Giving Plans as Rich People Organizing Tool
As a kid I collected baseball cards. In my early twenties, I collecting giving plans.
For the first 6 years I was involved with Resource Generation, from the age of 22 to 28, I collected as many giving plans as I could. If another constituent (ie young person with wealth), said they had written up their plan, I would ask for a copy, print it out and put it in a black 3-ring binder. I still have that binder in my office today.
I’ve always loved reading the specifics of how money is moving from individual bank accounts to the collective good. It’s often quite hopeful and inspiring to see the creativity, thoughtfulness and planning that go into each person’s efforts. I can learn a lot from seeing the details and understanding the intentions and strategies employed (or not).
My fascination with giving plans is one of the many reasons why I do this work professionally.
They are where the rubber meets the road.
Moving money, the redistribution of wealth, is central to organizing the rich to be full partners in working class led liberation movements.
Giving plans are a key tool in that project.
They are a chance to reflect on important questions like…
What are your values?
What are your hopes and dreams?
How can the money in your control contribute to building the world you want?
How does your giving plan relate to your overall financial plan?
What are your giving and redistribution goals?
What does support and accountability look like?
Each person’s plan is a unique reflection of their life and mind.
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What is a giving plan?
To borrow from North Star Fund, “A giving plan is a personal document that reflects your best thinking on how you want to give, with accountability tools you can use to help you stick to your plan.”
What does it include?
Well. That’s up to you. Each one is different and unique.
It can include…
who you are
where the money in your control came from
Vision statement (What do you hope your money will help accomplish?)
Goals for your giving
Values you want your giving to reflect
Politics and principles that inform your giving
Priority Areas
Strategies
Geographic Areas
Numbers — how much are you giving and why? What % of your income or net financial worth does that represent?
What support will you need?
Questions you will explore
Ways you will reflect and adjust the plan over time
and much more
So many possibilities!
Resources for making a social justice giving plan include…
Best and Worst Donor Practices Tip Sheet
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In the months after my first Making Money Make Change Conference (MMMC) in 2003, Resource Generation (RG) staff reached out to me. Jamie Schwesenedl (at that time Jamie Schweser), RG national organizer, was coming to town and wanted to offer a giving plan workshop in the Bay Area.
I came out of MMMC lit up by the possibility of organizing myself and other people with wealth to support the movements I cared about. Making my own giving plan was clearly an important initial step towards this goal.
I offered to host the workshop at the apartment I shared with my 2 roommates at 26th and Bartlett in San Francisco.
I helped spread the word and we got a whopping 7 people to show up.
I remember butcher paper on the walls. RG Social Change Giving Plan Workbooks being passed out. I remember feeling proud to have helped organize it and to be taking pro-active steps to think about the money in my control.
As the years pass (it’s been 20), the numbers look smaller and smaller. At the time, it felt like more than enough. I had a $50,000 trust fund that my dad was the trustee of and $5,000 that my grandma had given me when I graduated. Though at that point I hadn’t asked, I knew my grandma had wealth and that at some point it would likely be passed down to me. My parents were both financially stable home owners in San Francisco, one of the most expensive cities in the world. I had and have the confidence of an average class privileged white man, and knew I could afford to share some of the dough.
At my first giving plan workshop I learned that making a giving plan starts with making a financial plan.
I came out of the workshop tracking my expenses for the next three months, making a budget, and opening up a retirement account. I asked my dad for permission to give $5,000 from my trust fund. I decided to make a number of monthly donations and small dollar donations from my income. I left the workshop committed to asking my Nanna how much money she had next time I saw her (spoiler: it turned out to be three million).
The process had clearly moved me. I was taking many important steps towards a financial and giving plan aligned with my values.
I had gone from almost never donating or engaging my family around wealth, to significant action.
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It’s astounding to me how few progressive donor networks systematically support their members to make giving plans.
Research by Laura Wernick, Professor at Fordham, has shown that involvement in Resource Generation by dues paying members increases giving 16x. Her research found that making a giving plan was the most significant reason why people’s giving increased.
Giving plans make a difference.
This is not surprising. In any industry, having goals and a plan to get there increases the likelihood of meeting those goals.
Whether it’s a giving plan, redistribution plan (same thing as giving plan with a different name that emphasizes the goal of redistribution) or financial plan…helping every progressive wealthy person have a values aligned plan for the money in their control is the baseline for helping them become a full partner to left movements.
I’d love to see what would happen if every progressive donor network and public foundation developed regular ways to support their members to make these plans and share them with each other and those close to them.
What new $ would be unleashed if Solidaire, Women’s Donor Network, Threshold Foundation, Democracy Alliance and others, offered support and training in developing a social justice giving/philanthropic plan?
What would be possible if progressive c4 fundraising groups like Way to Win, Movement Voter Project, Groundswell Action, and more, decided to help their members develop pro-active long-term c4 giving plans?
What would it look like if every progressive public foundation made sure their donor advised fund holders were supported to make social justice giving plans?
What could be possible by putting this tool to more broader use?
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Last year, Solidaire organized a giving plan discussion as part of one of its regular community calls. It was a well attended event. Over 40, out of the 350+, members showed up. A solid showing for weekday zoom call.
I noticed it was primarily a mix of Resource Generation (RG) Alums who were now Solidaire members and had made plans while involved in RG, and older individual members who had yet to make one.
It was clear that for many, especially the crowd who had never been through RG, this was the first time they were given space and time to learn about and take steps towards making their own plans.
The excitement and interest was palpable.
Two individual members shared their giving plans, what it took to make them and what they enabled.
These were plans to move tens of millions to frontline movements through multi-year general operating support donations. C3. C4. PAC. Gifts to individuals. It was all reflected.
The energy was palpable.
The call ended with a bunch of excited suggestions…from creating a way for members to easily share their plans with the community to follow-up calls and small groups dedicated to helping members make their own.
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Giving plans are one of the best tools to help enable people to make multi-year donations.
Without a plan, it can be hard to make long term commitments.
Long term funding commitments make a huge difference for organizations and their ability to plan ahead, be bold, think long term, and build power.
The fundraising treadmill for c3 organizations is exhausting. Multi-year commitments are a great way to free up energy and build the capacity of groups.
On the c4 side, the boom and bust cycle of funding is a significant limiting factor in building long term electoral organizing infrastructure and winning power. Multi-year c4 baseline pledges are necessary to build durable, long-term progressive power.
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I’ve always needed consistent, dedicated time and support to create and follow through on my giving plans.
Two or three years into my involvement in Resource Generation, I came together with several other Bay Area constituents to meet regularly to work on our giving plans.
We all liked the local dinners, but the topic and who showed up changed every time, and each of us realized we needed scheduled, ongoing space to really align the money in our control with our values.
5 of us decided to meet monthly. We were all in our 20’s, with varying degrees of wealth. We met over dinner, in the kitchens of our Bay Area apartments. Sometimes in Oakland or Berkeley. Often in SF.
We would talk about how things were going, what we needed help with, what questions were coming up, celebrate successes, and read through financial statements.
For me, it was a precursor to what would become RG praxis groups…theory + action groups for support, community and collective accountability.
It was wonderful to have a group of buddies to work on my plan with, get feedback from, and help me move forward this, easy to ignore, project.
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3 years ago, a friend and colleague from my days working at RG hired me to help her make a multi-year giving plan. She had always struggled to make them while at RG. Putting her vision and values down on paper?! Intimidating. Understanding how much money she could move? Even harder.
She comes from multi-generational wealth. There is a family office, 25+ staff members, managing a billion+ dollars, if not more.
Over the course of several months, I interviewed her about her goals, priorities, values, inspirations, questions and more. All the pieces of a giving plan. I took what she told me and started populating a document that become the plan.
At the same time, I started sitting in on financial meetings with her family office. I was taken aback by how confusing and opaque her financial situation was. I was no accountant, but I had run a non-profit, raised millions, and worked through financial statements before. It gave me new found respect for what it means to take on the wealth defense industry.
Slowly but surely we untangled the knots and got a clearer and clearer picture of her financial situation.
Turns out she could give a way bigger chunk of her inherited wealth than she thought.
When we started looking at her financials she had $18 million, with yearly distributions of $1.3 million from her family’s trust. We looked at the numbers, her expenses, her long-term financial desires, and made a plan to get her net worth down to $1 million. There would still be yearly distributions, giving her plenty of room to make this bold move. What emerged was a 8 year, $25 million dollar redistribution plan.
It was early 2019, Trump was in the middle of his first term. She decided to prioritize electoral organizing, climate justice and disability justice. She prioritized giving to progressive philanthropic intermediaries with accountable, trust-based grantmaking processes. She prioritized progressive power building efforts, like Working Families Party, Native organizing groups at the forefront of the climate fight, like Native Organizers Alliance, and bad ass disability justice groups, like HEARD and Disability Justice Network of Ontario. Over 55% of her donations were to c4’s, PAC’s, IE’s helping build progressive electoral power, and not tax deductible.
What started out as a 8 year plan, has moved much quicker. It’s 2025 as I edit this, and she just celebrated $25 million moved.
She has helped progressive movements win big things (like GA, AZ, the climate bill…), build durable long term infrastructure, contest for governing power, fight the oil and gas industry, build the disability justice movement, and more.
Just as exciting in my eyes, she opened up whole new possibilities in her efforts to organize her siblings, cousins, parents and extended family to join her.
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When I made my first giving plan, I shared it with my dad.
He was curious. The giving plan was part of a larger move I was making to have a financial plan and take more responsibility for the money in my life.
My dad was impressed. Like most people, his giving was fairly haphazard and last minute.
Despite thinking it didn’t make sense for me to identity as a young person with wealth (he wasn’t all wrong), he liked that I was being thoughtful and purposeful about my finances. He respected that I was centering my values in my financial planning.
He also liked and appreciated that he could see who I was donating to and why. He could read about the strategy behind my giving. Why I was making monthly donations, supporting social justice public foundations, giving a % to local groups I knew and a bigger % to national groups, prioritizing community organizing and working class and people of color led groups.
He learned from reading my giving plan and was inspired.
Over the next few years, I would share updated versions with him as it continued to evolve.
After a while, activated by reading about and seeing me take action, he decided to give me and my siblings $10,000 to donate together. Over the years, that amount has grown to $20,000. It has been a unique and meaningful way for me and my brother and sister to talk together about our values and what we’re excited to support at least once a year.
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Some other thoughts on giving plans that might be obvious to you and probably deserve being said:
Poor and working class people give more (by % of income and assets) and are more altruistic than rich people. I don’t think most poor and working class people have giving plans. In my mind, giving plans are mostly useful as a tool to help rich people live out their values of justice and equality, in the face of an economic system that will continually encourage them to grow and hoard their wealth.
Tithing is the shit. OMG. Giving 10% of your income to the thing you believe in as a communal practice. Yes! Let’s all do that.
Don’t let the perfect get in the way of the good!!! One of my favorite quotes I’ve used over and over again in this work. So many of us can get stuck in perfectionism. If I don’t have just the right plan, I can’t do anything. If it’s not radical or bold enough, I don’t want to do it. Pshaw. Don’t wait until you think it’s just right. Small steps are great and so necessary! There’s no rush. Really. It’s fine to go little by little, just as long as we keep thinking and going and trying.
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I had a client who was adamant that he would never be able to fundraise or organize others. He would say, “It just isn’t my personality. I’m not good at it and I don’t like it.”
As we were making his giving plan, he asked, “Why are you asking me to add a personal narrative? Why are you asking me to introduce myself on this document if my wife and I are the only one’s who will see it?”
I reminded him that I believed he could use it as an organizing tool. That there might be a few people in his life who would want to see it and learn from it.
He wasn’t so sure.
A few weeks after finishing the plan, we met over zoom.
He was excited to tell me that a friend had asked him how his work with me was going. He told his friend that he had finished the giving plan and was glad to be putting it into action. Turns out his friend wanted to see it.
He had emailed it to his friend the other day and now they had planned a date to talk more.
He was glad to be wrong. I was glad to be right.
And that’s my self serving story about giving plans as organizing tools.
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Giving plans are really useful and, as I mentioned before, hard to make on your own. I’ve never had much success doing any of this financial and wealth planning and management work solo.
I’ve always needed a group or a buddy to make anything around finances move forward.
If you’re interested in making a giving plan, the workbook links above are a great place to start.
As well, there are local progressive public foundations, like Social Justice Fund Northwest and North Star Fund, that have workshops or trainings or support for making a giving plan.
I also want to give a shout out to donor advisors.
For people with some amount of wealth, hiring a donor advisor to help make a plan can be invaluable. Here’s a link to a spreadsheet of donor advisors I love.
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Truth: I haven’t updated or worked on my giving plan for years. It could use some help.
My wife and I give every year, 10% of our income and a significant % of the inherited wealth we get (usually 30–40k/year). We (try to) have financial meetings monthly and we only sporadically talk about where we’re giving.
Writing this is a good reminder that I could use more regular space to reflect on my giving and update my plan.
Parenting and being in my 40’s has made that time more difficult to find.
And I like remembering that I could use this tool once again.
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Ok. That’s what I got today.
I’d be curious to learn…
What’s been your experience with giving plans?
How have they been helpful or not?
What thoughts do you have about putting them to use in your life or work?