Month: March 2009

I’m leading a workshop in Philly on April 5 for people with access to wealth who want to support social justice work, and I thought some Enough readers might be interested. Here’s the link – Giving and Beyond: Leveraging Privilege and Resources for Grassroots Movements (I’m privately calling it “Philanthropy for Anti-Capitalists”). Please come!

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What does it mean to be both a donor and an activist? How can people with access to wealth support grassroots social justice movements? How do we challenge institutionalized oppression within philanthropy? What are some ways to leverage privilege and resources beyond giving money?

Giving and Beyond: Leveraging Privilege and Resources for Grassroots Movements
A workshop exploring class, money and social change.
Sunday April 5, 1-5pm
1500 Walnut Street, Second Floor Conference Room
Fee: Sliding Scale $35-$75 
To register for this workshop click here.
(This workshop is a solicitation-free space)

This interactive workshop is intended for people who have a working understanding of social justice philanthropy and grassroots organizing, and who have experience giving or planning to give. We’ll share some specific models for giving money within a social justice framework, explore other ways of leveraging privilege, talk about what it means to support grassroots organizing beyond the mainstream nonprofit model, and much more. We’ll also have time to delve into deeper questions about accountability, how much is “enough”, applying social justice principles to our personal practices around money, and whatever else you bring!

This workshop is designed specifically for people with social justice values who have access to financial wealth. “Wealth” can mean many different things: it can be something we have now or something we expect to gain access to in the future, it can come from earnings or inheritance, and it can range widely in scale from a thousand or less to millions or more. This workshop is for you if you feel that you have (or have access to) substantially more resources than you need to support yourself.

A couple weeks ago I was having a talk with somebody at a coffee shop in my neighborhood, and I noticed some graffiti on the bathroom wall that said: “Downward mobility is not radical.” Incidentally, the talk I was having that day was with a young white class-privileged person who was struggling with what to do with some inherited money, and we were talking about wealth and social justice and giving away inheritance and all of these things, and the whole time I kept pondering the graffiti and thinking that actually, downward mobility is radical. Wouldn’t it be very radical if all wealthy people gave away their money and spent only what they needed to live? 

[I’m talking here about the kind of downward mobility that’s chosen and intentional, not the job-loss/cuts-to-social-services/increasing-wealth-disparity kind.]

 

But I know what the graffiti means – it means that the writer is sick of people who act like they don’t have money when actually they do. Personally, I lived this problematic phenomenon for several years after high school, which I spent hitchhiking, trainhopping, and dumpster diving my way around the country in the company of other freewheeling punk youth who (like me) often lacked a particularly tight race and class analysis. Continue reading “On downward mobility”