This article is my story of wealth redistribution, which began in earnest in 2017 with the launch of our family foundation and peaked five years later after my dad died and I redistributed a multimillion-dollar inheritance.

Scaling up the redistribution of wealth in this country is urgent. Not only are many issues, such as democracy, inequality, and climate, at critical tipping points, but many funders are also retracting their commitments to equity and justice. As the government increases pressure on progressive nonprofits, funders are stepping back, not wanting to put their own tax-exempt status at risk. While nearly $2 trillion sits in philanthropic coffers, many funders are opting to protect their resources and save them for the proverbial “rainy day.”

As some larger philanthropic institutions are capitulating to the government’s attacks on diversity, equity, and inclusion, it is important for individual donors and family foundations to step up and affirm their commitments to marginalized communities.

I am sharing my story in the hope that it inspires more of these funders and donors to accelerate their giving. I will touch on what compelled me to redistribute the money, the emotional and psychological barriers I faced, and the lessons I learned along the way.

Family History, Wealth Accumulation, and Wealth Redistribution

The majority of the wealth in my family came from a small business that my grandparents started after fleeing Nazi Germany in 1941. Several years after the war, they received restitution payments from the German government and used those payments to start a medical supply business. At the time my family arrived in the United States, Ashkenazi Jews were part of an expanded classification of Whiteness. This allowed them to assimilate into dominant middle-class culture, despite a harsh ongoing undercurrent of anti-semitism.

As a young adult, I lived the life my parents and peers expected of me. I went to college, got an MBA and started a career in the private sector. In my thirties, however, I grew increasingly uneasy about the dissonance between my values of equality and justice and my passive accumulation of wealth. In my forties, I started to ramp up my giving and became active in organized philanthropy, but still kept my class status and giving as private as possible. It wasn’t until my fifties, as a result of rising political changes in the United States coupled with an expanded awareness of my Jewish history, that I developed a more reparative approach to my giving and became more public about my wealth.

Read the full article about wealth redistribution by Alan Preston at National Center for Family Philanthropy.