This article is my story of wealth redistribution, which began in earnest in 2017 with the launch of our family foundation and peaked five years later after my dad died and I redistributed a multimillion-dollar inheritance.
Scaling up the redistribution of wealth in this country is urgent. Not only are many issues, such as democracy, inequality, and climate, at critical tipping points, but many funders are also retracting their commitments to equity and justice. As the government increases pressure on progressive nonprofits, funders are stepping back, not wanting to put their own tax-exempt status at risk. While nearly $2 trillion sits in philanthropic coffers, many funders are opting to protect their resources and save them for the proverbial “rainy day.”
As some larger philanthropic institutions are capitulating to the government’s attacks on diversity, equity, and inclusion, it is important for individual donors and family foundations to step up and affirm their commitments to marginalized communities.
I am sharing my story in the hope that it inspires more of these funders and donors to accelerate their giving. I will touch on what compelled me to redistribute the money, the emotional and psychological barriers I faced, and the lessons I learned along the way.
Family History and Wealth Accumulation
The majority of the wealth in my family came from a small business that my grandparents started after fleeing Nazi Germany in 1941. Several years after the war, they received restitution payments from the German government and used those payments to start a medical supply business. At the time my family arrived in the United States, Ashkenazi Jews were part of an expanded classification of Whiteness. This allowed them to assimilate into dominant middle-class culture, despite a harsh ongoing undercurrent of anti-semitism.
As a young adult, I lived the life my parents and peers expected of me. I went to college, got an MBA and started a career in the private sector. In my thirties, however, I grew increasingly uneasy about the dissonance between my values of equality and justice and my passive accumulation of wealth. In my forties, I started to ramp up my giving and became active in organized philanthropy, but still kept my class status and giving as private as possible. It wasn’t until my fifties, as a result of rising political changes in the United States coupled with an expanded awareness of my Jewish history, that I developed a more reparative approach to my giving and became more public about my wealth.
In 2017, my siblings and I launched a family foundation that funds transformative organizing. When I donated $1.5 million to the foundation, it marked the first time I’d made a gift that significantly reduced my net wealth, instead of just donating a portion of annual income. This felt like a big step at the time, violating the edict I’d been raised with and internalized: “never touch the principal.” My longing for alignment between my values and my giving had reached a boiling point. By the time I received the inheritance in 2021, I was ready to commit to a larger scale redistribution.
Barriers I Faced
Giving is often complicated by complex trust structures or restrictive retirement accounts. For me, however, the primary barriers to giving were psychological and emotional.
The decision to redistribute my wealth required that I interrupt lifelong messaging around money that I not only received from my family, but from society at large—by financial advisors and planners, by the media, and by a culture that valorizes the accumulation of wealth. It felt increasingly lonely to express my desire to redistribute resources only to be met with well-meaning compliments about my giving and attempts to dissuade me from more substantial redistribution.
In my case, family pressures were more implicit than explicit. With my decisions to start a foundation and later to redistribute my inheritance, I had to come to terms with my dad’s disapproval of my choices. I felt guilty about giving away wealth that he and his family, like many immigrants, had worked so hard to earn. Taking time to acknowledge and engage these feelings, rather than avoid them, was key to transforming my guilt into action.
Another psychological obstacle I faced was fear of making the wrong decisions. A sort of “paralysis by analysis” was fed by having too many options. The choices involved in this redistribution were dizzying and it was easy to feel overwhelmed. Which issue areas should I prioritize? How many organizations should I fund and at what level? Should I fund locally or nationally? Which are the most promising strategies? How should I involve others in the decision-making? When donors like me stew in our abundance of choices, we deprive movements of the urgent funding they need.
Tips for Getting Started with Wealth Redistribution
In the end, I moved the entire inheritance in 18 months, learning some important lessons along the way.
1. Seek Support and Accountability
While I liked to think I could and would redistribute money on my own, the reality is I lacked the motivation (and courage) to do it. It was too easy to do other things and kick the can down the road. Institutional funders, facing a 5 percent giving requirement, have at least a bare minimum level of external accountability. Individual donors have none.
One of the most important decisions I made early on was to hire a values-aligned philanthropic advisor for support and guidance. My advisor coached me to work through the barriers that were keeping me stuck. He also helped me clarify the values guiding my giving and used his immense knowledge to recommend trusted organizations. Perhaps most importantly, he provided accountability.
Values-aligned donor networks offer other important sources of support. I had been part of numerous donor networks in my forties and fifties, but it was in joining the Solidaire Network in 2020 where I found a “philanthropic and political home.” Solidaire offered me invaluable political education, supportive and rigorous peer relationships, and mentorship during and since my redistribution.
2. Don’t Start with “How Much is Enough?”
Most people considering asset redistribution grapple with the question of “How much is enough?” to keep for their family’s needs. It’s a valid question, just not a good starting point. I ruminated on this question for years, and it had proven to be little more than a bottleneck, a largely unanswerable question that proved a recipe for inaction. What freed me to begin redistributing significant amounts of my wealth was flipping the question from “How much is enough?” to “How much is more than enough?”. It didn’t take a detailed financial plan for me to know that I could part with the money I gave through the foundation and inheritance.
3. Get Clear About Your Why and How
One of the first things I did with my advisor was to write a philanthropic mission statement and identify the core values that would drive my redistribution. The result was a plan that used a reparative lens to move money to trusted social movement organizations and to fund groups that were committed to protecting and expanding democracy.
Early on, I made the decision not to simply transfer my inheritance to the family foundation. The foundation funds very small grassroots nonprofits (budgets under $1 million). With this inheritance, I wanted to resource larger, re-granting intermediaries—a strategy that pushes decision-making down to organizations that were much closer to the ground and accountable to communities. I also didn’t want to limit the giving to 501(c)(3) organizations. Almost 40 percent of the work I funded supported advocacy, lobbying, and political work, which is necessary to be in a position to win governing power.
4. Establish and Stick to a Timeline
Setting a deadline proved to be an effective antidote to my tendency to indulge in procrastination and avoidance. I gave myself 18 months to develop and execute my plan, and my advisor and I worked backward from that goal. In the end, we spent about three months on the strategy, six months meeting with organizations, another six months soliciting input on the plan and refining our strategies, and then three months making final decisions. This was by no means a full-time endeavor (I dedicated maybe five hours per week, on average), but keeping it in the foreground at all times was critical to staying on track.
Learn more about identifying and navigating psychological barriers to giving in the guide, Overcoming Psychological Barriers to Giving.
What I Gained from Redistribution
Individually, and through my family foundation, my giving has built capacity and infrastructure for intermediaries and grassroots groups across the country. Personally, redistributing these funds has given me a sense of living in integrity with my values. I have also experienced an element of healing. My family’s assimilation provided material benefits for which I am grateful; however, it also cost me a sense of connection to my history and culture, and limited my relationships with other people. I feel like I am interrupting the conditioning that money alone will provide safety and security and creating a new narrative for myself and my kids that centers connection, emotional well-being, and interdependence.
Redistributing my personal inheritance feels more like a stepping stone in my philanthropic journey than a crowning act. Although I gave away the bulk of my assets, I still feel like I have “more than enough” and continue to resource a number of the groups I care most about, albeit at a lower level. More importantly, I spend much of my time these days organizing other donors and coaching individuals and families who are ready to redistribute wealth.
Through my personal and professional experience in philanthropy, I believe that the redistribution of wealth and power can heal our hearts and our world. As donors and funders, we must confront the obstacles holding us back from giving like we want to win. Now is the rainy day we have been waiting for.
If you are interested in talking with me about wealth redistribution, please contact me directly at alan@alanprestonllc.com or through my website.
The views and opinions expressed in individual blog posts are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the National Center for Family Philanthropy.