97. When Trust Fund Kids Grow Up

When I was growing up, in my working class community, there was this terrible thing you could call someone, a “trust fund kid.” And the implication was that if you were a trust fund kid, if you were born with a silver spoon in your mouth (what a weird expression), it meant that you had never had to really work for anything. Opportunities had just been handed to you on a silver platter. Even if you had a job or a profession, you probably didn’t actually have any skills or deserve to have the power or position because your generational wealth had paved the way for you to get there without you actually having the skills or the know-how or having put in the same sweat equity as everyone else.

But whatever happened to those trust fund kids? What are they doing now? Today we’re going to talk about a group of young people with trust funds who are trying to reconcile their values and their incredible wealth.

It’s called Resource Generation. It started in 1998, by two young women I believe in the Boston area and it has grown, there are now over 1,000 members between the ages of 18 and 35 whose family wealth is over $20 billion.

I’m going to include some links in case you want to go further in your research after today’s episode, and I’ll even include their twitter which isn’t very active at all, but does have some things that give a look and feel of the organization. For example, they have a job listing on their site for a program director position. And they very clearly have listed the salary, that it is a 32 hour 4 day a week position with 6 months of parental leave, health insurance for the employee and their families, some details about retirement account employer contributions and they let you know that you get a 2 month sabbatical after 4 years. It feels a little different than your average job posting you start to get a sense of their values in the job posting. Whenever the staff takes breaks they post about how it is a reflection of the organization’s values. It’s interesting!

So this is a young person’s organization and they are fed up with the way their parents have given away their wealth. Their parents tend to be stingy in their giving and they tend to give to charities that aren’t going to create meaningful change in the way our society fundamentally works. Which makes sense, right? You wouldn’t want to overhaul a system that made your family super rich right?

Whereas their parents tend to give to museums or the universities they graduated from, this generation of trust fund kids that are members of this group want to have social impact.

The mission of the organization is to organize these young people to become leaders working towards the equitable distribution of wealth, land and power. 

They do conferences and workshops with speakers who are social justice activists, who are experts on all kinds of social justice philanthropy topics. They have experts on DAFs, I have been working on an episode about those, basically it is a way to park your money while you decide how to donate it if you want the tax break now but you’re not quite ready to actually donate the money yet. Experts on the difference between reparations and regenerative philanthropy which is a different model of philanthropy that moves away from top down ivory tower type of giving, it puts the power in the hands of the people in the communities in terms of defining impact and how the work should be done. That is a very light taste of the philosophy behind regenerative philanthropy, if you are interested in learning more about that, I’d be happy to do a deeper dive on a future episode, just let me know!

I really enjoyed reading the various materials for Resource Generation. It reads very Gen Z and I loved that. For example, one of the sessions in their coming conference is called “Pleasure-Based Transformational Fundraising and Organizing.” LOL I love young people!

Their big conference is coming up here soon and wow, I’m jealous, they are requiring negative covid test results to get in to the conference. In today’s day and age, can you imagine? I’m recording this in the fall of 2023.

And they have local chapters. 

They have a redistribution pledge that they can sign if they want to. On it, they say “We are living in the most extreme wealth inequality in modern history. As young people, this stops with our generation.” And then they pledge how much they are going to give so that they don’t become wealthier from their wealth at a minimum, but hopefully even more than that, they redistribute their wealth in a way that sustains the social justice movements and creates a more equitable world. Here’s how they say it in their words:

“Resource Generation is working toward a vision in which wealth, land, and power are equitably shared. Achieving this vision requires more than just individual action – it requires systemic cultural, policy, and institutional shifts, as well as reparations and a radical reimagining of society. We believe that well-resourced grassroots social movements led by Black, Indigenous and People of Color, poor and working-class communities, women, and queer and trans people are our best hope for achieving this vision, and so we ask our members to commit to sustaining social justice movements that are working towards systemic shifts.”

So these are some progressive ideas. They have a goal of mobilizing $100M a year towards this vision, this is about 7% of the wealth that the members have. So they are asking members to donate a minimum of 7% of their wealth and to make it a multi year commitment. They also ask that they spend a tenth of that giving as membership dues. 

The members of Resource Generation are motivated to give in ways that create systemic change and they believe and I agree that a part of that is funding political movements, and you know, this is a tough one because a large part of our problems comes from wealthy people having too much influence on our public policies. But I tend to believe that until we can dismantle the current system, it probably makes sense for these young rich people to play the game. If the Koch brothers are going to throw millions and billions into harmful causes like the NRA, then I’m not mad at these young progressive people for throwing their money behind progressive causes. 

We will see how far this goes, because the way the tax codes are written, you get tax deductions for giving to charities but you don’t get those same writeoffs if you give towards politics, so hopefully these young people don’t lose their resolve.

I’m going to leave a bunch of links for you in the show notes today. Including a very honest essay from a member of Resource Generation who writes about how she was raised when it came to money and some of the uncomfortable truths about the way that her family has hoarded wealth. It was very interesting. She writes about the intersections of class, race, and her family’s specific heritage. Check it out.

Any other episodes you’d like to hear on the show, send an email anytime. The email address is spend donate invest at gmail dot com. And there’s a newly refreshed website located at spend donate invest dot world. That’s where you can sign up for the monthlyish newsletter. It is very low key, no spam, don’t worry.

I think I’ll stop here for today. Have a good one and let’s talk again soon!

https://www.vox.com/recode/2020/1/13/20827389/young-donors-philanthropists-resource-generation-politics-trump 

https://www.washingtonpost.com/magazine/2020/03/02/their-families-built-fortunes-these-millennials-are-trying-figure-out-how-undo-their-class-privilege/ 

https://twitter.com/ResourceGen 

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/27/style/trust-fund-activism-resouce-generation.html   

https://resourcegeneration.org/choosing-to-talk-about-ugly-stuff/