A year of giving away money

Happy new year, folks! I wanted to post my giving plan for the past year, as promised: here it is, with some background info and some of the thinking that went into creating it.  

Giving away all this money has been such a weird experience. One one hand, it’s been so great to have so much money to support organizations I know are doing amazing work. But also, it’s been really hard and frustrating to observe/participate in philanthropy culture and continue to learn more and more about how much philanthropy screws over social justice movements. Having lots of money to give away is such a palpable experience of how horrifyingly unjust wealth distribution, capitalism, and social justice funding are. But I’ve also gotten to have so many amazing conversations with friends, family, and other organizers in my community about all the things I love to talk about that we write about here all the time. I’m trying to get more comfortable with navigating those complicated spaces that exist when trying to act in just ways in totally unjust situations.

There are lots of things I could have spent a lot more time thinking about: whether to give a lot to a few places or less to more places, how much to give nationally vs. internationally, to give through activist-advised re-granting institutions or just give directly to organizations, to give all at once or to spread my giving out over a few years, etc. I never found satisfactory answers to any of these questions, and I tried to just move forward instead of getting caught up in doing things perfectly. I’m so excited for when every wealthy social justice activist is giving away their inheritance and talking about it openly with the whole movement, because then it will be so much easier to make these kinds of decisions. Actually, I’m so excited for when capitalism ends and we find ways to take care of ourselves that aren’t based on oppression and exploitation, and social justice organizations have all the resources they need without having to rely on the whims of a handful of lefty rich people.