These Super Rich Canadian Millennials Are Giving Away Their Inherited Millions

So, the world's on fire and it's time to eat the rich. Or is it just time to donate all your money to some NGO charity? For a group of young Canadians who identify as holding class privilege and access to wealth, the answer is somewhere in between.

Resource Movement (RM) is "an organization that mobilizes a membership of young people, 40 and under, with class privilege or access to wealth," educating and mobilizing as a community to "take action around redistribution, in order to help reshape Canadian society towards a more equitable distribution of wealth, land and power."

That explanation comes from RM's sole full-time staff member, National Organizer Jon McPhedran Waitzer, who is responsible for supporting the work of a crew of volunteers across Canada who share the goal of moving their wealth and mobilizing their privilege in search of a better future.

But this isn't just a group of rich kids looking to dump their trust funds: it's a collective political project intended to put the power into the hands of grassroots organizers — the people "doing the work," so to speak.

Moving money to grassroots organizers

One of RM's primary goals is to redistribute as much wealth as possible toward the groups, organizers and people who need it most. But who exactly those groups, organizers and people are isn't really up to RM members.

"We, for the most part, don't individually direct our members towards fund[ing] this organization or that organization because we just don't think it's actually the place of a bunch of people with class privilege to be deciding, you know, collectively, like this is the project that we're going to give all of our resources to," McPhedran Waitzer explained over Zoom.

"We think that people at the grassroots should be the ones prioritizing which projects get funded," they added, which is why RM partners with the Groundswell Fund each year.

The Groundswell Fund calls itself a "Community Justice Trust Fund," led by a panel of grassroots organizers from a wide variety of movements who collectively decide where the group's money should be spent.

"They prioritize Black- and Indigenous-led movements [and] groups that are not able to access funding from other sources," McPhedran Waitzer explained, adding that they "only fund groups that are doing structural change work and led by communities most impacted.

"It's so amazing for us to be able to hustle as hard as we can each year and push our members to push their communities and their families and just put as much money as we can towards Groundswell."

And they really mean push. It's not just about giving a little here and a little there. It's about stretching yourself to redistribute an amount that "is going to feel still safe, like, I'm not going to put myself in danger," but that edges into discomfort.

McPhedran Waitzer doesn't think the rich deserve to be eaten, they say, "but I don't think I have a right to comfort all the time."

RM's most recent Groundswell campaign, its most successful so far, moved just over $230,000 to organizers. But that's only a fraction of the money that really moves through RM circles and into the trusts of grassroots organizations.

"Anecdotally, I know that there are there are individual members who [have moved] multiple millions of dollars just on their own," McPhedran Waitzer told me.

"So I know that our collective impact, if we include the money that our members have moved individually," they said, "That's definitely at least $5 million over the last five years."

Changing the narratives behind wealth and class

Delivering hoarded wealth to underserved communities is only part of the struggle, though. RM also wants to push back against the culture and narratives around wealth hoarding.

"We would love it if 20 to 30 years from now, we could be a part of shifting the culture around wealth in Canada so that it becomes obvious [...] that we do not live in a meritocracy. We do live in a class-based society. Nobody earns a million dollars. Every rich person's wealth includes a certain amount of wealth that was extracted from Indigenous, Black, brown, working-class communities," they told me.

RM wants it to be "uncool" to hold onto more wealth than you need, uncool to own a second property, and uncool to participate in what is currently the dominant paradigm.

Redistribution as "healing work"

The benefits of financial activism don't just touch those receiving funding from RM's money-gathering projects and individual donations. Instead, McPhedran Waitzer says, this type of work can heal often overlooked wounds they believe are caused by the cognitive dissonance inherent to class privilege and access to wealth.

There is an "unconscious mental gymnastics" that wealthy and class-privileged people have to play "in order to be okay with our role in a society that is fundamentally unfair while receiving overwhelming messages from media and from our families that things are basically okay," McPhedran Waitzer explained.

"The dissonance between those messages and the reality that surrounds us" is deeply painful, they argue. "So in order to save ourselves from that pain, we ended up shutting off our ability to actually perceive the realities of the society around us," they said.

"That's like a psychological wound a lot of us carry, and then that will manifest in lots of different ways," from emotional abuse to manipulation.

But that's not to say the rich have it hardest. Instead, RM's National Organizer points out that acknowledging these harms means seeing wealth redistribution as a path to a better life, even for those "losing" money, privilege or status.

The work of unlearning capitalist myths about meritocracies enhances our "capacity to accurately perceive the world outside of our bubble of class privilege," McPhedran Waitzer says, "to engage with that world in a more grounded and healthy way and to help heal society."

A growing community with Montreal roots

These are bold goals for a relatively small movement whose active member base rarely tops 50 in 2023. But McPhedran Waitzer is optimistic about the group's future.

"It has been a rebuilding process," they told me. "We had 150 active members towards the end of 2020. And when we sort of came back together to rebuild this past fall, it was more like 25."

Over the past year, RM has been focusing on building solid foundations and strategies to support a membership much higher than its current numbers. Much of McPhedran Waitzer's day-to-day work involves helping facilitate answering questions like, "What is our strategy? How do we make decisions together? How do we want to navigate conflict together?"

"What we're hoping is that as we move into our second year in this configuration, we can start to really grow," they explained. "We are preparing for a big in-person gathering in early September (September 8 to 10) here in Montreal, and that gathering is going to be a moment where we try to crystallize a lot of this new DNA of our movement that we've been building together this past year."

"Hopefully, it'll be sort of like the launching pad for moving into this next phase of our work together."

The author is an active member of Resource Movement.

This article's cover image was used for illustrative purposes only.