From Cool Rich Kids Movement to Making Money Make Change

My personal story, part 1

On Monday, I turned 43 years old. 

It’s my birthday week, and despite my urgent feeling that what I really need to do is finish up a reflection on Billy Wimsatt’s Bat Signal Memo¹, I am going to share a story about me (and actually, about Billy too).

Organizing the rich, from the beginning, has been a process of unlearning the idea that my story doesn’t matter, and learning that it is actually the most powerful and effective way I can know myself and move others. Whenever I meet with someone new in this work, if we have the chance, I love to swap stories of family, class, money, race and how we came to do what we do. 

In that spirit, I’m going to take a moment to let you get to know me better, and share how I came to this work. This version below is more detailed than I would normally share when meeting a new colleague or client, and I think it’s worthwhile to use this space to tell you more than I usually do. It’s a helpful experiment as I write this book and I’m curious to see how it lands.

Here’s where I will begin today:

I was 22 when I first read the “Cool Rich Kids” chapter of Billy Wimsatt’s book, No More Prisons.

Cover of the book, No More Prisons by William Upski Wimsatt. First published by Soft Skull Press in 1999.

It was the early Fall of 2003, my favorite time of year in San Francisco, the city where I was born and raised, and that parts of my family have called home for five generations. I was living in the Mission District, with my college roommate and bestie. It was six months since the US had invaded Iraq and three months until Outkast’s new hit song “Hey Ya” would echo down the block at midnight as me and my roommates hosted the most epic New Years Eve party of my young life.

I was a wanna-be radical and recent Vassar College graduate. Like many well-meaning young do-gooders, I had just finished working for an AmeriCorps program, making $12,000 a year, plus the bus pass and $4,000 educational stipend. 

I don’t remember how or why I picked up No More Prisons, except I imagine it was making the rounds of the lefty activist spaces I was drawn to at the time. My sophomore year of college I sat in on inmate-led discussion groups through the Greenhaven Prison Program in upstate New York. The program was founded in 1979 by Larry Mamiya, a Vassar Professor of Religion and Africana Studies. Over the years it had brought hundreds of Vassar students into Greenhaven Maximum Security Prison. The purpose of the dialogues was for students to provide information about what was happening in the outside world, and for the inmates to share their experiences of life in prison. It was always meant to be a radical experiment in transformative education and relationship building. 

It blew my mind. Just going into a prison, through the multiple layers of security and pat downs and sealed rooms, was a brand new experience for me. Sitting in on these groups…forget about it. I was learning so much every time I went.

The groups were led by the Black and Latino men who were the overwhelming majority in the prison. As we shared stories on those plastic chairs, in a circle, in a windowless beige cinder-block room, I was shook. 

In the wealthy SF world I grew up in, illegal drugs of all kinds were being used by kids and parents alike. I remember smoking weed out of a bong on the way to high school in my friend’s car. I can still picture running from the police after they broke up impromptu high school parties by the Presidio wall. I had numerous friends who were selling weed or mushrooms or both. I rarely worried that there would be any serious consequences, and there mostly weren’t. New York state’s Rockefeller Drug Laws made the penalty for selling 2 ounces or more of weed or other banned narcotics, a minimum of 15 years to life in prison. Not surprisingly, almost all the people convicted under the laws were poor and working class Black and Brown men. Many of the wise and welcoming guys I was talking to were in prison because of these viciously harsh and punitive laws. Sitting in that chair, knowing I was about to walk out and go about my life, and they were going to stay locked up, it permanently changed how I saw the world around me.

I remember driving home from one of the groups with my girlfriend. I was in the passenger seat of her Ford Explorer as we drove down to the Mid Hudson Bridge. I shook my hands in front of my face and exclaimed, “I can’t believe white supremacy still exists!” I grabbed my head in disbelief and anger. 

I had grown up in the liberal, majority white and wealthy, private school world of San Francisco. I had been taught about the civil rights movement and about racism as something that mostly lived in the past, even as I saw the massive inequality and segregation in the streets and city I lived in every day. 

Realizing that racism and white supremacy still existed, and in such violent and horrifying form. Realizing that it hadn’t been solved and that my people, white people and wealthy people, were just as implicated as ever in the oppression of others. It broke my heart and lit a fire all at the same time.

I started shifting my identity from a beer drinking, angry and emo rugby player/skateboarder, whom one friend gave the shitty (but also kinda awesome) nickname “Mean Mike McGirk,” to an engaged and self-righteous activist trying very hard to prove himself. 

I read the biographies of George Jackson and Angela Davis². I learned about the prison industrial complex, and joined a campus group working to end the Rockefeller Drug Laws. I began to wonder how I could most effectively be part of these movements I was getting to know, led primarily by poor and working class people of color.

In several of my college courses, I was hearing from my professors, particularly professors of color, that I could and should think about how to work for change in my own communities and from my own experiences and identities. I had no idea what that really looked like for a young white Jewish guy like me from wealthy San Francisco.

In 2001, I went to South Africa for a semester to live and study in the Cape Town suburbs. I learned about the anti-apartheid movement while studying at the University of Western Cape and hitchhiking around the country. I read about the Committee of 81 that had organized massive student strikes and boycotts all across the Western Cape in 1980. The Committee of 81 referred to the 81 different schools represented. It was astounding to read about the coordination, militancy, and power of these young people. 

I spent those months in South Africa noticing over and over again how the inequality and segregation I was seeing looked so similar to what I knew in the US. I had been raised to see apartheid as an almost unimaginable and foreign evil, right up there with the Holocaust for my liberal Jewish family. It was unsettling to see how familiar the landscape of post-apartheid South Africa felt. I was seeing the world with new eyes, connecting the dots between South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation process and the movement for reparations and racial justice in the US. 

Me (on the far right, bottom row) and the staff at the Pollsmoor Juvenile Prison where I lived for a week while studying the post-apartheid juvenile justice system.

I returned to the Bay Area during my summer and winter break to find a bad-ass youth movement forming to stop Proposition 21, a racist ballot measure that would increase sentences for a whole bunch of juvenile offenses. I remember going to a teach-in put on by Youth Force Coalition, Third Eye Movement, and School of Unity and Liberation (SOUL), in an industrial building by West Oakland BART. A multi-racial crew of activists, only a little older than me, were leading 100-person meetings to defeat the measure, plan direct actions, and rally support. It looked so cool! I wanted in.

Those years were an incredible time of growth and learning for me. I was doing my best to find my place and role in a new world of oppression and privilege, activism and social movements. I was so curious…and so clueless. 

How clueless? My junior year I was the co-chair of Vassar’s Black Student Union mentoring and tutoring program. Yes, you read that right. I can offer many justifications and explanations for ending up in that position, but I think it’s a better story if I don’t. I often think about myself during that period as being like that little bird in the story “Are you my mother?”, looking for love in all the wrong places. 

Cover of the book, “Are you my mother?” by P.D. Eastman, first published in 1960.

So when I picked up No More Prisons in the Fall of 2003, it was just the right book at just the right time. Reading Wimsatt’s chapter about “the Cool Rich Kid’s Movement”, I had found someone I felt was speaking directly to me and could help answer these questions about my role in multi-racial, cross-class movements. It was an exciting day. 

At the time the author, Billy Wimsatt³, was a 25 year old artist, organizer, hip-hop head, author of an underground classic Bomb the Suburbs, a former graffiti artist and break dancer, a political thinker, a white Jewish guy and a sorta rich kid (like me!). He was just the right messenger for someone like me, who wanted to be cool and down, and needed a lot of support to understand how to claim all the parts of who I was in service of the movements I cared about. 

Flipping through the pages of that book now, I am still in love with Billy’s writing style and perspective. In the “Cool Rich Kids” section of the book, his sub-chapter titles are “How Break Dancing Got Me into Philanthropy,” “In Defense of Rich Kids,” “The Cool Rich People’s Conference,” and “Money Talks So Can She: An Interview with Tracy Hewat.” Each section opened up a whole new world, as well as a challenging and intriguing perspective on how to relate to the class privilege and wealth in my life and communities. 

The last page of that section has a resource list. I jumped on my aqua green clamshell Apple laptop and dove in, looking through the websites listed. 

Cool Rich Kid Movement Resources page of the book, No More Prisons, with physical addresses (so old school!), and websites. A picture of part of the rich people organizing ecosystem at the time.

Third Wave Foundation, Resource Generation, Responsible Wealth, United for a Fair Economy, More than Money Journal, Grassroots Fundraising Journal…all organizations and projects I had never heard of. In the internet wormhole that followed, I found a few particular gems of information. On the Resource Generation website I read that my sister’s best friend from high school, Mahea, was on the board. I also discovered that the Making Money Make Change Conference, a 4-day retreat for young people with wealth (18-35) who care about social change, was going to be held in Marin, CA in just a few short months.

I reached for the cordless phone on our kitchen table, walked to my room, and called Mahea.

“Are these good folks? Will you be there? Should I sign up?”

“Yes! I’ll be there! You should totally come. They’re good people. I’ll hold your hand. It will be great…and a lot. And I’ll be there with you.”

I put the phone back down on the receiver. I was scared and committed. I would use part of the $5,000 my Nanna gave me when I graduated college to sign up for MMMC. 

For the first time I was being organized to move towards the wealth and privilege in my life. It was what I always wanted and didn’t know was possible. I was lit up by anticipation and expectation. 

What was it like at my first rich kids conference? Did they only serve champagne and caviar?! What’s my family's story of class and money in the first place? And what the heck did those RG organizers do to transition me from a one-time conference attendee to an ongoing participant and leader?

Like or comment below to let me know you’d like to read more of my story and see what happens next. 

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This is where I stop today. If I could, if we were meeting right now, I’d love to know a piece of your story. So much of the magical glue of organizing and movement building happens in these moments of connection and vulnerability. They help form the relational bonds that hold us together. 

I hope you get a chance to swap stories with someone in your life this week, maybe even telling a part that you were reminded of while reading this post.

1. Take a look at the Bat Signal memo if you haven’t gotten the chance. It’s an important message for all of us who are trying to move the rich towards justice.

2. George Jackson and Angela Davis are Black radicals and liberation leaders who wrote searing autobiographies detailing their lives, politics, and experiences in jail. George Jackson died in 1971 after attempting to escape Soledad Prison in California. Angela Davis is alive and well, a professor at UC Santa Cruz and leading leftist writer and thinker.

3. Billy is not only the person who introduced me to this world through his book, he’s been a friend and colleague ever since. Currently he is the founder and Executive Director of Movement Voter Project (MVP), moving hundreds of millions of dollars to grassroots, young people, working class, and people of color led electoral organizing efforts all around the country. They’re fundraising and organizing over 40,000, primarily middle and owning class people, to support working class led movements through their donations…the largest effort of its kind. All to say, Billy remains a key leader and organizer in this work.