Young, Rich and Fighting The System That Made Them Wealthy

Five years ago, Emily Bookstein was fresh out of Stanford, debt-free thanks to her grandparents. Her dad had just given her $10,000, money he had put aside for her college education but ended up not needing. She now works in tech, and her most recent salary was $104,000.

This is Bookstein’s “money story,” a term the nonprofit  Resource Generation (RG) uses as part of its work to help wealthy millennials give their money to groups fighting social, economic and racial injustice. The idea of the money story is to get people to be open about their relationship with money – how much they have, where it’s from and how it’s benefited them.

In a society where talking about wealth is almost on a par with talking about your sex life, revealing oneself as rich doesn’t always feel comfortable.

This was certainly the case for Bookstein. Post-college and becoming increasingly politicized, she was in denial about her privileged position, “not in denial in the sense that I thought I didn’t have it ― I definitely knew that I did ― but I was trying to distance myself from it,” she says.

Adam Roberts, now an RG staffer, says he was also keen to keep his wealth under wraps before the nonprofit “kicked my butt into gear.” Roberts used to give less than $200 a year, but as part of RG, he’s now giving more than $50,000.

Source: huffingtonpost