Tag: donating money

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Zeph’s story

by Zeph Fishlyn

I’m a mid-forties white genderqueer person born and raised in Montreal and raised again as an adult queerdo in the Mission District in San Francisco. I came from an owning-class Canadian WASP family. I can thank them for good teeth and education and vacation opportunities and also for legacies of silence, repression and anger. In 1987 I landed in San Francisco desperate for connection and found it among all the small-town escapees, queers from every quarter who had managed to walk-crawl-run to a city where they could find others like themselves.

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What I Gave and Where I Gave It: 2008 Giving Plan

Tyrone Boucher

Where The Money Came From (and some history)

My dad set up a trust fund for me when I was young, with stock from a software company he started. The company ended up making lots of money, and my trust fund grew to about $400,000. When I turned 25 (last year), the option opened up for the trustees to begin transferring the money into my control.

Because of my involvement in economic justice organizing, I’d already had lots of conversations about class, inheritance, and giving with my father by the time I started to get the money. He agreed to arrange for $200,000 to be transferred into a brokerage account that I controlled. I used some of the money to pay him back for my expenses he’d paid for in the past (like school), and put most of the rest of it into my giving plan.

Dealing with this money has been an ongoing process of talking with my family, understanding kind-of-complicated financial and tax stuff, making compromises (mostly about moving more slowly than I’d like), and getting clear on my own motivations and vision. I’m planning to give away 50-60% of the money from my trust fund by 2010, and most of the rest of it later, as I get access to it.

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Letter To My Dad About Giving Away Money

by Tyrone Boucher
I wrote this letter to my dad as part of an ongoing dialogue we were having shortly before I turned 25 and began to get some access to the trust fund he set up for me. I wanted to explain why I planned to give away the money, why I thought it was important and useful, and why I wanted him to be involved.
Hey dad,
Thank you so much for your thoughtful response to my email! I read it several times, and I’m sure I’ll return to it frequently as I continue to think about this stuff. Everything you wrote about economics was really interesting, and gave me a lot to think about in terms of how I view wealth accumulation. I have a lot of thoughts prompted in part by some really awesome books I’m reading right now about the racial wealth divide and political economy respectively, and I would really love to talk more this stuff as I finish those books and pull my thoughts together.
For right now, though, I want to respond to some of the more personal stuff you wrote – as well as bring up stuff that is really timely right now in regards to my giving and my own relationship to wealth.

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Notes From New Orleans

March 2008

Earlier this week I attended an amazing event put on by the Worker’s Center for Racial Justice here in New Orleans. In a chilly gym near the old St. Thomas housing development, a crowd of people gathered to celebrate victories. A group of organizers from the Congreso de Jornaleros (Day Laborer’s Congress) performed a play celebrating the victory of a group of Indian guestworkers who had been lured to the United States at huge personal cost, with false promises of permanent residency and steady employment. Instead of finding the anticipated American dream, they had been abused by an exploitative company, forced to sleep 24 to a room, prevented from leaving company premises, and threatened with deportation when they tried to organize.

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Privileged with Cancer

by Libby Goldberg 

It’s been four months since I was diagnosed with a rare form of ovarian cancer and six months since my long-term partner and I split up. Needless to say, thirty-one has been a fucking hard year for me. Less than five percent of women with ovarian cancer have my type, germ cell, and most of those who do are between the ages of fifteen and twenty. My diagnosis and treatment have impacted my life in deeper ways than I have words to adequately express, both negatively and positively, and I have faced enormous challenges. One of the major factors contributing to my ability to successfully meet these challenges has been my class identity. My recent experiences with cancer have provided me the opportunity to more viscerally understand the individual and institutional privileges I have access to and have inspired me to share this understanding with others in similarly privileged positions. Early on my process with cancer, I made the decision to use all the angles I could, however unfair it might be, to take care of my body and to save my life. While this decision feels like the right one, my experiences have continued to feel complicated and riddled with questions. What does it mean to be a radical with access to the best medical care in the country? What privileges are okay to use? Can I still be part of the “movement”, even though I belong to the owning class? What is the best way to leverage the resources I have towards social change? For those of us whose fire inside burns stronger with the possibility of a just world, where every human need gets met, where we are collectively liberated from oppression, I am hoping that my story will encourage discussion and action. Continue reading “Privileged with Cancer”