I’m a privileged disability activist with a complex family past
Keat Welsh
I grew up in the United States thinking I was middle class. It wasn’t until much later that I began to untangle the complex threads of my family’s history—a history shaped by class privilege, colonization, and chattel slavery.
My father’s family is a mixture of British and French ancestry. They settled in the U.S. in the late-1700s and actively participated in the system of enslavement. On my mother’s side, the narrative was different. There are stories of hard-working, dairy farmers in upstate New York. Yet the unspoken reality is that we have been landowners for generations.
Both sides of my family have a history of military involvement, and family lore admits that my father’s side “fought in the civil war on the wrong side”. Crucially, being in the military provided a springboard for wealth accumulation, paying for education and securing high-ranking jobs rather than frontline risks. Even my Armenian grandfather, who fled two genocides, was able to access the GI Bill for schooling after joining the U.S. military.
These generational advantages crystallized in my own upbringing. My parents, who had me while in medical and grad school, were eventually able to buy a large home in a wealthy neighborhood with the help of a loan from my grandparents. While we had the “smallest house on the block,” I had access to well-funded public schools, numerous road trips, and a safety net that many lack.
My relationship with money started to shift drastically when I became chronically ill as a teenager. I moved to Canada after high school and became a permanent resident, a process where I benefitted from an immigration system that favours white English speakers. Today, being chronically ill and disabled shapes my financial reality. As a disability activist, I see clearly that while I am unable to work a full-time job, I am shielded from the worst effects of capitalism. In contrast, a lot of my friends and community—many of whom are also disabled—are deep in legislated poverty.
My income from contract work is between $40,000 and $55,000 annually, but this does not tell the full story of my financial security. I possess a level of net wealth that is high for someone in my position, accumulated almost entirely through gifts and inheritances. My family sends me monthly financial support to supplement my income. I also benefit greatly from living in affordable, accessible co-op housing.
Joining Resource Movement allowed me to move from haphazardly giving away money to a more disciplined “praxis” of redistribution. I now aim to give away over 10 per cent of my income every month to mutual aid campaigns, movements, and folks in my community. I have also begun moving my money from traditional banks to credit unions to divest from war. For me, redistribution is about acknowledging that my safety net was built on centuries of extraction, and actively using those resources to support the survival and autonomy of local communities.
But I know that personal redistribution, on its own, is not the answer. While I view my giving as an act of solidarity rather than charity, it can’t fill the gaps left by the state. That’s why I fight for the end of legislated poverty. We need a society where disabled people are not forced to rely on family luck or private benevolence just to survive. True justice means safety, housing, and care are guaranteed rights for everyone, not just lucky privileges for those with the right lineage.
My family is among the richest of the rich
Anonymous
I am part of the 0.01 per cent of wealthiest people in Canada. I am a sixth-generation shareholder in a family business, and someday I will control over $200 million worth of shares. In the meantime, I live a life of immense privilege, which has included a private school education, two debt-free degrees, and the financial freedom to pursue a career in the arts. A tax-free gift from my parents paid for my house, my cottage, and the renovations for both.
For a long time, I didn’t understand the scale of this. My mother lived as an anonymous philanthropist, and secrecy—rooted in guilt—was the family norm. It wasn’t until I was older that I grasped the magnitude of our wealth. While my family tells stories of leadership and hard work, I came to see the other side: how neoliberal policies accelerated our wealth, how corporate power translates into political influence, and how we have benefitted as settlers on this land for generations.
This realization created a deep cognitive dissonance, especially as I pursued my academic interests. During both my undergrad and graduate degrees, I spent a lot of time exploring how the very economic systems that made my family rich were simultaneously deepening inequality and accelerating climate change. I realized I couldn’t live in secrecy anymore. I wanted to model a healthy relationship with money for my children and find alignment between my resources and my values.
I am now much more transparent about my situation with the people in my life. This openness makes it possible to support others with less mystery, and it has allowed me to feel more seen and understood. My partner and I also worked to create a concrete redistribution plan for the approximately $1 million we have access to annually.
We now give half of our annual income to groups organizing for political, economic, and climate justice. We prioritize organizations that don’t issue tax receipts, because often the most important work happens outside the non-profit industrial complex. As the button says, “the revolution will not be registered as a charity.”
Beyond this political giving, we support friends and family to help with life milestones, from down payments to fertility treatments. These conversations can be awkward, but the resulting stability for the people we love is deeply gratifying. We are also building a portfolio of ethics-aligned investments that sits outside the traditional market, aiming to add $100,000 to this annually.
We live on the remaining 20 per cent, which also includes an ad-hoc fund for emergencies that come up in our community. It’s not lost on us that living on $200,000 is still an exceptionally comfortable existence. Transparency has made us more accountable, but we know we have further to go. We are already reimagining how we can reallocate a larger percentage of our wealth next year to the grassroots organizations doing the work we believe in.
I’m suddenly rich: does that change everything?
Emma Davis
My financial situation has changed a lot in the last few years, and I’ve had to unlearn much of what I thought I knew about money.
I grew up in an “eat-the-rich” family. My parents were immigrants to the U.S. from Western Europe, artists who were deeply involved in the anti-apartheid movement. The family lore was that my father got into Oxford despite being poor simply because he was smart. They left out the part about him being white and male.
While we drove rattly second-hand cars and I lacked the brand-name clothes my peers had, my upbringing was rich in cultural capital. We prioritized music lessons, books, and international travel over home electronics. We talked about books and languages. We travelled overseas and there was a never-ending stream of people from all over the world traipsing through our house. I see now that this specific kind of upbringing allowed me to fit in with wealthy people in a way my classmates—especially kids of colour—could not.
The explicit money message in our house was practical: “Get a secure job, don’t be a starving artist like us.” The implicit message was that there are more important things than money, like following your passions, and art, justice and community. I learned how to make do, to save and be thrifty, to hustle. I’ve used these skills every day in my career in non-profit administration.
I met my husband when we were teenagers. His family was middle class—we had different relationships to money. His parents’ academic jobs meant his tuition was free, and they had enough money to give him a safety net, allowing him to take the risk of starting a tech company. The venture capitalists my husband pitched to were exclusively white men, and often Jewish like him—a reminder of how affinity-bias lubricates the wheels of capital.
He sold his startup to Twitter, which led to a lucrative career in Silicon Valley. Those were the early days of social media, and we are still wrestling with the fact that the source of some of our wealth comes from a platform whose impact on democracy has been, to put it mildly, messy.
Over the last few years, we’ve been able to sell enough tech stock and startup options to find ourselves suddenly part of Canada’s ultra-wealthy 0.1 per cent. The survival skills I learned—how to navigate the world without money—are no longer the ones I need.
Getting involved with Resource Movement has helped me figure out how to reconcile my new reality with my old values. I’ve found the words for some of the questions I have been wrestling with, and a community of like-minded people who share those questions. That’s freed up energy to tackle the challenge of redistributing my wealth in ways that are aligned with my priorities. I’m finding ways to use my privilege to ensure a more equitable and sustainable society, and to address the root causes of inequality, including as a board member of Patriotic Millionaires Canada—a group of wealthy Canadians who believe the rich should be paying more in taxes.
As my family grew richer, I had a political awakening
Anonymous
I immigrated to Canada with my family at a very young age, and I watched our rapid financial ascent happen in real-time. We moved from a small rented apartment, to a rented townhouse, to homeownership in the suburbs, and finally to a much larger home in an affluent neighborhood by the time I started high school.
My political awakening happened in tandem with this stability, sparked by two distinct ruptures.
The first was in a Labor Studies class. My professor displayed a graph of tech workers immigrating to Canada in the 1990s, showing a massive spike followed by a precipitous drop after the dot-com crash. I suddenly saw how much my family was a beneficiary of a specific government policy window designed to serve their economic interests. I realized how much of our stability was based on luck and timing.
The second rupture happened the year I co-founded a Chinese Canadian community group. I watched, horrified, as conservative Chinese Canadians organized an Islamophobic protest on Parliament Hill alongside white nationalists. I realized then that “representation”—simply being around people who look like you—was not enough.
Driven by these realizations, I moved to Los Angeles for graduate school in Urban Planning. I didn’t just go for the degree. I wanted to immerse myself in the rich lineage of progressive Chinese and Asian American activism. While I was there, I got involved in labour, abolitionist, and housing justice movements, while being faced with the sheer intensity of wealth inequality in the U.S.
After graduating, I moved to San Francisco to work as an Urban Planner in Chinatown, and I also got involved in Resource Generation, the American sibling to Resource Movement. My own privilege as an international student supported by family wealth was laid bare. I began to rethink what wealth meant for me, especially after discovering that my parents had acquired single-family homes as “investment properties” back in Canada—an echo of the gentrification dynamics I was witness to in Chinatown.
Having access to wealth means I can’t just advocate for structural changes (like decommodifying housing) in the abstract. I have to look at my own bank account. I have to reckon with the fact that my stability is built on systems that have extracted from others.
This work is deeply personal and often terrifying. As a queer person, my relationship with my family is complex. I sometimes wrestle with the fear that I could be cut off, emotionally and financially. That fear fuels a scarcity mindset, urging me to hoard money to ensure my own independence.
But I am trying to choose interdependence instead. I’ve stopped trying to hide my values. I am now trying to talk to my family about why I do this work, bringing my full self to the table despite the risks. Redistribution, for me, is about turning toward my family rather than away, using mutual aid as an act of love to build a future that benefits us all.
