Free the People to Free the Money to Free the People: An Organize the Rich Anthology

For over fifty years, a growing movement has been quietly organizing wealthy people to redistribute their resources toward justice. From the radical rich kids of the 1970s to today's cross-class coalitions, this is the most comprehensive collection of stories to date from the front lines of this work.

Through intimate first-person accounts, strategic analysis, and hard-won wisdom, contributors reveal what it actually looks like to organize across class--the relationships built, experiments tried, victories won, and mistakes made. These pages contain the voices of inheritors giving away millions, organizers building unlikely alliances, and movement leaders grappling with the contradictions of philanthropy and power.

At a time when billionaires shape elections and inequality reaches historic levels, this anthology offers both hope and practical wisdom. It shows how the wealthy can be organized not just as donors, but as full participants in creating a just future--freeing the people to free the money to free the people.

Contributors include: Winona LaDuke, Rajasvini Bhansali, Iimay Ho, Braeden Lentz, Michael Gast, Linda Burnham, Max Elbaum, Alex T. Tom, Chuck Collins, Marian Moore, Billy Wimsatt, Nigel Charles, Leah Hunt-Hendrix, Sharon Chen and Mijo Lee.

Michael Gast has been engaging, fundraising and organizing the wealthy toward justice for over 20 years. He is the former director of Resource Generation (RG), where he spent 13 years as a member, leader and staff person. Since leaving RG in 2014, he's worked as a development director, fundraising consultant, donor educator and donor advisor with individual wealth holders and groups such as Movement Voter Project, Chinese Progressive Association, Showing Up for Racial Justice and Thousand Currents. These days, Michael directs a multimedia project called Organize the Rich. Born and raised in San Francisco, he currently lives in Oakland with his awesome wife and son.

Marian came to the work of convening, facilitating, coaching and organizing wealthy people through her experience in the Threshold Community, aka Donuts, which she joined in 1990. She co-founded and co-led Play BIG, Lead with Land, Just Economy Institute, the Trust Web, Jubilee Gift, and Jubilee Justice's Our Ancestral Journey, some of which are still in play. Her ancestors were colonizers who arrived here between the 1600s and 1800s. Many accumulated massive wealth and land, some of which she inherited. Her parents changed the trajectory of that lineage through their social justice activism. Marian's work emphasizes the need to shift consciousness to change patterns of wealth and land accumulation and activate redistribution.

Alex T. Tom is a second-generation Chinese American born and raised in San Francisco and the Bay Area. He is the former executive director of the Chinese Progressive Association in San Francisco and is currently the executive director of the Center for Empowered Politics, a movement capacity-building center that aims to train and develop leaders and grow movement infrastructure at the intersection of racial justice, organizing and power building. Alex is also a proud baba (father) of an awesome and autistic son and blogs regularly on parenting and politics on Diary of a Baba.