Money survey as rich people organizing tool
I firmly believe it’s important to support and challenge wealthy people to look at all the money in our control, not just the arbitrary amount we’ve put aside for philanthropy.
As I’ve heard said, wealthy people need to ‘own what we own’.1
Money surveys are one of my favorite tools to do just that…help wealthy people look at ALL of the money and property and investments, take stock of the complete picture and assess if it’s in alignment with our values.
If you are curious what a money survey is, read more below and check out this powerpoint presentation from the money survey at Resource Generation’s 2024 Making Money Make Change Retreat.
A money survey is a tool I was introduced to at the Making Money Make Change Retreat in 2002, a 4 day conference for young people with wealth who wanted to leverage their resources and privilege for social change (that was the language at the time).2
I had just turned 22 when I first attended MMMC. I was horrified by the idea of identifying as a young person with wealth and class privilege, and delighted and intrigued by the chance to talk about class, money, family, wealth and values in the context of the social justice movements I cared about and wanted to be a part of.
Soon after I got to the retreat center in Marin, CA, I found myself sitting in large room with 70 other young people with wealth being asked to do some homework.
We were informed that all attendees would be encouraged and supported to fill out an anonymous money survey. This survey asked questions about the full picture of our financial lives and our relationship to the money in our and our families control.
Questions included…
Where does your money come from?
Do you expect to inherit money in the future? If so, what’s your estimate of how much and when?
What is your net worth? What is the net worth of your family?
What is your income? What are the sources of your income?
What % of people in your life are you public to about being financially wealthy?
How much money do you donate? What % of your assets do you donate?
What types of groups do you donate to?
How much of your money is in investments? How much of the money is invested in alignment with your values?
What type of high school and college did you go to? What type of high school and college did your parents go too?
Do you have debt?
Do you know what tax bracket you’re in? What was your effective tax rate last year?
What’s your comfort being aware are of your financial resources? What’s your comfort with acting in relationship to your financial resources? Rate on a number scale.
How isolated or connected do you feel in terms of being a person with wealth? Rate on a number scale.
And many more
As you can see, this is quite a list and quite a range of questions.
Right from the start, the leaders of the conference made clear that this survey would likely take some time to fill out and that it would be a good idea to start working on it from the start. It was a Thursday to Sunday conference and we were given until Saturday night to turn them in. The collective results would be reported back to us on Sunday morning.
We were encouraged to use the money survey as an opportunity to find out information that might have been withheld from us or that was hard for us to notice and think about. We were encouraged to call our parents or financial advisors or partners or whoever else might help us find out the answers to these questions.
It was a powerful homework assignment.
Throughout the conference we had small groups called pods we would check in with daily. In those small groups, we often worked together on the survey, getting support to fill out each section.
By Saturday night, the survey’s were turned in.
This was 2002. It was not an online survey that was automatically tabulated. It needed to be manually entered into a spreadsheet and made into a power point that could be shared the next day.
Several heroic and hard working participants would spend most of the evening entering the data and compiling the power point. It took many hours. I remember Holmes Hummel and Jason Franklin often being at the center of the late night data entry party that was often happening in a room near the dance party going on at the same time.
The next day, we walked into a lecture hall for the presentation of the results.
Holmes walked us through them slide by slide.
I remember being so angry and horrified and engaged and awakened.
There were hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars, in the control of the participants in the room and our families. Incredibly little of it was going to taxes or being donated. Even less was going to social justice efforts. Very little was being invested in alignment with our values. The % of our assets being donated was less than the average giving for a working class family.
The day before we had sat around and shared a one minute version of our money stories. Listening to those stories was a vivid description of the way wealth has been made through hard work, perseverance, determination as well as extraction, exploitation, colonialism, genocide, slavery, sexism and militarism. Those stories were in my mind as I heard the numbers in the money survey.
I wanted to barricade the doors until we got everyone to move this huge pile of wealth to social justice efforts.
I was angry and embarrassed for myself and for us, and I was awakened.
And I was moving through my emotional shit. I was starting to work through the angry, self-righteous, better than, embarrassed, scared, guilty feelings that limited my ability to organize myself and other wealthy people around wealth and class.
I was starting to glimpse the incredible opportunity in front of me and in front of us if we could get ourselves to move from isolation to collective action. It was a hard and inspiring and, in the end, hopeful talk.
It lit a fire under me that I have maintained to this day.
— — — — — — — —
The money survey has continued to be a helpful and important tool at Making Money Make Change. At some point, it became normal practice to send it to participants in the week or two before they arrived, so they could work on it ahead of time. At some point, it became an online survey people could fill out. After many years of Holmes leading the money survey, the baton was passed and many other leaders have filled that role since.
And, despite its power, it still remains more unique in its use than I would like.
There are many social justice philanthropy conferences that spend the whole time engaging wealthy people around the question of “where do I give my money?”.
They are still relatively few conferences and projects where the question is about the full picture…”how much money do you have? Where did it come from? What is it doing? How much are you moving and to where? how can we support you to reimagine your relationship to the whole thing?” I love these questions. They are transformative. They challenge and move and agitate wealthy people in a helpful way.
The work of holding space for wealthy people to engage those questions is hard. And it’s where the transformation lies. Using the money survey opens up all sorts of revolutionary possibilities.
An important tool in our collective toolkit.
I often heard this said by Dana Lanza, head of Confluence Philanthropy and my Americorp boss at Literacy for Environmental Justice when I was 22 years old.
When MMMC started it was co-organized and led by Resource Generation, the Funding Exchange, Tides Foundation and Third Wave Fund. In the mid to late 2000’s, it become a retreat organized and led solely by Resource Generation.