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John -- With just a couple weeks left in 2020, we wanted to thank all of you who have made good on your RG Giving Pledges and committed to RG as a dues-paying member. Thank you for answering the call to grow, change, and be more powerful together than we can apart.
As a multi-racial community of young people with access to wealth and class privilege committed to the equitable distribution of wealth, land, and power, we were and are called to redistribute our resources and show up powerfully alongside communities and organizations at the frontlines of the intersecting crises of racial capitalism.
Part of being able to do that^ means being in it together as dues-paying members of RG to support the work and growth of organizing young wealthy people to join in solidarity with BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of color) poor and working-class led movements for economic, racial, and social justice.
If you haven’t yet, 2 weeks til the end of 2020 is plenty of time to send in your pledges and update your RG membership dues.
As of now in 2020, we have raised:
And, for the ***first time in RG’s organizational history***, we have over 1,000 dues-paying members – 1,115 as of the writing of this email!
When we originally set a Giving Pledge goal of raising $50M this year for social justice movements, many of us were unsure if that was realistic. In 2019 – our first full year of tracking our members’ giving via the RG Giving Pledge – we raised over $27M. Would more of our members step up to sign in 2020? Would enough people pledge to increase? Your answer was a resounding yes. And because of what doing this together in 2020, we are ready to level up even further next year.
Long term commitment to funding movements is just one part of our work as young people with access to wealth to divest from and dismantle racial capitalism and white supremacy. We must also transform ourselves to transform the conditions that make it possible for wealthy people to take refuge in wealth hoarding and systems of supremacy.
As Ruby Gordillo, a community leader with ACCE (CPD affiliate) said in one of our last webinars, “[Organizing] brings us to a whole other level of personal growth - not just holding our electeds accountable - but creating leadership among us and transforming our lives into becoming powerful people where we can create the change we want to have, that we need in our communities, and we know we can obtain when we fight together and stand together.”
This year, as poor and working-class and BIPOC communities continue to be impacted first and worst by the pandemic and the ongoing crisis of white supremacy and racial capitalism, the rich got even richer by design -- including those of us in the wealthiest 10% that RG organizes, our immediate and extended families, and networks. In response to this, our campaign partners the Movement for Black Lives demanded philanthropy to step up and commit $50M in new funding to Black-led movements, and our campaign partner Center for Popular Democracy called for support of their year-round work developing poor and working-class leaders to lead campaigns for structural change. We heard Southern leaders calling us to resource Southern, BIPOC-led grassroots organizing and create lasting movement infrastructure through the Black-led Southern Power Fund. And all of this during a contentious presidential election campaign and amid one of the largest protests for racial justice in this country's history.
As a community, we responded - we moved money, organized our friends and families, showed up in the streets, contacted elected officials, and supported our partners’ campaigns. Throughout the heartache, grief, and power of this year, we found ways to fortify frontline movements with our resources, our bodies, and our hearts. We affirmed that our role in movements has to be about more than any single individual or candidate, and also about more than mobilizing from a place of guilt or shame.
And there’s still time to do more.
As our Program Director Jes Kelley has said, “At RG, when we talk about wealth redistribution, it is a harm reduction strategy. Redistribution means circulating rather than hoarding excess wealth, and it is one of the lowest rungs on the ladder: a tangible way for people with wealth to practice solidarity with poor and working-class communities. It’s a crucial starting place, not one that needs to be overly glamorized or intensified, just a thing to do. We all have roles to play in resisting capitalism, now is a great time to find yours and play them well.”
So get your pledges in before the end of the year, join or renew your RG membership, and recommit to building collective power for the equitable distribution of land, wealth, and power in the years ahead.
To playing our roles well…
In community,
The RG Team
https://resourcegeneration.org/giving-pledge/
https://resourcegeneration.org/giving-guidelines/
***P.S. -- Here is a consolidated list of some of the materials staff and members have been working on to help ground in a shared vision, analysis, and action. Please share far and wide :)
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