Making Money, Making Change
I spent last weekend at Making Money Making Change—a conference for young progressives(liberals?) with wealth put on by Resource Generation, co-hosted by the Funding Exchange, Tides, and Third Wave. It was a fascinating, challenging, growing, weird, fun, intense, thought-provoking experience. [For those of you that don't know, I have a $100,000 trust from my grandparents that I'm trying to decide what to do with]
About the conference:
There were about 60 young people with wealth (YPPW) mostly women, lots of queers, from around the country, with heavy representation from the Bay. No surprise that there were only a few people of color—this is partly about concentration of wealth/racism, but also about a lack of concerted outreach/anti-racist programming within the RG network [something that’s starting to happen more]. There were millions & millions of dollars in assets in the room. Wow.
It was set up as a “safe space”. Ack! I’m so very wary of “safe spaces” for privileged folk, yet I also understand that that’s part of what’s necessary to get a lot of folks in the door—folks who are early in their process & shame/guilt/hiding around having wealth. It’s incredible how much hiding most of us YPPW do [though I think many folks figure out we’ve got money, or at least class privilege, even if we think we’re hiding it well], and how liberating it is to have a space to be open & talk about it. For me, I’ve become pretty much completely public & open in the last year, which I find incredibly liberating & fun—but that’s a process that takes a while, and MMMC was the first space many participants had been in where they could talk about being a YPPW.
Organizing in this space:
I went to MMMC to push myself & work through more of my issues—how much to I keep/give away, what are accountable decisionmaking methods for giving away my money, working through my own issues around class privilege & class shame. I didn’t get to do as much of this as I would have liked because I spent most of my time with folks who weren’t on the same page politically [though there was a cluster of folks who I love & adore, most of whom I know through other work]
I also went to MMMC to organize—to engage with people to push them, to play with what it means to challenge people effectively & recognize people’s processes—I haven’t done this type of work before—work that many of you have done with white folks, and work that I want to learn how to do well for the long haul. In some ways I see working with YPPW as a laboratory to learn about organizing among folks with privilege in many different settings.
And I hit a lot of walls. I’m in that space in my process around class—familiar from my process around race—where I'm pissed and angry as hell at people who aren’t radical enough, and at how completely fucked the foundation/funding system is (not to mention concentration/accumulation of wealth in our society), etc. This is a difficult place from which to constructively engage folks! Luckily, there were folks who have been doing this work for a few years to lend an ear after frustrating conversations—friends to remind me that, just like in community organizing, there are folks who will never get it & aren’t worth your time, and there are folks who are new to this & don’t get it—but are open to learning. When I started focusing my energy on the latter, I had some amazing conversations.
As critical as I am of the space, I’ve already heard a whole bunch of stories of folks leaving MMMC and immediately having conversations & getting better informationa bout their money & ready to move more money out the door. Which is great.
Heads Up's framework around accountability & solidarity & what it means to be an ally was incredibly useful & applicable. While RG staff get this & put it out there, along with a handful of participants(luckily many of them friends & local), this framework was largely missing from the conference. The core planning committee consisted of 2 constituents & 5 non-wealthy staff of color from RG & the co-sponsoring orgs—notably, they are all funders. They say that the conference is not “By & for” constituents, and there’s that modicum of accountability set up—but frankly, I don’t want to be accountable to funders—even if they are progressive young people of color working in progressive foundations, I want to be accountable to on-the-ground organizers doing the everyday movement building work. A select few of those folks were invited in to do workshops (Michelle from SOUL, Mahea & Ibrahim from MSC, USSA, a handful of others)--but they were not allowed to stay past a meal. I left feeling that if you’re gonna have a “safe space”, there needs to be a much stronger politics of accountability put out.
So what now?
I’m committed to doing organizing in this space, but there are a million directions that could go. I see the huge potential for having conversations about class, class privilege, and wealth in a variety of communities, and the potential to leverage class privilege & wealth for the movement. In general, I think our movement can benefit tremendously by opening up more conversation about class, --and about how we all use the resources at our disposal.
I’m chewing on a whole lot of stuff about my own wealth & class privilege & how to be a good steward of it --- and about how I want to organize among class privileged and wealthy folks.
About the conference:
There were about 60 young people with wealth (YPPW) mostly women, lots of queers, from around the country, with heavy representation from the Bay. No surprise that there were only a few people of color—this is partly about concentration of wealth/racism, but also about a lack of concerted outreach/anti-racist programming within the RG network [something that’s starting to happen more]. There were millions & millions of dollars in assets in the room. Wow.
It was set up as a “safe space”. Ack! I’m so very wary of “safe spaces” for privileged folk, yet I also understand that that’s part of what’s necessary to get a lot of folks in the door—folks who are early in their process & shame/guilt/hiding around having wealth. It’s incredible how much hiding most of us YPPW do [though I think many folks figure out we’ve got money, or at least class privilege, even if we think we’re hiding it well], and how liberating it is to have a space to be open & talk about it. For me, I’ve become pretty much completely public & open in the last year, which I find incredibly liberating & fun—but that’s a process that takes a while, and MMMC was the first space many participants had been in where they could talk about being a YPPW.
Organizing in this space:
I went to MMMC to push myself & work through more of my issues—how much to I keep/give away, what are accountable decisionmaking methods for giving away my money, working through my own issues around class privilege & class shame. I didn’t get to do as much of this as I would have liked because I spent most of my time with folks who weren’t on the same page politically [though there was a cluster of folks who I love & adore, most of whom I know through other work]
I also went to MMMC to organize—to engage with people to push them, to play with what it means to challenge people effectively & recognize people’s processes—I haven’t done this type of work before—work that many of you have done with white folks, and work that I want to learn how to do well for the long haul. In some ways I see working with YPPW as a laboratory to learn about organizing among folks with privilege in many different settings.
And I hit a lot of walls. I’m in that space in my process around class—familiar from my process around race—where I'm pissed and angry as hell at people who aren’t radical enough, and at how completely fucked the foundation/funding system is (not to mention concentration/accumulation of wealth in our society), etc. This is a difficult place from which to constructively engage folks! Luckily, there were folks who have been doing this work for a few years to lend an ear after frustrating conversations—friends to remind me that, just like in community organizing, there are folks who will never get it & aren’t worth your time, and there are folks who are new to this & don’t get it—but are open to learning. When I started focusing my energy on the latter, I had some amazing conversations.
- a couple of young white queers who are totally new to this space, but SO on it in terms of accountability, white supremacy, etc. who are isolated regionally, but could totally kick butt
- a couple of folks who are nervous as all get out about being public in their workplaces who I think we convinced that it’s actually amazingly liberating & fun to be public, and that my fears about it really never materialized
- a woman who’s trying to get her family to include anti-racism as a principle/value in their family fund & strategizing about how to do that effectively
- a dyke who wants to participate in organizations she gives to, where we talked about what solidarity means, what it means to support the needs of an organization....and that that may not mean collaboration—using an example from HEads Up of how we started by doing direct support work and over the course of several years moved to collaboration.
As critical as I am of the space, I’ve already heard a whole bunch of stories of folks leaving MMMC and immediately having conversations & getting better informationa bout their money & ready to move more money out the door. Which is great.
Heads Up's framework around accountability & solidarity & what it means to be an ally was incredibly useful & applicable. While RG staff get this & put it out there, along with a handful of participants(luckily many of them friends & local), this framework was largely missing from the conference. The core planning committee consisted of 2 constituents & 5 non-wealthy staff of color from RG & the co-sponsoring orgs—notably, they are all funders. They say that the conference is not “By & for” constituents, and there’s that modicum of accountability set up—but frankly, I don’t want to be accountable to funders—even if they are progressive young people of color working in progressive foundations, I want to be accountable to on-the-ground organizers doing the everyday movement building work. A select few of those folks were invited in to do workshops (Michelle from SOUL, Mahea & Ibrahim from MSC, USSA, a handful of others)--but they were not allowed to stay past a meal. I left feeling that if you’re gonna have a “safe space”, there needs to be a much stronger politics of accountability put out.
So what now?
I’m committed to doing organizing in this space, but there are a million directions that could go. I see the huge potential for having conversations about class, class privilege, and wealth in a variety of communities, and the potential to leverage class privilege & wealth for the movement. In general, I think our movement can benefit tremendously by opening up more conversation about class, --and about how we all use the resources at our disposal.
I’m chewing on a whole lot of stuff about my own wealth & class privilege & how to be a good steward of it --- and about how I want to organize among class privileged and wealthy folks.
posted by Cathy at 2:38 p. m.
1 Comments:
Hey, Cathy. Jeff Zelli from the Columbus League here. I was just going through footage from Adrienne Maree Brown's Oct 04 visit and I have a clip of you repping YVA. It brought back happy memories and made me google you. The old space on High Street is a Verizon store now. Seems like forever ago, doesn't it?
Sorry to hit you up through comments, but I didn't see an email. Anyway, big ups from Columbus. The work continues. We're working on making our new website look hot (columbus.indyvoter.org).
Much love and gratitude for the work you're doing. I'm bookmarking your blog. Drop a line sometime to pissed.off.voter at gee mail if you're in the mood. Jeff
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