“We can’t afford to leave any power on the table” An Interview with Braeden Lentz
Welcome to Organize the Rich!
I am so excited to share this interview with you. This is the first post I’ve sent out since almost all of you subscribed. It is jam packed with important insights and lessons learned, and I can’t wait to see what you think and read your comments.
An important note: Thank you Braeden for being willing to share your honest thoughts and reflections with me and with us. It is no small thing, especially for someone who is not wealthy and whose job depends on the support of wealthy people. The culture of the rich (and all of the institutions we run) discourages honest conversations about class and money. And yet, these conversations are just what’s called for if we’re going to build the loving, rigorous and powerful cross-class movements needed to defeat fascism and win the big structural changes we all want.
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Ok. Big breath.
Let’s get going…
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Breaeden Lentz is one of the most skilled fundraisers and wealthy people organizers I know. We met in 2010 when he was 22 and was working at Unitarian Universalist Veatch Program at Shelter Rock (a social justice grantmaking program), and joined the Resource Generation (RG) board. I was the Co-Director of RG at the time, so he was my boss. I liked and respected him right away. He comes from a working class white family, grew up in Upstate New York, and is incredibly clear about his political commitments to ending white supremacy and winning multi-racial working class governing power. He is honest, funny and a high integrity guy. Since we met, he has been on the board of RG, on staff at RG as Associate Director, on staff at Solidaire and now is the Development Director at Working Families Party (WFP). He intimately knows what it means to build political homes that not only help wealthy people become powerful social movement funders, but wealthy people organizers and (to the extent that we’re able) full partners in left movements.
Below are excerpts from a short interview with Braeden in December 2022. It has been edited for content clarity. It is, at least in part, based on these questions. There are many ideas shared that I would love to talk more about and go deeper into with Braeden. There is so much more we can all learn from him. There aren’t too many raised working class leaders who have figured out to play a central role in this work for the long haul. And I’m happy with the questions we were able to cover in this first attempt. I want you to know about Braeden, learn from him, listen to him…and, it’s imperative all of us in the US know about and support WFP.
MG: What do you want Working Families Party, and your WFP people, to better understand about left organizing of rich people?
BL: I want more of our people to see organizing the owning class as possible. To be curious about how to do it as part of a sound, uncomplicated strategy, and to hold its contradictions within a coherent ideology and toward WFP’s goals. Because we can’t afford to leave any power on the table.
MG: What do you see as the lineage of your work organizing wealthy people as part of left movements? Whose shoulders do you stand on?
BL: When I was a Program Associate at Veatch, before I really understood what philanthropy even was as a field, my colleagues brought me into collaborative spaces like Social Justice Infrastructure Funders where I first started to see this work happen. I first was exposed to the concept of funder education there, and was aware that some of our most flexible partners like French American Charitable Trust and Solidago Foundation had families with wealth as part of their boards and involved in their giving. These institutions held a commitment to the education and leadership development of their families as part of their work.
These left program officers often worked with living donors—wealthy people who were receptive to the world around them and had the will and power to change their foundations in response—before social justice philanthropy and funding movements were popular. That is the part of my lineage that helped to discipline my thinking, both about power building and on organizing wealthy people.
My emotional development as a working-class person within wealthy people organizing is due primarily to Resource Generation, where I later joined the board. I started building more direct cross-class relationships through RG and witnessed a strategy that frontloaded political development with young people just beginning to form their worldviews and understanding of the wealth they had access to or would inherit. At the same time as I saw strategic opportunity for the movement and began to make meaningful relationships, I also grappled with anger at wealthy people who were right before my eyes in a way they never had been—and grief about the unjust system of wealth hoarding they represented to me.
I also want to name North Star Fund and the Funding Exchange (FEX) model it comes from as important to the lineage of good relational fundraising that informed me, RG, and others. I want to make a distinction between relational fundraising and organizing. Much of what RG has done historically is good relational fundraising, and part of why I was excited for RG to begin taking on campaign work was so members could begin to have direct experience in campaigns and partner with organizing groups engaging them in a bigger picture. [MG Note: This is one of several juicy statements from Braeden that we didn’t get into more. At this point in the interview, Braeden’s doorbell rang and he went to answer it.]
MG: What are the stories or lessons from your time organizing wealthy people that you want others to know and understand?
BL: You cannot heal your own trauma about class by getting angry at rich individuals.
Most of my early years as a board member with Resource Generation were shaped by a mix of discomfort, shock, frustration, anger, sadness, and grief—just to be around rich people. And I think that's the number one barrier that most working-class people will experience: the emotional contradiction of being so adjacent to the systems that hoard and harm us, and the people that system benefits. And I think the way to maybe not heal—but to make sense of the tension—is seeing and believing in the humanity of rich people. Actually believing in their liberation as humans, their capacity to transform, and their ability to have a meaningful role in our movements. If you don't believe in those ideas, none of the tension inherent to this organizing project will ever make sense.
As helpful a rallying cry as “eat the rich” is to call out the urgency of wealth inequality, it doesn’t work to have that mentality sink into your approach working with individual rich people. It makes a difference to see them as people who deserve liberation from our unjust class system, not just as targets to campaign against or people to extract money from. And they can tell when you bring an extractive approach, like any human can. The first lesson, I think, is the skill of being emotionally developed enough to personally hold the contradiction.
A second lesson is more tactical; it’s important to remember that wealthy people, no matter where they are in their development, live within cultures and institutions. You’ll need to navigate within wealthy class spaces in order to properly organize them. If you don’t come from those spaces, navigating them will be a necessary skill that requires genuine curiosity and patience.
Pretending that you can organize them in the same way as anyone else is probably not going to work. For example, a lot of wealthy people with radical values will look for the easy way out: “What's the easiest way for me to absolve myself of guilt so I feel in right relationship with working-class people?” Some wealthy people will have that approach. Some wealthy people will be stuck in their owning-class culture in other ways, like they might want to have a lot of control over outcomes and only want to work on projects that they feel a sense of power over. Others may be scared of making wrong decisions in the eyes of their family and advisors and be too discouraged to act at all.
I think being disciplined about how much time you spend on people is important. It also takes time to learn and decide if you feel like you can help move a wealthy person or not in their political development and commitment to take actions. You’ll need to make strategic choices about some people you just have to give up on. Some people are too lost. A lesson there for me is that the earlier you get involved in someone’s political development, the better.
It also helps to just be upfront. It's better to be direct about when you want to have a call where you're going to ask for money. If you actually want to build a relationship with the person, tell them, “I want to have a meeting to get to know you better” and mean it. And when you're going to do an ask, let them know you want to do it and ask for their consent. Ask them if it’s okay as part of setting up a meeting. Or if it comes up in real time, be like, “Hey, it seems like it might make sense to talk about funding or money now. Is that okay with you?” These are probably just basic organizing practices that I’ve found work.
Rich people behave differently, have different stories, have different layers of institutions around them, are at different stages in their development, like different things as people, and have different families. I know that maybe there's some guidance on typical class tendencies, like the ones in RG’s book, Classified: How to Stop Hiding your Privilege and Use it for Social Change. But at the end of the day, wealthy people are as nuanced and unique and fascinating as the working-class activists and volunteers we organize.
I probably haven't ever had a one-on-one meeting with “Cynthia” (MG: Braeden is using fake names for his examples) since I started working here, but she's been increasing her giving to us because she sees our work and gets it. We know she's got our back and we're her favorite. Another wealthy donor, “Matthew,” needs a meeting every two weeks. There's a whole spectrum of engagement, and it's really not one-size-fits-all. That brings me to the importance of assigning wealthy people to the right organizer. A point of contact who is committed to building a relationship from beginning to end, and to making decisions about how to best move forward the person’s political development and bring them into the life of the organization.
It's the same with organizing activists from any class background.
This reminds me, we're starting to develop an organizing model for WFP funder engagement.
The model starts with Program Funders, people who basically just care about the good work that we do. They put money in and helpful electoral outcomes pop out and the map gets painted more blue. Then there are Party Funders who better understand the breadth and depth of what we're doing, building the governing power of the multiracial working class through elections as a third party in America. And those are the people who see WFP as their political home, who are in some sense “class traitors” and are offering what they have to the larger project of building multiracial working class political power. And then there's the Kitchen Cabinet—which we probably need a better name for—people who not only get it and are invested in us, but who actually start doing peer-to-peer funder and wealthy people organizing on our behalf. Those are the engagement patterns that we’ve started to notice and name.
We want our people going into meetings with wealthy people reading for their engagement level. What is this person’s level of understanding and curiosity, and where can we move together?
MG: Nice. I like the simplicity.
BL: Yeah. There are three options. It’s a leadership ladder. It helps us understand where wealthy people are in relation to our work and allows us to just admit some people are going to stick as Program Funders and are not going to engage with the party’s full vision. And they may give a ton of money, right? They are part of our united front in the war to fight fascism, but might not be with us for every battle.
MG: What do you see as the strengths of how the left engages wealthy people right now? And what do you see as the weaknesses?
BL: What are we doing well? We are really good at making compelling, urgent pitches about crises that get rich people to take risks that they otherwise wouldn't have taken in terms of the amounts that they're giving.
For example, the surge in fundraising to defeat Donald Trump (MG: For example the hundreds of millions raised by Movement Voter Project and Way to Win). WFP benefitted from this surge moment—and as a movement, we're really great at creating stories about urgency and that “this is the most important thing ever!”
I don't think we're really good at getting wealthy people to make longer-term commitments to build institutions. This is in part because that's the way philanthropy is structured. It's also in part because the left can be ambivalent about even building institutions, and we often lack long-term plans. There is also a fundamental avoidance—to not really want to manage relationships with wealthy people or believe that’s possible. So yeah, the thing that I see, working-class left leaders and fundraisers have exacerbated the surge and fall of money, too. I mean, we always talk shit to philanthropy, like, “Give us long-term general operating support!” But we don't actually have long-term plans that invite people into meaningful relationships with us toward big, long, multi-year general support giving. So it can be a self-fulfilling prophecy.
I think we're really good at explaining the moral imperative of the moment to wealthy people. I think we're good at basic political education, like getting people to understand racism and capitalism. I don't think we're good at political education about what power needs to be built to change those things. We know how to get people to turn up on the system, but we're not disciplined about explaining the theory of change needed to build and win power over the long term and the institutions we need to build to get there.
And I think all of these opportunities and shortcomings fall back on a set of donor advisers who help pick up the pieces and help donors navigate things. Yet even still, this is an imperfect solution since advisers come in with their own set of relationships and theory of change, and vary in their desire to push, agitate, and learn with donors versus being deferential to preserve their jobs. At worst, we end up with this class of advisers that mostly sees itself as in service to the donor, not to social movements.
MG: If you can identify two priorities for lefty rich people organizing over the next five years, what would it be? What experiments would you want to see the left try?
BL: In general? Not necessarily for WFP?
MG: Just if you were to try to level up left organizing of wealthy people in the next five, ten, 20, 50 years, what are some things that you would love to see happen?
BL: First of all, I would love to have our organizations encourage donors to sign up for progressive donor networks like Solidaire, Way to Win, Resource Generation, Democracy Alliance, and Movement Voter Project. No donor network is perfect—just like no working class organization is perfect—-but it’s better to lean into a community of learning and commitment than to stay isolated. And I believe in collective action. It might be that some wealthy people can find political home within working class organizations—I do think this is the case for many of our folks at WFP—but if an organization doesn’t have the capacity to support them, we can’t leave our people hanging.
Second, this requires the left to hold wealthy donors with less scarcity—which has many other benefits. Get them into formation and encourage them to join a donor network. It's going to be helpful to you as the fundraiser to have them be part of a network where they can fundraise for you. It's also going to be a place for them to get some of their emotional needs met about their unique experience as wealthy people—which is likely not possible at your organization. And if you actually believe that you need strong coalition partners, and that your organization cannot be all things to all people, why wouldn’t you encourage your funders to support other good work?
But there's not enough of those groups for people to sign up to, and they all need more capacity!
The left should have proper infrastructure that's going to meet the needs of rich people stepping into movement in alignment with working-class vision. And then I think we need to hold our donors less closely and encourage them to sign up for it. Yeah. I feel like that's the top. Those are the top two things.
Finally, one even more fundamental thing that is needed. The left actually needs to consolidate its ideology and strategy.
Funding an ocean of grassroots activism, or the first people of color activists you stumble across, is not going to move us toward ending wealth inequality. We need to invest in wealthy people’s understanding of how change works, to understand power building, and to be committed to building the governing power of the multiracial working class to ultimately force wealth redistribution through taxes and to deliver a safety net that works for everyone and invests in healthy and vibrant communities. If we encourage rapid, chaotic giving, we are mitigating emotions of guilt and urgency, but we are leaving power on the table. Obviously, this requires the left to consolidate around ideology and strategy—when we lack strategy, this has ripple effects into the behavior of left wealthy people, too. As we consolidate around ideology and strategy, there need to be enough organizations to receive these wealthy people, and there needs to be more of a generous spirit to get people into the right house in the neighborhood of organizations. Let’s get wealthy people into a political home that is part of a broader multiracial working class movement, and which is going to help them unlock the most amount of money as part of a larger strategy and meet their political and emotional development needs, just like people of all class backgrounds deserve.
So just all that.
Solid read for organizers! Thank you both.