I got involved with Resource Generation about four years ago when my roommate invited me to an RG open house. The generational wealth in my family comes mostly from family businesses, including real estate and manufacturing boots for U.S. soldiers in the Panama Canal Zone (both of which are directly connected to colonization). Raised in an upper-middle-class neighborhood with semi-secret trust funds totaling $210,000 (today that number is about $135,000, with the difference mostly given back to the communities from which it originally came), I dropped out of undergrad after my first year and was working as a carpenter’s apprentice when I went to my first RG event.

Although I genuinely love trade work, I also knew that I couldn’t resolve my feelings about class and wealth by simply running away and shunning the wealthy community and identity I grew up in. I appreciate the opportunity RG gives me to embrace my wealthiness and work with my people to change the role we to play in the oppressive class system (and dismantling it).

This past winter and spring I participated in the third cohort of The Giving Project through Headwaters Foundation for Justice, along with two other Twin Cities RG members. Headwaters is a social justice foundation granting locally in Minnesota, and RG has had a relationship with the foundation for the last several years. A couple of our members were even on the steering committee that helped launch The Giving Project at Headwaters, modeled after a similar project in other cities, such as Seattle. The Giving Project is a community-led grantmaking model for building power through community, leadership development, and funding social change. This model is important because it puts the decision-making power of where funding is allocated into the hands of the community, and grounds both the fundraising and grantmaking process firmly in relationships.

Read the full article about The Giving Project in Minnesota by Madeline Shaw at Resource Generation.