Power and Possibility: The Role of Donor Organizing

This article is part of NPQ’s series, Money in Movements: The Role of Donor Organizing. Co-produced with Solidaire Network, this series offers firsthand narratives from donor organizers deeply embedded in justice struggles to illuminate how individuals with wealth can authentically align with grassroots movements.

Wealthy people cause a lot of harm with how they spend and invest money. In fact, the more unequal a society gets, the greater the harm. Contrary to what Andrew Carnegie and others have claimed, charitable giving does not meaningfully reduce these harms.

Consider US foundation asset growth. In 1979, US foundation assets stood at $34.7 billion (about $150 billion in 2025 dollars). As of September 30, 2025, that number is $1.757 trillion, more than 10 times greater, even after adjusting for inflation. But few would argue that we are living in a more equitable society. The data show the opposite is true.

The mega-rich philanthrocapitalists who say they want to address social problems certainly don’t want to redistribute money or power, and their actions often make things worse. In fact, rather than address root causes of inequality, as critics such as Edgar Villaneuva, Anand Giridharadas, Hali Lee, and Vu Le have pointed out, charitable giving typically legitimates it. By giving away a little of what they have, the rich justify holding on to a lot. And what they hold on to is typically invested for maximum return, without any attention to harmful consequences.

Class Traitors

Fortunately, there’s a smaller group of people, including the writers in this series—Farhad Ebrahimi, Deborah Sagner, Margi Dashevsky, and Katrina Schaffer—who are redistributing their wealth and contributing to building systems that promote the collective good.

The mega-rich…who say they want to address social problems certainly don’t want to redistribute money or power, and their actions often make things worse.

In my own research on class traitors—wealthy people who use their social advantages (money, connections, influence) to challenge the system that gives them those advantages—I’ve interviewed over 80 such people, and two dozen others who work with them. Hailing from all over the United States, this group includes tech multimillionaires, inheritors from families with dynastic wealth, and young adults whose fathers have accumulated tens or hundreds of millions of dollars in finance. Some of these people have been active in progressive donor spaces since the 1970s; others could be their grandchildren.

Not everyone I talked with identifies as a class traitor. I use this phrase because what I see as crucial about this work is that it disputes the legitimacy of upper-class rule—and directly challenges the political and social power of those at the top.

Far from the noblesse oblige character of much of conventional philanthropy, these donors see themselves as benefiting from these shifts; that is, they believe they will be happier and safer in a more democratic and socially just world. As the contributors in this series have shown, the privilege wealthy people have enables them to play unique roles in movement building, even as they face particular dilemmas in doing so.

What does being a class traitor look and feel like?

Class traitors work to shift relationships with movement actors and organizations. They challenge donor-centered approaches.

First, class traitors support movements by giving money in unconventional ways. Many focus on moving philanthropic dollars to grassroots movements with transformative goals. Like Dashevsky and Schaffer, but unlike most donors, many class traitors give away large proportions of their wealth—even most or all of it—often without regard for tax deductions. These are also foundation leaders who give far more than the required minimum; some even sunset their organizations, as Ebrahimi did, rather than try to preserve them forever.

But it’s not just about giving more. Class traitors use their power to challenge conventional philanthropic practices and model better ones, from eliminating cumbersome reporting requirements to providing multiyear grants for general operating expenses. As Sagner writes, being a class traitor donor means leveraging one’s position to push political education in philanthropic spaces. They help create tools that fix blind spots in philanthropy, as Schaffer did by setting up an intermediary to distribute resources to disability justice activists.

Class traitors work to shift relationships with movement actors and organizations. They challenge donor-centered approaches. As Sagner explains, for example, she has also been attentive to the pitfalls of centering herself, while acknowledging the urgency of moving money and her capacity to do so in particular ways. Sometimes social justice philanthropy means building deep relationships of mutual accountability, as Dashevsky describes; sometimes it means simply releasing funds to intermediary organizations led by activists and getting out of the way.

Investing is another tool. Redistributive investors—individuals and foundations—move money out of extractive assets, sometimes off Wall Street altogether, and into the solidarity economy, seeking social rather than financial payoff. These regenerative finance investments support movement initiatives such as co-ops and local ecosystems like the Ujima Project.

Finally, class traitors take advantage of their networks and access to call for change. They speak up about harms done by the companies that have generated their wealth, as descendants of the founders of Procter & Gamble have done, or use their platforms to call for higher taxes on the wealthy. Many draw public attention to the injustice of the system that benefits them, calling out the “lie of meritocracy” and reframing accumulation as hoarding. Like these authors, some become donor organizers along the way, supporting others to take these same steps.

Organizing Against a Culture of Accumulation

Moving money and speaking up isn’t as easy as it might seem. It requires time and dedication to imagine transforming racial, patriarchal capitalism, as well as to consider the role donors and their money might play. This process involves not just cultivating political and strategic knowledge but also confronting hard personal feelings. It’s not easy to admit that the system that benefits oneself produces suffering for others, which is one reason so few people become class traitors.

Many wealthy people don’t actually know much about their money. Most inheritors grow up being taught never to talk about it, so they don’t ask. They often still don’t know how much their families have or even how much they themselves legally own well into adulthood and middle age. In wealthy families, it’s usually men—fathers, brothers, grandfathers, male financial professionals—who control assets. Implicitly or explicitly, women are told that they don’t need to worry about it. Regardless of gender, legal structures like trusts (more like “dis-trusts”) lock up assets across generations, aided, as people like Chuck Collins have shown, by a well-developed wealth defense industry. It can take years just to figure out how family wealth is structured.

The people who do control the money believe that their main job is to make more of it. Wealth managers, trustees, accountants, and even philanthropic consultants take for granted that the goal is to accumulate as much as possible, avoid taxes, and give primarily to offset capital gains. They don’t usually call it “accumulating,” though. Instead, they talk about growing, stewarding, and preserving one’s legacy.

Accumulation might appear to be simple greed, but it isn’t. Oddly, it’s actually motivated by a desire to be a good person. Growing up, wealthy people—like most Americans—learn that hard work and disciplined consumption are morally good. This is what German sociologist Max Weber called the Protestant Ethic over a century ago, a foundational idea at the heart of American capitalism. Seen in this light, accumulation becomes an indicator of moral virtue. This is the core of what I call the “culture of accumulation.”

Unlike most people, the wealthy don’t actually need more to be secure. But they’re still subject to this moral logic. “Making” money remains a measure of success, especially for men, so they have an incentive to accumulate even absent any kind of need. (Even inheritors of tens of millions of dollars have told me that they felt they “should” be “earning” money.) “Saving” by not spending unnecessarily is virtuous, especially for women, who are often responsible for family consumption but also—when they’re rich—stigmatized for being lazy spendthrifts, “ladies who lunch.” And “preserving” family wealth (aka accumulating) is a responsibility toward future generations.

This ethic of accumulation is also wrapped up in notions of what constitutes good parenting. Keeping children safe, protecting them from an unpredictable future, is a parent’s main job, and parents never know how much that might require. Making sure kids aren’t “entitled,” that they have a work ethic and don’t get whatever they want, is also a moral responsibility. This is why parents often don’t tell kids about the wealth they’ll inherit—instead emphasizing limits and even scarcity. Thus, children in wealthy families often grow up thinking that their families are less wealthy than they are. Steeped in the ethic that working and not spending (accumulating) are the marks of a moral person, they reproduce the culture of accumulation.

When class traitors start to reframe accumulation as harmful, as undeserved, and as “hoarding,” they face a lot of resistance. Parents and other family members don’t have much experience talking about how much they have or where it comes from. They often feel unfairly judged by adult children, as if they’re being called “bad people,” when they feel they were just trying to be successful at work and responsible at home. Financial professionals and others counsel that it’s too risky not to maximize return, cautioning against giving away principal or investing at below-market rates.

Donor organizers play a key role in helping emergent class traitors confront these relational and institutional obstacles and upend these norms.

Finding a Political Home

People make these money moves more easily when they’re in community with others, especially those who have less than they do. Like Dashevsky, they often have close relationships with activists who don’t have wealth and whose wellbeing is threatened in myriad other ways. For people like Schaffer, seeing disability or other challenges in their families illuminates the obstacles for those who have fewer resources. These relationships change the meanings of money; young inheritors see, for example, that what their families spend on a vacation could pay their friend’s rent for a year.

But being in community with other wealthy people also matters. Future class traitors need to talk about money with people in the same boat, sharing their experiences, feelings, and challenges. They need to discuss what to do with the money, from the broad strokes of political imagination to the nuts and bolts of making a giving plan or approaching recalcitrant family members.

Such class traitor communities are created and nurtured in organizations, from Resource Generation (RG), which connects people under the age of 35 who have access to wealth; to groups like Solidaire and Women Donors Network. Donor organizers create spaces for wealthy people to talk, learn, strategize, and share. They offer political education and connect wealthy progressives to movement activists on the ground, helping them work through what it means to contribute without dominating.

Donor organizers also support alternative narratives, challenging money as a measure of worth or safety. And they help emerging class traitors see how redistribution and social justice are in their own self-interest. Participants in these spaces begin to resolve the conflict between being wealthy and progressive—constructing new, often public, identities.

My own recent story illuminates the effects of finding community around these issues. I was drawn to studying progressive wealthy people partly because I’m interested in unconventional ideas about who deserves what. But the project was also what social scientists sometimes call “me-search.” I had become familiar with RG while researching my previous book, Uneasy Street: The Anxieties of Affluence, but I already knew about the longer tradition of progressive rich people, because I was one.

My father’s family had generational wealth, some of which I inherited in my twenties. At the time I gave 10 percent of it to a social justice intermediary with which my progressive family was connected. I transferred my investments to a politically aligned financial advisor. But after that I let the money—and my conflicts about it—slide to the back of my mind. I never had enough not to work, and I always lived mostly on my income. I donated small amounts, but I heeded the messages to be “prudent” about giving and never to give principal. So, the money kept accumulating. But then I started this research.

Seeing the work of these organizations up close, learning how class traitors were making bold moves with their money and their voices, and sometimes being organized by the very people I was interviewing, I was inspired to act. Ultimately, I redistributed over $700,000 in three years—more than half my investments—mostly to grassroots intermediary funds. I moved $100,000 to low-return solidarity economy investments. I prodded my family to make decisions about a philanthropic trust that had been mostly just accumulating since my grandmother passed more than two decades ago—and we have now given away a lot of it. I joined Solidaire—not as a researcher, but as myself—and I’ve found a political home there.

Although I came to this world in an unusual way, I don’t think the effects I’ve experienced are uncommon. And none of it would have happened without the support of donor organizers.