📣 We’ve officially wrapped up our Spring Drive 📣 — our bi-annual membership drive where we grow and engage our base on the value of redistributing wealth, invest in members’ leadership and skills around fundraising, and call on our members to fully fund RG’s budget and sustain this work to organize our people.
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As part of our Spring Drive, we called on our base to take action with us—and folks showed up: - 682 people ‼️ registered for the national political education events we hosted or co-hosted:
- Donors Against MAGA: How Donors Can Stand Up to Trump & Musk’s Agenda
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A donor mobilization event co-hosted by numerous donor networks and our sibling organization, RG Action. Recording here.
- Still We Build: The State of Our Movements
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A powerful panel featuring our movement partners and allies from Movement for Black Lives, Popular Democracy, Grassroots International, and Headwaters Foundation for Justice. Recording here. (passcode: stillwebuild!2025)
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Brick by Brick: How to Build Your Political Home
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A storytelling celebration featuring graduating members of our inaugural Organizer Praxis cohort, a base-building cohort representing 8 RG chapters across the country. Recording here.
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57 people 🦋 became members or renewed their membership dues, sustaining our community of ~1000 dues-paying members.
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212 people 🔥 have pledged to boldly redistribute wealth to movements, bringing the total pledged for 2025 to $46.7M – almost halfway to our annual goal of $100M!
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While we’re celebrating this membership community and the organizing work we’ve undertaken together, we want to acknowledge the difficult reality: we fell short of our goals to raise our organizational budget. We are about $500,000 behind where we need to be in order to sustain our day-to-day organizing and political education. We share this to be as transparent as possible with you and to underscore the importance of funding our own organizations. RG’s fully funded budget makes it possible for us to boldly organize young people in this vital moment.
We aren’t calling on our base to take one-off actions. We’re calling on young people to be part of a long-term membership community where we build our power over time. Right now, hundreds of thousands of young people with class privilege and/or wealth are forming their analysis, values, and political framework. Staff, members, and leaders with Resource Generation are here to support people on their political journey, develop new leadership, grow our organizing capacity, and resource movements for collective liberation.
If you haven’t renewed your dues for 2025, now is the time. Commit 10% of your overall redistribution to fully fund RG’s work.
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What is the value of a membership community? |
Inspired by membership organizations like labor unions, our membership structure is designed to aggregate resources at the scale needed to contest for power against corporations and governments. But a membership model is about more than just scale. It’s also an investment in developing leadership from within and cultivating shared ownership of this organizing project.
The following is an excerpt from a piece called How to Fight With Your Mom About Money by Ingrid Ren, a member of RG’s Boston chapter, reflecting on her own process of politicization. As she wrote, “My parents immigrated from China, became wealthy in the U.S., and do not think of themselves as wealthy. I wrote an informal guide on how to navigate this as I go through it myself.”
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When you’re young, really young, there’s nothing to fight about. Your mom tells you what to do, and you do it. She tells you how the world is, and you believe her. When you’re six or seven, living in a three-story Palo Alto townhouse your parents bought for $630,000 in 2003 (worth $2 million today), you ask your mom, “Are we rich or are we poor?” “We’re somewhere in the middle,” she says firmly. You believe her.
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The summer before fourth grade, you move to San Francisco, where one third of kids, including you and your brother, attend private school. The city is noisy and smelly, and you’re shocked to see people sitting, laying, and living on the streets. In middle school, you take the train home, and a woman with wrinkled cheeks sits next to you. “Do you have any change?” she asks. You hesitate. “I’m so hungry,” she says, a bony hand rubbing her stomach. You nod and empty out your coin pouch into her unsteady palm, altogether less than two dollars, keeping your wallet with your dollar bills tucked away in your backpack. You still don’t see yourself or your family as rich, but you are aware of a level of poverty, of lack, that you hadn’t known before.
- In high school, you attend a four-week STEM summer camp. You crush on an engineering girl with red hair and strong calves from Bakersfield, an oil and agriculture city north of LA. After the camp ends, you spend many nights on the phone with her, and you mention that tuition for your private high school is $30,000 ($46,000 today). “That’s how much my family makes in a year,” she says.
- Senior year, you fill out a college application form for the UCs, and there’s an optional box asking for your household’s income. You grasp for a guess—two software engineers’ salaries—and type, $500,000. When your college counselor reviews your application, she deletes the number. “You don’t need to put that. It could only hurt you,” she says.
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The following summer, you’re back home fighting with your mom about money. “Ingrid,” your mom says in your bedroom one night, “I refuse to become a burden on you or your brother.” Your mom embodies the trope of eldest immigrant daughter. She sponsored her parents and her brother for immigration to the U.S., bought an apartment for her parents, and co-bought a house for her brother all while nurturing a tense relationship with the three of them. Although she has never labelled her parents as abusive, she has certainly described abusive acts of theirs. That evening, you understand that her family has been a burden on her, financially and emotionally, and you can see how her unending chase for money is a way to protect you from inheriting her burden. You want to tell her that she did it, she has enough, she has kept you safe, but while you believe it so strongly you feel like you know the future, you cannot guarantee anything. She’s right. Anything could happen at any moment.
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A year later, as fate will have it, students at Brown launch a college chapter of Resource Generation. In your last semester of college, you join Praxis, a series of meetings to talk about wealth and to challenge each other to redistribute.You meet the facilitator and two other Praxis participants in an old classroom, and you drag four chair desks across the uneven wooden floor and sit in a small circle. The facilitator shares her “money story”: Her parents immigrated to the U.S., work as a dentist and a law firm partner, own a $4 million home, sent her to a private high school (whose tuition is $64,000 today), give her a monthly allowance of $500, and share your parents’ scarcity mindset. I was stunned. Not by her family’s wealth which sounded comparable to mine, but by her honesty which, because it was about money, could be mistaken for bluntness. Then, you and the other participants share your own money stories. Your cheeks turn pink while you tell yours, but by the end you are relieved. You’ve always prided yourself on your honesty, and it’s only after verbalizing numbers and experiences that you realize how much you conceal.
Read the full piece by Ingrid Ren here. |
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Resource Generation is 95% funded by members like you—young people with wealth organizing to redistribute land, wealth, and power.
We encourage you to consider joining RG as a dues-paying member, and if you would like to get involved in your local chapter, please fill out this intake form!
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Resource Generation 1216 Broadway New York, NY 10001 United States |
Resource Generation Inc is registered with the IRS as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization. Our EIN is 27-1847561. Donations and gifts are tax deductible to the extent allowed by law. Visit our Charitable Disclosures page for additional information. |
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