Holly Fetter, an undergraduate student at Stanford and praxis group leader, originally wrote this piece in STATIC, a site for Stanford activists to connect and create.Holly writes of her piece: “This piece was written when I was first coming into my class identity and accompanying consciousness. Though my ideas and actions around class have shifted in the past…
Re-blogged, due to our partnership with Bolder Giving:Elspeth Gilmore, current executive director of RG, writes in Bolder Giving about coming to terms with class privilege and inheritance. At age 33, I’m at last coming into my own about my wealth. I’ve made mistakes. I’ve learned a lot. I’m finally clear that, for me, using my resources to…
I grew up in a middle-class household with two working parents, weekly budgeting, coupon-clipping, and a 30-year mortgage on our small house. My brother and I knew that we had the privilege of an inheritance, but that it came in a different form than money: learning union songs on long car rides to our family’s…
2012 has been a transformative year so far. I moved across the country from Seattle to New York, started a new job at Resource Generation organizing young people of color with wealth, and turned thirty. I was excited to step into the unknown, and ready to take on big challenges. I expected that there would…
This is an edited version of a sermon I gave this spring at the Mid-Columbia Unitarian Universalist Fellowship, a congregation I served as minister this last year. UUs are known for being great about sexuality education, but money can be much harder to talk frankly about. Hence, this sermon. Growing up, our family never worried…
There are two things that I’ve loved for decades. One, is asking questions. The second is hanging out with old people. Not just old people, but elders. For me, an elder is anyone older than me. With three older siblings, I learned how to listen and to learn from their lived experiences. At 25, I…
I was recently asked to speak to a captive audience on the subject of why I’m a “progressive funder.” I was more than happy to oblige, with one minor change: I preferred to answer the question of why I’m a radical activist who happens to have some money. Knowing that I’d likely ramble and run…
When I saw the tumblr site “We are the 1%. We stand with the 99%,” I thought about $140,050 sitting in a bank account in my name at the Permaculture Credit Union, money I’d received in distribution payments from my 5% share in an apartment complex. I questioned myself: How would I really be standing…
It is spring of 2008, and I am giving a workshop on prison industrial complex abolition at Wesleyan University in Connecticut. We start by asking participants, “What makes you feel safe?” There is a wide range of answers, from “my friends” to “having healthcare” to “self-defense classes” to “knowing my parents could support me in…
I love the crap out of rich people. RG has helped show me that. Meeting dozens and dozens of wealthy people, each and every one who is smart, thoughtful, and wanting so badly to do right by the world—time and time again, I am bowled over by the sheer magnitude of kindness and generosity in…
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