In the Tradition of...
In the tradition of George Pillsbury, Harry Belafonte, and Tracy Hewat, we as young people with wealth stand with communities and movements working for social change.
Harry Belafonte
"Harry Belafonte is an American musician, singer, actor, and social activist. One of the most successful pop singers in history, he is perhaps best known for singing the "Banana Boat Song", with its signature lyric "Day-O." Throughout his career, he has been an advocate for civil rights and humanitarian causes, and was a vocal critic of the policies of the George W. Bush Administration.
Belafonte's political beliefs are greatly inspired by the man that he still views to this day as his mentor: singer and activist Paul Robeson, a man who was in his time a controversial figure for strongly supporting the Soviet Union throughout the Cold War. He strongly opposed not only racial prejudice in the United States, but also western colonialism in Africa. Like Robeson and other black entertainers, Belafonte's success in the arts did not protect him from racial discrimination, particularly in the American South. As a result, he refused to perform in the South from 1954 until 1961. In 1960, President John F. Kennedy named Belafonte cultural advisor to the Peace Corps. Belafonte was an early supporter of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1950s and one of Martin Luther King Jr.'s confidants. He provided for King's family, since King made only $8,000 a year as a preacher. Like many civil rights activists, Belafonte was blacklisted during the McCarthy era. He bailed King out of the Birmingham City Jail and raised thousands of dollars to release other imprisoned civil rights protesters. He financed the Freedom Rides, supported voter registration drives, and helped to organize the March on Washington in 1963."
Read more on Harry Belafonte.
George Pillsbury
"I leveraged my brand name, my money and my connections to organize other donors and start a community foundation that both funded and modeled social change. I founded the Haymarket People’s Fund of Boston in 1973, and a national network of community foundations, the Funding Exchange, in 1979, that model grassroots giving as well as democratizing philanthropy by giving decision-making power to people in the community."
Read George Pillsbury's complete Bolder Giving profile.
Tracy Hewat
Our fabulous co-founder!
"Tracy Hewat, the 35-year-old scion of her family's fortune, helped found Resource Generation, an organization that gives support to wealthy young people with a social conscience.
TRACY HEWAT'S FOREBEARS came over on the Mayflower, and their riches grew with the country. Her ancestors owned tracts of land in California and made it big in lumber, gold, and, in particular, a derivative of iron ore. A relative sold the land that would later become the posh town of Bel Air. The family helped found Cal Tech and, as the lore goes, was responsible for bringing Albert Einstein to the US.
By the time the Hewat fortune got to Tracy, the family's 35-year-old current scion, it had been compounded by Ronald Reagan's trickle-down policies of the 1980s, which provided windfalls to the rich. Today, at the dawn of the George W. era, Hewat feels a sense of deja vu. With all the tax-cut stuff in the news, I feel like it's inevitable that there's going to be another set of tax cuts that benefit me, she says. I'm appalled...
Resource Generation was founded by Hewat and other Boston-area activists six years ago, after a national conference for wealthy young people was canceled because not enough people had signed up. The problem wasn't a lack of potential participants - with $10 trillion expected to change generational hands over the next 20 years, according to the Inheritance Project, an online resource clearinghouse, there are plenty of young people with money. Hewat suspected that she knew the real reason for the conference's failure. The stereotype of young wealthy men and women was so awful petulant, greedy, unmotivated, she says. No one wanted to fly across the country to go to a conference with people they thought would be like that."
Read the complete article, Young Bucks: Okay, so you are a millionaire. No what?
Check out a recent RG blog post.
