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Jon McPhe­dran Wait­zer and Andy Wei are mem­bers of an orga­ni­za­tion called Resource Move­ment. With chap­ters in Mon­tréal and Toron­to, Resource Move­ment brings togeth­er young peo­ple from across Cana­da who have wealth and/​or class priv­i­lege to work towards the redis­tri­b­u­tion of wealth, land, and pow­er. Scott Neigh inter­views them about the pol­i­tics of orga­niz­ing wealthy peo­ple in sup­port of social jus­tice, and about the work of Resource Movement.

Wealth inequal­i­ty in Cana­da is sub­stan­tial and grow­ing. This inequal­i­ty is unjust in its own right, because of how it pro­found­ly lim­its the life oppor­tu­ni­ties and harms the health of those forced to live in pover­ty – includ­ing, dis­pro­por­tion­ate­ly, peo­ple who expe­ri­ence the many and var­ied inter­sec­tions with oth­er axes of oppression.

In addi­tion, pub­lic and polit­i­cal life are dom­i­nat­ed by the wealthy and by insti­tu­tions con­trolled by them, so that main­stream polit­i­cal agen­das from con­ser­v­a­tive to lib­er­al almost always cen­tre the inter­ests of the rich. More­over, in the ongo­ing real­i­ty of polit­i­cal strug­gle, insti­tu­tions that rep­re­sent the inter­ests of wealth have no trou­ble find­ing the resources they need to oper­ate, while grass­roots social move­ments and com­mu­ni­ties-in-strug­gle inevitably have to scrounge for what­ev­er they can find to car­ry on the fight.

With some of these issues in mind, in the mid 2010s a hand­ful of young Cana­di­ans from wealthy fam­i­lies took part in pro­gram­ming from a US-based orga­ni­za­tion called Resource Gen­er­a­tion, which sim­i­lar­ly mobi­lizes class-priv­i­leged youth to work for social jus­tice. Back here in Cana­da, these young peo­ple began meet­ing in what they call prax­is groups” – small polit­i­cal edu­ca­tion cir­cles that work through ques­tions of inequal­i­ty, clas­sism, and injus­tice, and what it might look like to be bet­ter allies to work­ing-class peo­ple and move­ments. After a cou­ple of years, there was a push by some – includ­ing McPhe­dran Wait­zer – to found a for­mal orga­ni­za­tion. Resource Move­ment launched in mid 2017.

There is a keen aware­ness with­in Resource Move­ment of the long his­to­ry of the actions of well-mean­ing rich peo­ple co-opt­ing, harm­ing, and oth­er­wise fail­ing to help social move­ments they claim to sup­port. So right at the begin­ning they hired two well-known lead­ers from grass­roots move­ments in Toron­to and Mon­tréal to facil­i­tate a sort of strate­gic plan­ning process to come up with a struc­ture and a strate­gic ori­en­ta­tion for the organization.

In that process, they iden­ti­fied three core pri­or­i­ties. One is a con­tin­ued com­mit­ment to doing polit­i­cal edu­ca­tion among their own mem­bers, includ­ing through prax­is groups and oth­er mech­a­nisms. The sec­ond was to move resources into social move­ments engaged in strug­gles on the ground, both through facil­i­tat­ing dona­tions from indi­vid­ual mem­bers and also through col­lec­tive­ly orga­nized fundrais­ing cam­paigns. The for­mer large­ly hap­pens through their rapid response email list which cir­cu­lates calls for finan­cial sup­port from move­ments to about 300 mem­bers and sup­port­ers of Resource Move­ment. McPhe­dran Wait­zer esti­mates that over the years, about half a mil­lion dol­lars has been moved to social move­ments through dona­tions facil­i­tat­ed in this way. And in recent years, their col­lec­tive­ly orga­nized fundrais­ing cam­paign has sup­port­ed the Groundswell Com­mu­ni­ty Jus­tice Trust Fund, a Toron­to-based project run by cur­rent and for­mer social move­ment orga­niz­ers that dis­pers­es mon­ey to orga­niz­ing projects out­side of the con­straints of the char­i­ty mod­el. In their most recent cam­paign, Resource Move­ment raised about $160,000 for Groundswell.

And final­ly, Resource Move­ment makes use of the access that its mem­bers have to con­texts in which pow­er is con­cen­trat­ed to try to push a change agen­das in those areas. Most recent­ly, that has includ­ed a cam­paign for increased tax­es on the wealthy and for tax jus­tice, and a cam­paign to reform laws and reg­u­la­tions relat­ed to phil­an­thropy. Their tax jus­tice work com­bines cam­paign­ing on their own with par­tic­i­pa­tion in the Tax the Rich coalition.

McPhe­dran Wait­zer lives in Mon­tréal and they are 37 years old, which is towards the upper end of the age range of Resource Movement’s con­stituen­cy. Wei is a high school stu­dent in Toron­to and is one of the organization’s youngest members.

For both of them, in much the same way as for white peo­ple fig­ur­ing out how to work against racism and men fig­ur­ing out how to oppose patri­archy, involve­ment in Resource Move­ment has meant hav­ing a lot of dif­fi­cult con­ver­sa­tions – about the vio­lence and exploita­tion that wealth inevitably comes from, about the harms that class-priv­i­leged peo­ple unthink­ing­ly do to work­ing-class peo­ple around them, and about so much else.

As well, the group is well aware of the skep­ti­cism that many par­tic­i­pants in grass­roots move­ments might hold for a group of wealthy peo­ple get­ting togeth­er to orga­nize for change. Accord­ing to McPhe­dran Wait­zer, We wel­come that skep­ti­cism. We think it is essen­tial.” They con­tin­ued, We’re real­ly grate­ful to the grass­roots orga­niz­ers who have cho­sen to put their ener­gy and their time into help­ing to keep us account­able and help­ing to keep our analy­sis sharp.”