable to the power of the donor. If a donor directs a contribution to membership organizations doing community organizing, then the candidates are accountable to communities impacted and the issues they prioritize. And the community … Continue reading »

When it comes to writing about the intersections of race, class, and sexual violence, every time I get started I realize that there is an overwhelming amount of things to say. That teasing out the overlaps and contradictions could fill a book or many books and many lifetimes. That there’s no way I can capture all of the nuance and complexity in a blog post. So I’m not going to try — instead I am going to name some truths because breaking silence in imperfect ways is better than saying nothing at all.

The truth I must start with is this: I am a survivor of sexual assault and abuse.

I honestly don’t know a single woman, femme, gender nonconforming or trans person who has not experienced some form of gender-based violence, sexual assault, sexual harassment, or non-consensual interaction (touching, comments, insults) in their lives. Rape culture is a pervasive web that we are all caught in. When I truly pause to absorb the full extent of the harm it causes, I feel both despair and rage. How can we live with ourselves when we know that every day the price that cis and trans women, femme, and gender nonconforming … Continue reading »

This morning, some of us were in D.C. to disrupt Kavanaugh’s testimony.

The Senate Judiciary Committee began its hearing this morning at 9:30 am; Dr. Christine Blasey Ford’s searing and heart-wrenching testimony was just yesterday. Sarah Abbott, RG’s Mobilization Director, and I joined an action of over 70 protestors to #CancelKavanaugh brought together by local organizations including Center for Popular Democracy (CPD) and Housing Works.

We sat down outside the hearing, chanting at the top of our lungs and screaming our rage as we shouted “I believe survivors,” “Hell no Kavanaugh,” and “We will not be silenced.” We blew rape whistles. They could hear us in the Committee room. We held each other’s hands. As I looked around, I saw women, trans, and gender-nonconforming people of all ages, some with gray hair and some younger than I am. Many of them were crying. Tears filled my eyes as I looked around and felt our power and solidarity, our grief and anger.

Sarah Abbott, RG Resource Mobilization Director, and Iimay Ho, RG Executive Director

The police began arresting us one by one and we kept chanting, clasping arms as to fill in the gaps as our comrades were taken away.

For … Continue reading »

I’m danielle marilyn west, or danni, the new Development Director at RG! My hope in writing to you is share about my story, my background and orientation to what we are trying to do together: build and be transformative leaders for the redistribution of land, wealth, and power.

I’m 32 and have been an organizer for over half of my life. I come from a buffer-class family and was raised by working-class parents in a wealthy, system-aligned suburb of Dayton, Ohio. My father was raised on a farm in Northern Ohio (my people on both sides have been settler-occupiers of land in Ohio for many generations, and I regularly marinate on what the implications are to me in terms of material and spiritual accountability and reparation) and, before retiring, he was a professor at a state school in southwestern Ohio. My mother was raised in Akron, Ohio, where the family (and after her father died, her single-mother worked) for Goodyear Tire Company. My Mother’s paid work was from labor as a LCSW (Licensed Clinical Social Worker) and as a religious educator with the Unitarian Universalist faith. Both of my parents have bachelors and graduate degrees. To use a phrase I … Continue reading »

Top Rank is a Brooklyn-based print publication created by, for, and about women of diverse backgrounds who are driving and shaping creative, activist, and intellectual fields.

Resource Generation member-leaders Dominique Tan and Holly Fetter talk about showing up for wealth redistribution, economic, and racial justice as young folks with class privilege.

The conference mentioned in the above podcast episode, Making Money Make Change, is coming up in October. Registration is now open. Learn more here.

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Resource Generation is the only organization in the U.S. organizing young people with wealth toward the equitable distribution of wealth, land, and power. As a result of becoming a member of Resource Generation, our members end up giving away 16-times more money to economic and racial justice organizations than they did before. Learn more and support our work by becoming a member here.

If you need help figuring out your class background, check out our definition of wealth and/or fill out this intake form to have one our national organizers reach out to you. 

 

 … Continue reading »

Hello fellow RG’ers, and greetings from the South or Tidewater region of the country!

We are writing to share about Triangle North Carolina RG chapter’s first public-facing campaign, which we called “Protect Durham Housing.” (Spoiler alert: it was a success, and we raised over $120k through grassroots efforts!).

[A little background on our chapter: we are relatively small compared to other chapters around the country, but devoted!; there are a core of 7-9 people that regularly come to meetings, and a few more who have other priorities yet are committed to doing RG-related work in our community. ]

First off, we wanted to share our goals for the grassroots campaign we undertook. Then we’ll walk through the process, outcomes, challenges, and lessons we learned. You can decide if we achieved all that we set out to do…

What were our goals anyhow?

Support Durham Community Land Trustee‘s work An amazing, POC-led organization that provides and protects housing for vulnerable communities here in Durham, acting in direct opposition to capitalist housing and developer-based markets. Combat gentrification and support affordable housing and community land ownership in a fitting way for class privileged/wealthy people. Practice being fundraisers! As class-privileged… Continue reading »

On a sunny morning in May, I found myself at the post office getting my first ever money order. A few seconds later, I was making out a $2,000 payment to Immigration and Customs Enforcement. I was about to meet the mother of an 18-year-old Guatemalan young man named Eduardo who I was going to post bond for in order to be released from ICE detention. I had just joined the Boston Immigration Justice Accompaniment Network, and posting bond for Eduardo was my first significant act of solidarity with my neighbors targeted by the immigration enforcement system. After meeting Eduardo’s mom in a grocery store and counting the $1,000 in cash she had collected over the weekend from friends and family, I drove to the ICE office for the Northeast in Burlington, Massachusetts. I was nervous — white, a U.S. citizen, English speaker, and still nervous about entering the very site where people are torn from their families, detained, and deported.

Over the last few months, images of children in cages triggered a lot of us into facing the awfulness of the U.S. immigration enforcement machine. The attention paid to separating families at the U.S.-Mexico border has also brought to … Continue reading »

I spent the first week of July at a people of color meditation retreat at Vallecitos Mountain Retreat in northern New Mexico. There I experienced deep silence, stunning nature, and teachings on joy, loving-kindness, equanimity, and compassion. I was on retreat with about 25 other people of color, many of whom are organizers and activists, during the week of mobilization and direct action against family separation at the border. It was an important reminder that during a time of escalated violence we must also escalate our spiritual practice, resourcing ourselves and regrounding in our humanity so that we can center collective liberation in our struggle for justice.

One of the core teachings in the Buddhist tradition emphasized during the retreat is that we all inherently have Buddhanature and the capacity for awakening. That is, human beings are essentially good, and that goodness is part of our birthright as beings who are interconnected, interdependent, and not separate from all living creatures. This worldview stands in stark contradiction to the Christian doctrine of original sin and humanity’s inherent (and inherited) inclination towards evil and our “fallen nature”.  

The binary of good and evil and inherited guilt is especially present in American Protestant … Continue reading »

At my second wedding ceremony, the octogenarian vicar said to the guests, “Let’s be honest, this couple’s initial wedding was quite lacking.” Pretty bold, right? But he was right. My first wedding was for legal purposes only — my spouse is a citizen of the United Kingdom and I am a U.S. citizen. I knew I was going to marry him eventually, but we married sooner than we expected so that he could get a green card and live and work in the United States legally, and live without any significant fear of deportation.

The two of us lived overseas while we were dating, and we met many international couples — most of whom were resigned to the fact that they would have to be separated for about a year to fill out paperwork and navigate the U.S. immigration bureaucracy before they could legally be reunited in the United States. I couldn’t bear the thought of being separate from my now-spouse for a year. We found some fancy immigration lawyers, paid them thousands of dollars and were legally married in the U.S. in about a month. This smacks of privilege — as a young person with wealth, I had both … Continue reading »

These days the average wedding cake costs about half-a-grand. Imagine working 64 hours back-to-back at minimum wage to save up $466 to buy a wedding cake for the soon-to-be most important day of your life, knowing that that chunk of change is actually a minor cost of your big day. The average cost of a wedding in the U.S. is $35,000. That’s almost three full years of working at a minimum wage.

These amounts are not out of reach for many gay men that I know. And it’s not all that surprising, for the first time in history, gay men are getting paid more than our straight peers — about 10% more to be exact. And that’s not even taking the racial wealth divide into account for white gays. This is not to say that we haven’t struggled; we have and still do. But, as the report points out, it does mean that our deeply unjust and racist economic system doesn’t seem to care if you’re a faggot anymore — as long as you’re white and have a modicum of class privilege. A cake shop owner turning us away, even if backed by the U.S. Supreme Court (thanks, Colorado), doesn’t … Continue reading »