Leveraging Privilege: A Conceptual Model for Organizing Young People with Wealth to Support Social Justice

Background and Purpose: A great deal of wealth is increasingly controlled by fewer and fewer individuals. This concentration of wealth has significant implications for democracy in general and democratic social change in particular. A critical approach to addressing issues of social, racial and economic injustices is through community organizing. While most describe community organizing as disenfranchised people organizing to build collective power in order to create change, what these models focus less on is how to organize people with power and privilege to leverage their access to support social justice. (Alinsky, 1971; Rothman, Erlich, & Tropman, 2001; Smock, 2004). Applying existing organizing models to communities that already have an enormous amount of power and privilege has the strong possibility of replicating existing power structures. In this paper, I develop a conceptual model for organizing people with wealth to support social justice through addressing the following questions: How can people with wealth develop critical consciousness around issues of power, privilege and oppression? And, how can they responsibility leverage their access to wealth and philanthropic institutions to challenge systems of power and support social justice?

Methods: This study utilized a mixed-methodological ethnographic case study of an organization called Research Generation (RG), which has over 1000 young people (18-35) who have or will inherit wealth and are leveraging their access to resources and elite institutions to support social justice movements. Data collection included participant observation of organizational conferences, workshops, events, meetings and dinners; in-depth, semi-structured interviews of 23 of current and former constituents, staff and other community leaders; and curricula document analysis. Data was analyzed thematically (Yin, 2003) using atlas.ti through an iterative inductive and deductive approach.

Results: RG drew upon feminist, intersectional anti-oppression models of organizing while incorporating a cross class team of movement organizers to their staff, board and facilitation teams. This added both a diversity of knowledge and experience that came from both having and not having class privilege, while adding a level of accountability through their programming. The programming included three elements: community and trust building; development of critical consciousness; and skill building in order to take action on an individual and institutional level. In order to find that delicate balance between being supportive yet challenging, cross-class facilitation often used storytelling, humor and games to talk about difficult topics and mutual accountability to help them follow through with their action plans.

Conclusions and Implications: This paper lays out a conceptual model of community organizing that, through the incorporation of a cross-class staff, board and facilitators, addresses how organizations can organize people with wealth and privileged identities to develop critical consciousness around issues of power and privilege to responsibly leverage their resources and access to elite institutions to support social justice, while remaining accountable to cross-class movements. This research contributes directly to social work education by providing pedagogical approaches to helping students understand their own positionality within everyday structures of domination and how they can practically, constructively and responsibly impact change.