about the project

What started out in 2022 as a book project with my dear colleague Iimay Ho, and with financial support from Working Families Party and Solidaire, has transformed into much more. Organize the Rich is now a multimedia writing, video and audio project, sharing interviews, stories and analysis about what it means to organize the rich as part of multiracial working class led movements.

Organize the Rich is a project of Solidaire Network, with financial support from a handful of individual donors. It has an all-star advisory committee that includes:

  • Erin Heaney, SURJ

  • Yahya Alazrak, Resource Generation

  • Rajasvini Bhansali, Solidaire

  • Chuck Collins, Institute for Policy Studies

  • Braeden Lentz,Working Families Party

  • Iimay Ho, Local Progress

  • Alex Tom, Center for Empowered Politics

  • Elspeth Gilmore, Trust Web

  • Taj James, Full Spectrum Labs

Some of the key questions I’m looking at include…

  • What’s the lineage of progressive and left efforts to organize the rich?

  • What have we learned from the last 50 years of experiments in this work to organize the owning class to join and back working class led movements for equity and justice?

  • Where are we at now?

  • What might be next?

founder

My name is Michael Gast and I’ve been engaging, fundraising and organizing the wealthy towards justice since 2003. I’m the former Director of Resource Generation (RG) where I spent thirteen years as a member, leader, and staff person, organizing young people with wealth towards the equitable distribution of land, wealth and power. RG is one of the only groups in the world that explicitly organizes wealthy people for justice. I transitioned off RG staff when I was 34, in 2014. Since then, I have worked as a development director, fundraising consultant, donor educator, organizer and advisor with groups such as Movement Voter Project, Chinese Progressive Association, Showing Up for Racial Justice, Thousand Currents, Generative Somatics, Climate Justice Alliance, East Bay Community Foundation, Justice Funders, and more. 

I’ve helped numerous organizations develop their strategy and practice for engaging and fundraising from their middle class and wealthy supporters. I’ve worked closely with hundreds of wealthy people, helping them give back the money in their control, organize themselves, their families and communities, and stretch to become full partners in movements for equity and justice. I’ve helped move hundreds of millions of dollars towards frontline movements building the power of the multi-racial working class, addressing the climate crisis, and working towards collective liberation.

My family and I are part of the global 1% of wealth holders. In 2022, that meant a net wealth of $1,000,000 or more. We have been and are the well paid professionals who work for wealthier people and, at times, over the last several generations, we have been the business owners and bosses running the show. I am a part of and was raised in both the US middle and owning class.

I have found it useful to claim my place amongst the wealthy rather than attempting to downplay or minimize the $ and positional power in my life. I learned early on in this work, from my dear friend and mentor Holmes Hummel, that we are all trained to look up the class pyramid, never down. I try to notice what I’ve got and how it got there, and use my class position (and the access and relationships it brings) as one of my social-movement superpowers.

This work is personal to me, and it’s been my professional home for quite a while now. As in many parts of my life, I’m a bridge between different worlds and experiences, and I’m glad to play that role here. However you arrived here, whatever your background, I’m thrilled you’re reading this, entrusting me with your time, and interested in the conversation. Thank you!

CONTRIBUTORS

  • Marian Moore

    CO-EDITOR OF ANTHOLOGY

    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

    CO-EDITOR OF THE ANTHOLOGY

    Alex 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.

  • Isaac Lev Szmonko

    AUTHOR OF TRANSFORMATIVE DONOR ORGANIZING

    Isaac is a loving and rigorous organizer and political educator dedicated to building power in left movements to end racial capitalism. He organized with Critical Resistance to abolish prisons, police and other forms of criminalization. At Resource Generation he worked to increase taxes on the rich and increase the flow of resources into movements. At Catalyst Project, Isaac Lev worked to strengthen racial justice politics and practice with white organizers and majority-white organizations, training hundreds of grassroots organizers across the US and beyond through the Anne Braden Program.  At Jewish Voice for Peace, he was a board member, coach, and strategic planner.  Most recently, Isaac moved $100 million into grassroots liberatory movements as a donor advisor.  Isaac lives with his queer fam and his shorty pitbull in Oakland, CA (Huichin/Ohlone land). His passions include cooking, hiking, rambunctious laughter, leadership development, queer and trans community, and figuring out how to make revolutionary politics popular.

  • Allison Budschalow

    CO-HOST OF THE MOVEMENT MONEY PODCAST

    Allison is a people person with decades of experience in bringing folks together to build toward common goals. In 2019, she co-created Securing the Roots, a capacity-building fellowship to build people-power through a resource generation, mobilization and reclamation framework. In her work as a Core Consultant and Partner with the firm, Dragonfly Partners, she facilitates groups of all sizes through an exploration of who they are and what they are invested in. As the first person in her family to graduate from college, Allison received her BA from Earlham College and her MA from Goddard College. Born and raised in Philly and determined to raise her kids there, too, she is a member of the Kalmyk Mongol diaspora and is always excited to investigate the intersections of food, gentrification, race, class, and story-telling in her spare time.

  • ALLISON HARRISON

    WRITING AND ORGANIZATIONAL CONSULTANT

    Allison has 15 years in the nonprofit sector centered on issues of justice, empowerment, and healing–from a local rape crisis center to a state voting rights org to a national federation for people with rare illness. Her work is informed by her experiences as an advocate, caregiver, person with illness, intersectional feminist, mindfulness facilitator, program creator, writer, and more. She studied Creative Writing, American Studies, and Social & Economic Justice at UNC-Chapel Hill, where she also earned a Master of Social Work (MSW) degree with a concentration in Community, Management, and Policy Practice and an interdisciplinary Certificate in Nonprofit Leadership. She is a published poet. She continues to learn about mindfulness, mental health, and trauma; she is certified in Mental Health First Aid and Conscious Facilitation.