Tyrone Boucher
Where The Money Came From (and some history)
My dad set up a trust fund for me when I was young, with stock from a software company he started. The company ended up making lots of money, and my trust fund grew to about $400,000. When I turned 25 (last year), the option opened up for the trustees to begin transferring the money into my control.
Because of my involvement in economic justice organizing, I’d already had lots of conversations about class, inheritance, and giving with my father by the time I started to get the money. He agreed to arrange for $200,000 to be transferred into a brokerage account that I controlled. I used some of the money to pay him back for my expenses he’d paid for in the past (like school), and put most of the rest of it into my giving plan.
Dealing with this money has been an ongoing process of talking with my family, understanding kind-of-complicated financial and tax stuff, making compromises (mostly about moving more slowly than I’d like), and getting clear on my own motivations and vision. I’m planning to give away 50-60% of the money from my trust fund by 2010, and most of the rest of it later, as I get access to it.
I’ve been really glad to have this opportunity for honest conversations with my family and community about wealth, class, and giving. I try to share my giving plan as much as possible if people are interested, mostly to start community dialogue and get feedback and provide an example of giving money with a social justice framework. I always like hearing people’s thoughts and ideas and impressions. I hope this can be a tool to inspire people to create new and interesting ways to give money – there are so many different ways to do this and I sure don’t have it all figured out.
Values
1. The vast majority of my giving goes to social justice organizing (i.e. groups that organize communities to fight the root causes of injustice).
2. I give almost entirely to groups that are led by the communities they are organizing; specifically, folks who are most directly affected by oppression – people of color, poor/low-income people, queer and trans people, women, etc.
3. I give to organizations with a multi-issue analysis because I believe that all forms of oppression are connected, and that everyone’s liberation is bound up together.
4. I give without regard to 501c3 status or whether or not my donation will be tax-deductible.
5. I strive for accountability and transparency in my giving by sharing my giving plan freely and soliciting direct input from other activists, organizers, friends, and family.
6. I always give unrestricted donations rather than requiring that my gift be used for a specific purpose or project.
7. I make multi-year commitments as much as possible, and try to be clear with the recipients about how much I can give and for how long.
8. A percentage of my giving goes to social justice foundations with activist-advised funds, because I believe they do important work to support grassroots organizing and reshape philanthropy in positive ways, and that they are an important model for shifting the decision-making in social justice funding from individual donors (particularly folks with privilege)Â to community activists. I also know that the grant application and review processes that come with foundation funding can drain the time and energy of organizations – so, I chose to give the majority of my donations directly to orgs.
9. I make a point to give to individuals when I can, because I want to live in a world where people support each other and share resources within networks and communities.
10. When possible, I try to pair my giving with fundraising and donor organizing. I believe that donations can go farther when I use them as an opportunity to educate and engage with other donors about my choices, so I always give publicly rather than anonymously and try to use my giving to help get other people to give.
Process
I was intimidated by the idea of creating a giving plan, because I wondered how I would ever be able to choose between all of the amazing social justice organizations that I wanted to support. I had been giving smaller amounts somewhat haphazardly for a few years before I began gaining access to my inheritance, but I’d never created a clear plan.
When I finally sat down to do it, it wasn’t as hard as I thought. I made a list of all the organizations I’d given to in the past, and all the organizations I’d always meant to give to. I wanted to give consistent support to these groups, so I added them all to my new, multi-year giving plan.
I wanted my giving plan to reflect a wider range of organizations than the ones I was personally familiar with, so I informally approached several organizers in my extended community whose work I admired and asked them for input. They recommended organizations with whom they shared values and who they saw as allies in their work (I also specifically asked for organizations who had a hard time getting funding from traditional sources), and these organizations also went on my giving plan.
The process of trying to figure all this out has taught me that there are so many ways to give money, and most of them are both useful and challenging in their own ways. I try not to get too caught up in working towards perfection, because there is definitely no perfect or best way to create a giving plan. I think of giving money as one small facet of my social justice work that hopefully reflects my broader commitment to wealth redistribution, anti-oppression, and grassroots organizing.
Here’s how it worked out:
Anti-Incarceration
Safe Streets/Strong Communities $7000Â ($5,000 was for Expungement Day (partnered with Critical Resistance NOLA))
Families and Friends of Louisiana’s Incarcerated Children $2500
Critical Resistance $150 through monthly sustainer program + $600 for CR10
Critical Resistance New Orleans $2000
Anti-Violence/Transformative Jusitce
Communities Against Rape and Abuse $500
Generation 5 $360 (through monthly sustainer program)
Healthcare
New Orleans Women’s Health and Justice Initiative/INCITE! New Orleans $6000
Women With A Vision (New Orleans) $2000
Third Root Community Health Clinic $2000 (Half of this donation is a “loan” – to be paid forward to another community health project in 2009.)
Queer and Trans Justice
Southerners On New Ground $2300
Sylvia Rivera Law Project $3000
Arts and Culture
Esperanza Center $2500
IDA $3000 (one time gift to help them buy their land)
Sins Invalid $500
Anti-Poverty/Homelessness
POOR Magazine $2500
Welfare Rights Organization (New Orleans) $2000
Coalition on Homelessness $2500
Western Regional Advocacy Project $250
Social Justice Foundations
21st Century Foundation $2000 (Through Gulf South Allied Funders (gsaf.info))
Bread and Roses Community Fund $50
Immigrant Justice
New Orleans Workers Center for Racial Justice $3000
Madre Tierra $6000
Other
Resource Generation $1500
Catalyst Project $2080 (monthly sustainer plus one-time gift)
KINDRED $2000
ticket for NOLA activist to attend NPA conference $373
Misc urgent appeals $2000
TOTAL YEARLY GIVING $62,158
Wow, this is a really great list of groups! It’s awesome to see so how much one person can help support so many parts of the social justice movement.
I’m sort of curious about your decision in general to support many groups, though, rather than to focus on a more limited number of projects. Do you know anything about whether giving smaller donations to more groups is more stabilizing/less stabilizing for their work than giving larger donations to a few groups to really shore up what they’re doing?
hi meg,
my decision to give to lots of different groups wasn’t an intentional strategic choice on my part – it was more just that i wanted to keep supporting the groups i was already giving to, as well as get input from other folks about places to give that i didn’t choose myself – so that made for a pretty big list of groups. i’ve heard a lot of people say that it’s useful to give a large amount to a single organization, ’cause it’s really hard for most social justice orgs to get a really big no-strings-attached gift and that can really free them up to do their work. if i had it to do over, i might do that instead – but choosing just a few organizations to give a huge gift to felt a lot harder at the time (and still would), and i’m glad i just went ahead and gave away the money rather than agonizing over that choice.
i also know people who choose to spread their giving out even more and give small amounts to LOTS of organizations, with the rationale that they don’t want to make contributions large enough that programming would start or stop based on their individual funding. i’m not sure i agree with that, but it does seem like it could become a kind of circular ideological question about what’s better for movements as a whole. i would love to hear more from people about what kinds of choices around giving seem to make the most sense in different circumstances and why.
Someone forwarded this blog entry to me, and as development staff for a non-profit organization, I want to say thank you! Its always helpful to hear when, how and why people give. Thanks for supporting your many communities!
Hi. I was just wondering what you thought about the following organizations: Save the Children, Amnesty International, International Wildlife Fund, Doctors without Borders, Medicin du Monde (Doctors of the World), and Greenpeace? My husband donates to three of these monthly and I wonder if we should put the money to better use? Thanks!
Wow. It’s so nice to see a young individual helping others. I live in Washington state and if you haven’t heard most of are schools are bankrupt. I am very poor and am a single mother of two teen girls. They go to Montesano Highschool in Montesano WA. Heres the issue because the school has no money it’s making the dance team and the cheerleader pay for their uniforms and camp up front. We are talking $800.00 for mke $1600.00 cause I have two girls. I feel this is terrible because now only the rich kids can participate. Both my girls are straight students and deserve a chance to play sports and participate in these kind of activities. It’s an honor to them to make the team and they are so excited. But now I don’t know how to tell them they can’t I just don’t have the funds. Before the school would fork the bill and the kids had all year to fundraise to pay the school back. But because of our economy they will no longer be able to do this. The girls have until the first week of August to come up with the full amount. So what I am asking is would you consider donating funds to the Montesano Drill team and cheerleading so my girls and others with low funds can participate. You can contact me for further info if interested.
I really respect your honesty and openness in sharing your giving plan. We live in San Antonio and love the Esperanza Center.
thanks so much for your transparency and exhibiting how giving can be such an accessible and thoughtful process. i hope to meet you some day because we have mutual friends, and i have a lot of questions. namely, i am thinking about how to create a giving plan that takes into account my multiple class realities. on the one hand i make a decent salary, on the other hand my family is in no position to be a financial safety net for me. i will not inherit anything, that has never been a part of our immediate family for the past few generations. we don’t own a home. i am a woman of color and single. anyhow, i feel like i 1) don’t have models for management of resources 2) don’t know how to balance my desire to see acts of inspiring generosity within my own life with the desire to have some financial stability (like owning a home) 3) don’t have a community of support that is in a similar boat to help me push myself and be real with a need to build a solid foundation.
thanks for listening.
I wonder why so many gifts to such hyper-organized organizations? I feel like these groups spend a lot of energy just making themselves “look legitimate” in the eyes of non-profits (if they aren’t non-profits themselves). Also, CR is basically run by academics, I don’t know if that’s the case for INCITE! and some of the other well-known/”famous” organizations you’ve chosen to support. Maybe you feel your money will be used in a “legitimate” fashion?
Also curious about no donations for legal fees or bail?
-Hickory