When I first walked into Making Money Make Change 14 years ago, I’d never been in a space quite like it (registration for Making Money Make Change, Nov 9-12, 2023 is live, here). At the same time, it felt eerily familiar – almost a sense of déjà vu. I was already several years into my own redistribution journey, but it had, up until that point, been a lonely one. In finding Resource Generation, I’d found more than a transformative community; I’d found a home. A place that, weirdly enough, it felt like I’d always been.
Like many of the folks I met through RG, I was the radical lefty straight out of central casting in my family. And, like so many RG members, I was trying to reconcile my family’s ostensibly progressive values with our long-standing commitment to the practice of wealth accumulation. I grew up in a refugee family; my father is Iranian, and my mother was born in Cuba. My parents believe deeply in the concept of community self-determination, and they share their respective refugee experiences as instructive examples of what can happen when community self-determination is undermined by outside meddling (e.g. by US foreign policy). These conversations were absolutely formative to my political development, and I give my parents a lot of credit for that. And, at the same time, our family was accumulating wealth orders of magnitude beyond what we needed to provide for our own happiness, comfort, safety, or security. I’d come to recognize that you don’t get this rich without benefitting from a system that keeps other people poor – a system that, among many things worthy of critique, actively undermines the self-determination of poor and working-class communities. As many of y’all know all too well, this dynamic has made for some “interesting” dinner table conversations over the years.
Before I was even a teenager, my father had put a significant percentage of his shares in his primary business in my name. By the time I graduated from college, the wealth under my direct control was worth well over $50 million. No one I knew had experienced anything even remotely like this. Or, if they had, they weren’t exactly talking about it. I was fully committed to redistributing all of the wealth under my direct control, but I felt profoundly alone in doing so. RG changed all of that.
Fast forward a few years, and – with RG’s explicit support – I’d grown from simply wanting to be a better “grant maker” to wanting to be a better funder organizer. I’d gone through all the classic phases, from committing myself to move all the money, to exploring how I might move the money in potentially transformative ways, to feelling called – often quite literally – to support and influence how my high-net-wealth peers move their own money. By this point in my journey, I’d had the amazing privilege of building relationships with a number of movement leaders across the country, and they had a clear ask of me: Go collect your folks. If it weren’t for my experiences with RG, I’m not sure that I would have been prepared to respond strategically to this ask. But, thanks in no small part to all the ways that RG has invested in my leadership, I’ve been able to respond in ways that I am truly proud of.
It feels great to be able to share my story with y’all – it’s something that RG taught me how to do, after all! But this isn’t really about me. I believe in supporting RG, not just because of how RG has helped me, but because I understand that RG is an essential piece of movement infrastructure. Philanthropy is a hot mess, to say the least, but it is nonetheless a sector that needs to be organized. Wealthy families can be an even hotter mess, but the potential role of class traitors in supporting and participating in transformative social movements simply cannot be denied. If we believe that another world is truly possible, then funder and donor organizing will be a critical part of the work that must be done to get us there.
I support RG because I’ve seen first hand how RG invests in the leadership of its members. And I support RG because of how I see RG members and alumni showing up as powerful leaders in radical philanthropy. To be clear, I would support RG even if I had never been an RG member myself! I invite you to do the same, a week before the Fall drive launches.
The irony, of course, is that the philanthropic sector is rarely interested in investing in its own transformation. And that radicals with access to wealth are generally hesitant to support efforts or organizations that focus on organizing people that are too much like us. I’ve been there myself. But now I say, simply, that we are worth it. We are worthy of being organized because we are full people, not just ATM machines. We are worthy of being organized because we have a strategic role to play in a just transition to a regenerative economy. And we are worthy of being organized because our liberation is bound up in the liberation of the people we can support and work with to build a better world.
Social movements are asking all of us explicitly to do this work. And RG is, has been, and will continue to be a critical piece of movement infrastructure to support this work. In this context, the fact that RG has been wrestling with a budget deficit should be simply unacceptable. To be clear, part of what’s being asked of us in collecting our own folks is to support the infrastructure that makes that work possible.
As part of my own redistribution plan, I’ve made a ten-year commitment to RG at $100k a year. I know that this is well beyond what many of you can commit. I also know that this would be but a drop in the bucket for others. And so my ask to all of you is to do what you can to support RG right now: to renew your dues, to increase your support, or to extend multi-year support. Whatever you can. Not simply to repay RG for all the ways in which it has supported all of us, but to support RG’s ability to continue and to grow as critical movement infrastructure – the kind of infrastructure that movements expect of us to organize in our own community.
Please join me!
Farhad Ebrahimi
