Yahya is as big of a nerd about organizing the rich as I am. That’s saying something, and it’s one of the things I dearly love about them.
I met Yahya the year I was stepping out of my role as associate director at Resource Generation (RG). They had just joined the staff as an organizer, and I both liked them and was curious if they’d stick around. RG isn’t for everyone, and it’s never certain that new staff will turn into RG staff elders (which, for me, means anyone who stayed on staff for five years or more).
Yahya has more than stuck around; they’ve grown in their leadership and are currently the executive director, leading a staff team of 20, with a member base of over 1,100. This is a far cry from the Resource Generation I encountered in 2003 (with 4 staff and ~200 constituents) and the RG I helped lead from 2008 to 2013 (with ~8 staff and ~400 members).
I’ve really enjoyed getting to know and talk shop with Yahya over the past years. They embody rigorous, curious and committed leadership. I love hearing their thoughts about vision, strategy, what’s needed and where we go next.
As I’ve done with all my interviews, this conversation is loosely based on these questions, modified from ones developed by Linda Burnham, and has been edited for content and clarity. Yahya and I talked over Zoom during the winter and spring of 2023.
MG: RG remains a unique organization, the largest and most explicit project organizing the rich towards redistribution, collective liberation and movement building. Many groups talk about ‘donor organizing’ (which we know is mostly code for relational fundraising of wealthy people). RG is one of the few groups with a robust organizing model. Can you share more about RG’s approach?
YA: Sure. RG was started in the late 90s with a belief in the power of storytelling, caucus spaces, and political education as important ways to help young people with wealth develop giving plans, become peer-to-peer organizers, and ‘leverage their privilege for social change’.¹ Some of what I’ve learned about our organizing in the first decade of RG is represented in the RG House, a visual developed in the second half of the 2000s by [then] Executive Director (ED) Taij Moteelall and the rest of the staff and board at the time.
From a few regular local dinners around the country in the initial years to 19 chapters with local leadership teams, praxis groups² and local campaign partners, moving hundreds of millions to movements, RG’s model has developed a lot in the last 25 years. Base building³, leadership development, and political education were the first parts of the organizing model that got really solidified. In the last decade we’ve started to figure out what campaigns look like in the context of our work. Many of our chapters now have local campaign partners and have meaningfully contributed to victories like the fund for excluded workers in New York or the Millionaire’s Tax in Massachusetts. In 2017, we also took on national campaign partners for the first time [Movement for Black Lives and Center for Popular Democracy] and, alongside our Redistribution Pledge, are looking to launch a national campaign soon.
In 2022, board, staff and members spent time updating our organizing model as a part of our “strategic framework” building upon work in 2017-18 to articulate our leadership trajectory. I’m really proud of the collaborative effort it was and am excited to now be sharing these more broadly.
—An interview with Michael Gast from Organize the Rich
