“People with access to wealth have much more to offer than just moving money”
Interview with Yahya Alazrak, Part 1
Yahya is as big of a nerd about organizing the rich as I am. That’s saying something, and it’s one of the things I dearly love about them.
I met Yahya the year I was stepping out of my role as associate director at Resource Generation (RG). They had just joined the staff as an organizer, and I both liked them and was curious if they’d stick around. RG isn’t for everyone, and it’s never certain that new staff will turn into RG staff elders (which, for me, means anyone who stayed on staff for five years or more).
Yahya has more than stuck around; they’ve grown in their leadership and are currently the executive director, leading a staff team of 20, with a member base of over 1,100. This is a far cry from the Resource Generation I encountered in 2003 (with 4 staff and ~200 constituents) and the RG I helped lead from 2008 to 2013 (with ~8 staff and ~400 members).
I’ve really enjoyed getting to know and talk shop with Yahya over the past years. They embody rigorous, curious and committed leadership. I love hearing their thoughts about vision, strategy, what’s needed and where we go next.
As I’ve done with all my interviews, this conversation is loosely based on these questions, modified from ones developed by Linda Burnham, and has been edited for content and clarity. Yahya and I talked over Zoom during the winter and spring of 2023.
MG: RG remains a unique organization, the largest and most explicit project organizing the rich towards redistribution, collective liberation and movement building. Many groups talk about ‘donor organizing’ (which we know is mostly code for relational fundraising of wealthy people). RG is one of the few groups with a robust organizing model. Can you share more about RG’s approach?
YA: Sure. RG was started in the late 90s with a belief in the power of storytelling, caucus spaces, and political education as important ways to help young people with wealth develop giving plans, become peer-to-peer organizers, and ‘leverage their privilege for social change’.1 Some of what I’ve learned about our organizing in the first decade of RG is represented in the RG House, a visual developed in the second half of the 2000s by [then] Executive Director (ED) Taij Moteelall and the rest of the staff and board at the time.
From a few regular local dinners around the country in the initial years to 19 chapters with local leadership teams, praxis groups2 and local campaign partners, moving hundreds of millions to movements, RG’s model has developed a lot in the last 25 years. Base building3, leadership development, and political education were the first parts of the organizing model that got really solidified. In the last decade we’ve started to figure out what campaigns look like in the context of our work. Many of our chapters now have local campaign partners and have meaningfully contributed to victories like the fund for excluded workers in New York or the Millionaire’s Tax in Massachusetts. In 2017, we also took on national campaign partners for the first time [Movement for Black Lives and Center for Popular Democracy] and, alongside our Redistribution Pledge, are looking to launch a national campaign soon.
In 2022, board, staff and members spent time updating our organizing model as a part of our “strategic framework” building upon work in 2017-18 to articulate our leadership trajectory. I’m really proud of the collaborative effort it was and am excited to now be sharing these more broadly.
MG: How did you come to participate in organizing wealthy people for social justice?
YA: I first started organizing wealthy people at the age of 24, when I came on to staff at RG. I wish I could say I got to be [an] RG member before coming on to staff, and that wasn’t the case for me.
In 2011, I was going to Guilford College in Greensboro, North Carolina. I had a friend who was imminently going to be inheriting a trust. I forget if I googled “radical trust fund” or maybe I saw Jessie Spector [the executive director of RG at the time] post something about RG on Facebook. Whatever the reason, RG was somewhere in my brain. I emailed Jessie and she wrote back. A winter break happened. I was a flaky college student, and I never ended up having a one-to-one meeting.
Being in touch with RG started to get me thinking about whether or not I was a young person with wealth. I definitely knew that my dad’s family owned factories and was owning class, but I didn’t have a trust fund and hadn’t inherited any money yet. I came to the conclusion that I did fit within RG but at the time thought I wasn’t the primary target demographic, since my personal wealth was some years away.
After graduating, I had a job with CoFED [Cooperative Food Empowerment Directive] helping support and start student-run food co-ops. I was looking for a new job, and I saw a Facebook post about an opening at RG. I was intrigued. RG had a lot of mystery around it for me. Definitely coming from other social justice movement organizations, there was the idea that if you could just get somebody on the inside, being a part of RG would solve all of your money problems.
[Laughing] Not true.
Working in the solidarity economy was originally where I thought my career and life's work was going to be. Working for RG felt like something that I would enjoy doing while I was figuring out what was next for me. But quickly I became enchanted with the potential of this organization and decided to stick around. Now I’ve been here eight and a half years.
MG: What’s your class background, and how does it shape how you come to this work?
YA: My background is quite mixed class. My parents divorced when I was one, and I was raised in the US with my mom, while visiting my dad in Morocco during school breaks.
Despite educational privilege (my mom had a master’s degree), we fluctuated between poverty and the lower middle class at best. I was on free or reduced lunch my whole time in public school. We went to food pantries to stretch groceries and often had to have change counted to pay bills.
When I would visit my dad, however, it was a totally different story. He’s the CEO of our family businesses in plastics and electric motorcycles. All the homes I visited in Morocco had multiple staff, domestic workers, chauffeurs, gardeners. When I was in my early teens, my dad bought his first boat, which he upgrades every few years for bigger boats. I was going back and forth between the overabundance of Jet Skis in the summer to the precarity of counting quarters during the school year.
MG: What other influences brought you to RG?
YA: I was politicized as a part of a student-run cooperative coffee shop in college. It was founded by anarchists who were part of the anti-globalization movements of the early 2000s, wanting to be in solidarity with Indigenous-led people's movements in Central and South America. Many of them took work-study trips to Chiapas to learn from the Zapatistas. I didn't do that but was learning from those people. And then later, Occupy and the first uprisings for Black Lives in 2014. All of those things were pushing me towards being ready for and then understanding the potential of something like RG.
From being in those spaces, I already had a worldview that lined up with RG’s vision of “a world where land, wealth and power are shared.”
MG: Is there anybody you want to specifically acknowledge for the key role they played helping you find your footing as an organizer of the rich?
YA: I think a lot about RG staff I’ve learned from: Nitika Raj; Kaitlin Gravitt, my longest and my most beloved supervisor on staff; Jessie Spector, the ED when I was hired on. I always think about that RG promotional video where she's saying, “This is about our generation putting an end to wealth inequality.” I also want to shout out Iimay Ho, who was the first RG executive director who was also a young person of color with access to wealth, like me.
Someone from outside of staff who I think of is Max Rameau.
In college, I was a community and justice studies major. I was studying organizing. Max came and talked to us about the Umoja Village project. My recollection is that he identified himself as having relative class privilege. He had Haitian immigrant parents who had attended university. At the time, I was just starting to try and make sense of my multiple identities.
I asked him, “How is it for you to be somebody with relative privilege, organizing in a community of houseless people?” He was super-grounded in his response. He said, “As a person of privilege, I have a responsibility to be using the access, the tools, the skills that I have, which doesn't mean that I'm smarter or better than any of the people that I organize with, but that I have something specific to offer.” That was the first instance that I saw somebody really owning their class privilege and class position, not somebody trying to blend in, or trying to claim to be of the people or of the community that they were organizing within, because it was so obvious that he wasn't. When I joined staff, Max was at RG’s Transformative Leadership Institute as a speaker. I remember a short one-to-one meeting during the consulting cafe4 time. We talked about the responsibilities of Africans in the diaspora. He was a powerful early role model.
MG: Are there reflections or lessons from your work organizing the rich that you want others to better understand?
YA: I want more organizers and movement builders to understand that people with access to wealth have so much more to offer than just moving money. And that when we engage people with access to wealth around the things that are more than money, they most often end up moving a lot more dollars to movements.
When I first began working for RG, that idea was a hypothesis I wanted to test out. It seemed right to me, but I wasn’t sure.
In my early days at RG, I was the staff organizer for the Philadelphia chapter. At that time, the chapter had pretty much fallen apart. We had two chapter leaders who had moved and two who had been dating and then broke up. We had to rebuild.
A lot of our chapters can get stuck in the question “Should we focus on base building or moving money or campaign work?” And I’ve always believed and said, “We can do it all! They're not mutually exclusive!” So we decided to relaunch the chapter around a partnership with the Philadelphia Community Bail Fund5, with the idea that it could help us grow our base of young people with wealth in Philly, move money to an important local project and contribute volunteer energy to their campaigns. A win-win-win.
The structure of the Bail Fund allowed us to be more deeply enmeshed in the work than I think a lot of our other partnerships with organizations were. With many organizations that an RG chapter might want to partner with, the first meeting is often with their development director. Our members often have to tell the organizations something like, “We are down to help fundraise, and we really want to talk to your organizers about how we can be a part of this campaign you’re running.”
But the Bail Fund was a collective, and it had a steering committee. When we said we wanted to be involved, they said, “Great! Send two people to be on our steering committee.” The Philly chapter did just that. We had two local RG member leaders meeting weekly as part of the Bail Fund steering committee. It wasn’t just that we were partnering with the Bail Fund; we were part of the Bail Fund.
We were participating in the work of the Bail Fund, as a chapter, for probably a year to a year and a half before we did serious fundraising. We had done little bits of fundraising in that time but were mostly focused on other types of involvement, like supporting the bail-out process.
The Bail Fund would do these community dinners, bringing together people who they'd bailed out and their families, as well as the organizers and volunteers. I remember being in a church basement one evening, looking around the room and feeling so much pride and gratitude. I remember thinking, “This is what actual, honest, multiracial, cross-class community looks and feels like.” Building this sort of beloved community is something that we talk a lot about at RG, but being able to actually feel it, see it and experience it, that’s special. It's awkward and messy, and we were really doing it.
We did eventually flex our fundraising muscle for the project when the Bail Fund was making a move from being a volunteer collective to hiring staff for the first time. The Philly chapter took on the goal of securing three years of funding for these nascent staff positions. The chapter ended up raising close to $750,000 in pledges, three annual commitments of $250,000 per year. Having been involved in many newly forming organizations, to have three years of funding secured for three staff positions is just unheard of. The amount of stability and room to grow was spectacular.
Had we just started off that relationship asking the Philly chapter to fundraise right off the bat, without a doubt, we could have raised $50,000, easy. And maybe we could have done that a couple of times, but it would not have been nearly as impactful.
When we started asking our members in the chapter, “Will you make your biggest donation ever and make it a three-year commitment?” Members weren't asking, “Who are these people? What is this org? What are they trying to do? What's their theory of change?” Instead, the response was, “Yeah, duh, obviously.”
I'm not in this work to move as much money as possible. I’m in this work to end wealth hoarding and the class system as we know it, so we can have a world where everyone has agency over their lives and access to the resources they need to thrive. But for the people out there who are, developing real relationships through shared work also brings more dollars to the table.
When we organize wealthy people in a way that includes their skills, dreams, hearts, minds and money, we unlock so much power for our movements.
MG: Are there other reflections on this work that you want to share?
YA: Yes!
Especially for our base, as young people — though I think it’s a much broader dynamic — there's a real desire to be affirmed as a good person. Young people with wealth are often coming in with a lot of guilt and insecurity, and are looking for direction. It makes for a very powerful starting place to organize people from. “Oh, you want direction — here's some things you can do.” But, from this place of guilt and shame, it's easy for people to burn out and start having less and less “capacity.”6
We see this dynamic more generally in movement moments, like when Roe was overturned or the uprisings for Black Lives in 2014 and 2020. People feeling really activated and inspired towards action, really wanting to “do the right thing.” And they haven’t done the work to figure out their personal stake and self-interest in the issue. They are riding a wave of collective inspiration and feel some sense of responsibility or obligation to participate. And those waves of energy burn out.
The number one thing that I want to say to all those people activated in movement moments is, Find a political home. Find a place that can sustain you and keep you engaged and involved for the long haul. I know RG has been and wants to be a place where young, wealthy people can become full partners in movements for the long haul.
And to do that, we want and need our members to have a grounded sense of their self-worth and personal stake in what they're fighting for. If wealthy people don’t have those two pieces, they will fall back into a charity model of philanthropy or lose interest after a while.
At RG, I think it’s important that we continue to balance moving people to action and helping our members with the emotional blocks that inevitably come up. We can sometimes swing too much to one side of that work or another. And we need to do both.
We need to be solid enough in ourselves and our deeper reasons for being involved in movements that we can weather conflict internally, with other people inside RG, and with other organizations and campaign partners. What can carry us through conflict is a clear purpose and sense of our self-interest that's bigger than whatever it is we are quibbling about in the current moment.
If we’re secretly participating in RG or with any political work to feel good about ourselves and to try to prove our worthiness, that is a shaky foundation. Then, when it stops feeling good, we're going to duck out and leave. Our participation in multiracial, working-class-led social movements has got to be about more than feeling good. We’ve got to be real with ourselves as an organization about that and support our members to be real about that too.
MG: You said to me, at the beginning of this book project, “I think we’re winning and we aren’t able to notice it yet.” That really stuck with me and is the basis of so much of my writing. So I’m excited to ask you, what do you think are some strengths about how rich people are currently engaged by left movements?
YA: The past 10 or 15 years of attempts at creating a culture shift for wealthy progressive donors are starting to bear fruit. We now have MacKenzie Scott, a billionaire White woman, saying “I’m not an expert. The organizations that I'm funding are the experts. And I'm giving in unrestricted ways.” She is part of a bigger shift in philanthropy towards giving multiyear, unrestricted support and more open acknowledgment of how wealthy institutions are not the experts on how to make change. This shift is an important victory. I think we've gotten a lot smarter and a lot better at how to engage wealthy people as donors.
MG: What about the challenges?
YA: I think that the number one challenge right now is engaging wealthy people beyond their money. I think that there's a lot of inefficiency in our organizing when we don't engage all of the skills and connections that wealthy people bring to the table.
I think one of the first ways that we leave power on the table is by not acknowledging class in our movements. So many times there's this assumption that everyone in an organization is working or middle class. There's this idea that there couldn't be a person with wealth or class privilege in this room. If we have more honest conversations about class in our organizations, maybe we don't need to find an external sponsor to fund the pizza for the phone bank next week. Maybe we already have connections to more wealthy people and prospective major donors than we think. Maybe our groups already have more personal connections to the business or political leaders we’re targeting than we realize.
There’s so much more that’s possible if we can help wealthy people leverage their positional power and unique skills. For example, wealthy people often have the ability to become highly trained in specialized work, where the pay is often low or inconsistent, such as writing, filmmaking, art, outdoor education, music, healing and therapeutic work.
For me, it’s also about the question, “How do we equip wealthy people with the bravery and support needed to take actions that might challenge their relationships with their wealthy family and communities?”
A core part of enabling that sort of bravery is for wealthy people to have political homes, like RG, to hold them through the hard moments that will inevitably come up as they agitate and organize other wealthy people.
Giving away a significant amount of one’s wealth to working class movements is acting as a class traitor. You're doing something that you're told not to do. And I think that there are many other brave and risky actions wealthy people could be taking.
I'm thinking about some of the work that RG Member Leader Justine Epstein has been doing as one of the descendants of the founders of Procter & Gamble (P&G). She has been working with her family to intervene with P&G’s complicity in the deforestation of old growth forests in Canada and human rights abuses in Indonesia and elsewhere.
While Justine’s family is a very, very small portion of the shareholders, because of their name recognition, they get a response. The campaign gets the attention of the CEO and board in a different way, and it costs very little because of the immense amount of volunteer labor done by Justine and her family, enabled and subsidized by their wealth. So even just from a dollars and cents perspective, it’s a really important strategy to use when possible.
What does it cost to enable Justine to employ that strategy with her family? It costs the outreach and relational organizing that went into getting her involved in RG. It costs Justine’s political education and leadership development, offering her support and a mandate to use her class privilege as part of broader movements.
It’s not free, and when we are doing that at scale. Woah!
I'm remembering a few years back, the daughter of a prominent Republican redistricting strategist made public a whole slew of his files after his death. The documents she shared have been used in multiple legal cases as a way to show the GOP’s gerrymandering efforts going on behind the scenes. That's brave.
How many of our members are at the same holiday party as powerful corporate or political leaders? What interventions could they make given their proximity and relationship to power? In order to figure out what’s possible, I want wealthy people to be engaged as strategists and co conspirators. I want to think through the range of bold actions our members can take and help them understand and assess the risks. Our members are just scratching the surface of what we can do together, and we need all sorts of support for them to pull off the braver and bolder actions that are called for in this moment.
That's my dream, to figure out those parts of what it means to organize the rich.
MG: We’ve talked a bunch about the balance in this work between helping wealthy people build a sense of their own dignity and self-worth, while also organizing them to take responsibility and give back the wealth in their control.
Can you talk for a minute about how you’re thinking about that balance and tension in the work these days?
YA: One reflection I’ve had is that we're at a point, after multiple years of COVID with no in-person national events7 — and a doubling of our base in the last five years — where we need to bring back more strongly a compassionate and really human relationship with our membership. We’ve missed that, and it’s always been crucial to the success of this work.
I think it's also super-important for there to be an organization in the ecosystem that's asking wealthy people to look at their full financial picture and challenge them to give big, give from their principal and take bold steps towards moving all their inherited and excess wealth. We do that through the Redistribution Pledge, and I think that it’s been an overall net positive. We’re engaging more young, wealthy folks than ever, in part, because we’ve had this bold stance and pledge that serves as a beacon for radical rich kids.
I do think it’s important to notice that it does turn some people off from RG and activates shame for some of our members and prospective members. I want RG to be helping people move through shame, not get stuck there.
And I think for each person who comes to RG and gets set back feeling challenged by our asks, there are also people who say, “Oh my gosh, I was waiting for an organization that tells me it’s okay to give away my money, that I’m not wrong for wanting to give big or thinking I don’t need this.” As we grow bigger and bolder as an organization, and as the ecosystem of organizing the rich expands, there’s going to be more people for whom RG is not a fit, and I think that’s ok.
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Thank you Yahya! We’ll stop there for today. There are more important reflections to share in part two of our conversation. I’m trying (and failing) to keep these interviews at a reasonable length.
If you appreciated this interview and want to read more, please like and comment below. I know both Yahya and I would love to see the thoughts and questions our conversation brings up for you.
This line “leveraging privilege for social change” is from one of RG’s early mission statements.
A praxis group is a small group of people with class privilege and wealth, or who are partners of people with wealth, who meet monthly over the course of 6 months. A Praxis Group builds community and relationships, provides space to talk openly and honestly about wealth and class privilege, and supports you to set personal goals around giving and leveraging privilege for social change. Monthly meetings help everyone move forward with their personal commitments by being a place to check in on steps you are taking around these issues. Here is the most updated RG Praxis Group guide.
Base Building is how an organization grows the number of people it is connected to, from the constituency it is organizing, that are willing to take collective action together towards a shared goal.
The Consulting Cafe is a time during RG’s conferences where participants can sign up for one on one conversations with experienced leaders in relevant topics like social justice philanthropy, investing, fundraising, and financial planning.
PCBF organizes to end cash bail and pre-trial detention in Philadelphia. Growing out of the Mama's Day Bail Outs, started by Southerners on New Ground, they post bail for those who can't afford it as part of a revolving fund, and they organize in coalition to pressure the city and commonwealth to end the practice of pre-trial detention.
More from Yahya on this idea of “capacity” as a myth: “Capacity is often a passive way of talking about priorities. When people say they don't have capacity for something, they usually mean they are prioritizing other things. We see this time and time again with movement moments: people who didn't have "capacity" to attend a weekly meeting suddenly are able to be in the streets every day. Which isn't to say we shouldn't prioritize things in our life, but as organizers, if we can shift the conversation from a binary yes/no to what are someone's motivations and self-interest, we can move people.”
Since this interview in the Winter/Spring of 2023, RG has returned much more to in-person events, including their first in-person Making Money Make Change Retreat since the start of the pandemic.
Top two faves here:
1. "I'm not in this work to move as much money as possible. I’m in this work to end wealth hoarding and the class system as we know it, so we can have a world where everyone has agency over their lives and access to the resources they need to thrive."
2. The footnote on "capacity" as a myth. So much of our work in shifting away from the false binary of "donors vs. doers" is uncovering people's efficacy - they're capable of helping, their voices will be heard, acting together is more effective than acting alone, and the solutions being pushed for will solve the problem.
Huge thanks to Yahya and Mike for this one!
Thank you for this!