The New Rules of Old Money – HarpersBAZAAR.com

Images by PABLO DELCAN; Illustrated by JUSTIN METZ

When Casey Llewellyn was a teenager in Boston, her mother came to her with some startling news: She said our family had money and I would never have to work in my life if I didnt want to. That was extremely terrifying. Llewellyn, a 37-year-old playwright, says shed always known her family was well-offbut not like that. Of course I knew we had money, she tells me. We went on vacations to Europe and ski trips. But my politics at that time were like, Fuck the man. And then, suddenly, it was like, Oh, my God, Im the man.

Llewellyns mother, Amelie Ratliff, a longtime philanthropist, had actually been trying to start a conversation with her daughter about redistributing wealthsomething Ratliff herself has been passionate about since she was young. Growing up in Alabama in the 1960s, says Ratliff, 71, the contradictions of what I was learning in churchDo unto others as you would have them do unto youand what I was seeing in the world were stark, and so I looked for other ways of exploring those contradictions. Ratliffs familys money came from financial services, mortgage banking, and real estate. But she says that when she considered the true basis of their wealth, she saw it as a result of systemic and horrific discrimination, with land acquired from the elimination and removal of Indigenous folks and the labor of enslaved Africans. And so, she explains, as soon as I got money, I began distributing it.

My mother is very much the reason Im in this work, says Llewellyn, referring to her own philanthropy. She gave me access to my [inheritance] when I was 18 and recommended I reach out to Resource Generationa nonprofit organization founded in 1997 under the name Comfort Zone (it changed its name in 2000), which encourages people ages 18 to 35 to donate a large portion of their wealth to progressive causes. Since then, Llewellyn, who now lives in New York, says she has given away all but roughly 10 percent of her wealth to a variety of organizations dedicated to social justice and climate collapse. I dont think Im a rich person anymore, and it feels much better. I think its very hard to have money in an ethical way.

Casey and I are allies in our work, Ratliff says. She pushes me. Ive gone past where my parents werein terms of how much she gives awayand shes gone beyond where her mother is. Every wealthy person has to ask, How much is enough? How much do I really need, and how much do I want to make available more broadly?

A wave of radical giving is underway. The mammoth donations of philanthropic heavyweights like MacKenzie Scott and Melinda French Gates are only the most visible examples of affluent people trying to address Americas outrageous problem of economic inequality and change the way giving gets done. In a viral Medium post this past June, Scott wrote of her humbling belief that it would be better if disproportionate wealth were not concentrated in a small number of hands, and that the solutions are best designed and implemented by others. Those others are often the recipients of financial grants whose voices have not always been heard.

Llewellyn explains, Thats the structural change I think were going for: giving the power to the people with the expertise and the knowledge, the grassroots organizers and community organizers; giving power to communities that are trying to transform things for themselves.

Once upon a time, rich women did charity work as a way to gain social cachet (and, of course, some still do); organizing a fundraising gala was an opportunity to wear a designer gown and get your name in the society pages. That way of doing things never appealed to Susan Pritzker, 73. It always made me super uncomfortable, she says. The rubber-chicken dinners with a bunch of fancy people listening to somebody at the pulpit saying, You donors are so fabulous. It was very social. It was also transactional. What I was building was my Rolodex, and I could get a lot of people into those rooms because I could afford to go to everybody elses parties.

In 1969, Pritzker, then Susan Stowell, married Nicholas Pritzker, a member of the family that started Hyatt Hotels Corporation. (Today he is an independent venture entrepreneur.) I married into money, so I came into my philanthropy with this sense of, Well, its not really mine, says Pritzker, who lives in San Francisco.

Why doesnt everyone just put on jeans and T-shirts and get together and write letters? Regan Pritzker recalls thinking.For the price of the gown, the gala, and the dinner, why dont we just move the money to the organization?

She was all the more uneasy with how the grantees in traditional charity situations were often treated; sometimes they would get paraded across the stage as exhibits. I would always try to avoid doing that because I knew it was wrong. She couldnt stand it when grantees in turn seemed uncomfortable in their interactions with donors, to whom they seemed to feel they were expected to be deferential. Thats why Im really excited to have found out how to move toward something more empowering to both sides, Pritzker says. Really, truly, it all boils down to being constantly aware of where the power dynamic is sitting and asking, Is it in the right balance?

Since 2019, Pritzker has been on the board of Solidaire Network, one of the charitable organizations that has emerged in the two decades since the founding of Resource Generation. Solidaires purpose is to encourage wealthy people to not only donate their money but also change the system that unfairly gives them more of it. (Ratliff and Llewellyn have been members since 2015.)

Conceived in 2012 after the Occupy Wall Street movement started a national conversation about economic inequality, Solidaire was officially launched in 2013 by a group of activists and philanthropists including Leah Hunt-Hendrix, a granddaughter of the late Texas oil tycoon H.L. Hunt and the organizations first executive director. Today, the group has 244 members, 77 of whom are institutional members or have family foundations of their own. (Ratliff and Llewellyn, for example, sit on the board of the Ratliff Charitable Foundation, and in 2002 Pritzker and her husband and their four children founded the Libra Foundation.) This year, MacKenzie Scott donated $10 million to the organization. Solidaire operates out of 11 regional hubs, serving communities across the country. Solidaire is a network of donors who are committed to racial justice, to averting the climate crisis, and to making sure that were building a future thats democratic, multiracial, feminist, and pluralistic, says Rajasvini Bhansali, 46, the groups executive director since 2018. By becoming a Solidaire member, people consent to being in a collective project that liberates wealth and funds social movements, grassroots organizing, and what it will take to build a progressive force in the United States thats lasting and not dependent on electoral cycles.

Courtesy of Susan Pritzker

My politics at that time were like, Fuck the man. says Casey Llewellyn. And then, suddenly, it was like, Oh, my God, Im the man.

Most of our members have an understanding that the wealth that they have inherited wasnt just about their merit, says Bhansali, who started out as a community organizer after studying astrophysics at the University of California, Berkeley. Much of that wealth comes from a long history of exploitation that took for granted the labor of Black bodies and stolen Indigenous lands. Theres an understanding that its their job as donors to actually liberate this wealth in the service of social justice.

Instead of having donors control how funds get distributed, Solidaire calls upon its grantees to direct the course of change. For example, its Movement Infrastructure Fund is guided by strategic direction from our advisory committee, made up of movement organizers, says Bilen Mesfin Packwood, a spokeswoman for Solidaire and the founder and CEO of Change Consulting. The Black Liberation Pooled Fund is guided by our Movement Oversight Committee, also made up of longtime organizers working toward Black liberation, Mesfin Packwood says. Most of our staff has a background in grassroots organizing. We bring that experience and analysis to our work.

On an annual basis, Solidaire moves about $20 million through its three pooled funds, while its members collectively donate approximately $100 million more on their own. Our 10-year goal is to move a billion dollars to social justice, says Bhansali.

One notable recipient of Solidaires support has been the Movement for Black Lives. The groups annual budget was still relatively modest when it began partnering with Solidaire in 2014. Now theyre one of the most significant change organizations in this country, Bhansali says. Theyve become an umbrella organization thats essentially changing the narrative, changing how we think about anti-Blackness in this country. Without their consistent effort at the national scale, which Solidaire played a part in helping grow, we wouldnt be in the moment we find ourselves in. As incomplete as the work still is, its a pretty significant win of accompanying a movement from early days.

Regan Pritzker remembers the days when her mother, Susan, would be working on invitation lists and the invitations to charity events had to look a certain way. My moms not a fancy, formal person by any stretch, she says. Shes the one who would always be in jeans and a T-shirt, but she would participate in organizing these types of galas.

Regan, now 49, recalls thinking, even as a child, Why doesnt everyone just put on jeans and T-shirts and get together and write letters? I was like, I dont understand; for the price of the gown, the gala, and the dinner, why dont we just move the money to the organization? That really resonated for my mother too, but she was working inside of what was happening at the time. Its just the way things were doneand, of course, it still does happen. Ive been really heartened to see how its evolving, though theres still so much work to do. A former elementary-school teacher and cochair of the Libra Foundation board, Regan says she found out about Solidaire in 2017 from Leah Hunt-Hendrix. We went for a walk and she told me a bit about the history of the group, she says. Regan was moved because of the responsive nature of the work and the thinking around how people with access to wealth can lean in to philanthropy in ways that are not perpetuating some of the same patterns of donor-centered giving.

The influence Susan had on Regan as a philanthropist now came full circle when Regan introduced her mother to Solidaire. I immediately felt this sense of This is what Ive been looking for, says Susan.

Solidaires emphasis on promoting the agency of the people who are on the front lines doing the work of organizing was important to Regan from the beginning. She says that after joining the group, she became more educated on how she could help shift the paradigm of giving.

Its been essential for me to be in relationships with people who are willing to speak more honestly to me about my wealth, she says, who say things to me like, Im not trying to give you a hard time, but were not going to let you off the hook either, and you need to step up. Dont just write a check and go away. Get into the work with us, jump in and help us, and dont let it come from your ego; let it come from your commitment to this vision of a transformed society where all people have enough and we can live in a right relationship with the planet.

Theyre not just telling me, Youre amazing, she adds.

Regan confesses to feeling some discomfort at even talking about her involvement as a donor. I think my role is important, and I take it seriously, but I dont think of myself as the spokesperson for the work, she says. The way society still sees the donor as the celebrity in the story and centers the donor instead of centering the work and the good teams of people that make it possible has got to change. The fact that Im even having this conversation with you, I find ironic, because I do the least of all the people who work on all the different projects I support.

Inspired in part by Solidaire, Regan and her husband, Chris Olin, launched the Kataly Foundation in 2020 with the mission of working toward a world in which Black and brown people have the resources, power, and agency to execute their own visions for justice, well-being, and shared prosperity within their communities. Nwamaka Agbo, Katalys CEO, says the organization began with seed money of $445 million and was founded intentionally as a spend-out foundationwhich means that we will be giving away more of our assets than our endowment earns, which allows us to actually divest our assets out of Wall Street and strategically reinvest them into Black, Indigenous, and community- of-color projects that build community.

Agbo, 37, who comes from a background that includes organizing, says Katalys founders have been true to their goal of letting organizers take the lead. As the board members of Kataly, she says, Regan, Chris, and Susan have done a really excellent job of leaning in to their commitment of decentering themselves out of the decision-making that happens around our grants and out of the day-to-day operations of the foundation, so that those of us who come from social movements who are now running the foundation are able to make decisions that are deeply values-aligned and supporting social movements.

The way society still sees the donor as the celebrity in the story and centers the donor instead of centering the work and the good teams of people that make it possible has got to change, says Regan Pritzker.

The mothers and daughters I spoke with all said they get back more from their giving than they ever give away. A lot of my life has been spent moving in these donor organizing spaces because I felt as I did, my own humanity was returned to me, says Llewellyn.

For me, says Susan Pritzker, to narrow my focus and to now be supporting BIPOC-led movement organizations is like a dream come true. Its exactly where I want to be. Solidaire-type grant-making is still a tiny piece of the pie, she adds, but its grown so dramatically, and the interest feels explosive. I think its in part because of the sense of solidarity, if you will, thats created among the donor community. Resource Generation was the first to hit on thisthis sense [among some wealthy people] of Oh, my God, am I the only person going through this, wanting to do good things with my money without feeling icky? For me, its very hard to sit with privilege and wealth and not feel a little tainted by it. Llewellyn agrees: The negative emotional impact of having money is real, she says. Having wealth has damaged usdamaged our resilience, our sense of self-worth. Having things you feel you dont deservebecause everyone deserves everything equallycan affect your sense of worth. Its like, we feel fucked up, she goes on. And a lot of it, in my understanding, has to do with the isolating nature of wealth.

To address the discomfort of sitting with wealth and wanting to liberate it into the world, Solidaire offers donors training on transforming philanthropy, how to have hard conversations with family members, unearthing family stories of wealth accumulationwhich includes uncomfortable truths about the ways families became well-offdonor organizing around taxation, and talking with your family about abolition and defunding the police, says Mesfin Packwood.

But beyond the problem of economic inequality, Llewellyn adds, Theres the reality of where we are with climate collapse. We have to figure out ways to sustain the environmentwhich also involves finding ways for people to use their expertise, which I feel is what giving to social-justice movements is all about. Its supporting people with the expertise to solve the problems that are keeping us all up at night.

The goal is based in the knowledge that our liberation is completely connected, Llewellyn says. That we are completely interdependent with each other and with the earth.

Images by PABLO DELCAN; Illustrated by JUSTIN METZ

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The New Rules of Old Money - HarpersBAZAAR.com