New resources and new readers

A welcome and update

Hello Dear Readers,

It’s been a big month for Organize the Rich with many new subscribers coming in from a popular linkedin post and substack recommendations. Welcome! Thank you for your interest in this topic and conversation.

What started out in 2022 as a book project with my dear colleague Iimay Ho, and with financial support from Working Families Party and Solidaire, has transformed into much more. Organize the Rich is now a multimedia writing, video and audio project, sharing interviews, stories and analysis about what it means to organize the rich as part of multiracial working class led movements.

It is supported financially by Solidaire along with Resource Generation and several individual donors. It has a wonderful advisory committee of leaders in this work that includes Erin Heaney (SURJ), Yahya Alazrak (Resource Generation), Rajasvini Bhansali (Solidaire), Chuck Collins (Institute for Policy Studies), Braeden Lentz (Working Families Party), Iimay Ho (Local Progress), Alex Tom (Center for Empowered Politics), Elspeth Gilmore (Trust Web), and Taj James (Full Spectrum Labs).

In the last months I’ve been working on broadening the resources available through this project. Here are some updates on that work:

• Want to see video clips from my interviews? Check out and subscribe to the Organize the Rich instagram and youtube accounts.

• Want to read through the source material I am often referencing in my posts? Check out the Organize the Rich public archive. A simple google folder, a work-in-progress, where I’m sharing many of the documents from the 70’s to today, that I find or have been given. Have print or digital documents you want to add to the archive? Send them to archive@organizetherich.com.

• Curious to watch the opening plenary from last year’s Making Money Make Change Conference for young people with wealth put on by Resource Generation? It’s titled “Welcome to our lineage: Histories of Organizing the Rich towards Justice” and was a fabulous conversation with me, Chuck Collins, Hez Norton, Nicole Lewis and Yahya Alazrak. My brief powerpoint history of this work is a 10min section from min 13:45 to min 22.

• Want to listen to a recent podcast episode with Vini Bhansali and I talking (separately) with Cayden Mak from Convergence Magazine? It’s titled “Hear Us Out: Let’s organize the rich with Michael Gast and Vini Bhansali.”

• I added a “Resources” page to the Substack which includes a “Working Glossary” (shout out to Allison Harrison for putting it together).

This conversation is more timely than ever.

It is vital that we engage and organize a crew of wealthy people to side with working class led pro-democracy forces. We need a mighty, cross-class coalition, led by the working class, with a disciplined and determined crew of managerial and owning class organizers, to rebuild a society around our collective health and well-being.

How do we get there? I wish we had a road map! What I know is that we’ll be more powerful and effective if we build off of what’s come before.

I look forward to sharing more interviews and analysis in the coming weeks and months.

If you like what you read, watch or listen to, please share with others, like and comment on the posts, re-stack them on Substack, share them on social media, and help expand the conversation.

Sincerely,

Michael

I showed this graphic to a few friends and they were unclear what I meant by ‘hospice the rich’. I’ll explain. I mean that we need to hospice the rich out of our class position with as much love, care and prep for the other side as we can. Like a hospice nurse. Because for many wealthy people it will feel like death. Even if it isn’t.