Sometime in late fall 2018 I was hanging out with Friends in The Watershed Center yurt when I learned that the average white man with a throwaway idea generally has access to waaay more startup money than an extraordinary woman of color with bonafide credentials and a track record of success. I don’t remember the exact statistics and specific dollar amounts off the top of my head anymore,¹ but what stayed with me most clearly was a nagging curiosity about the people behind the numbers.

I’m always curious about the people behind the numbers. Who was counted and who got missed? How much awareness do the counted have about themselves and their own standing in the count? What do they think and how do they feel about their own experience and the experiences of others around them? What relationship dynamics help us to better understand the numbers and why “things are the way they are?”

During that third gathering of the Old Money New System community, at what had by then become an annual retreat experience, my Friends and I shared living space, meals, resonant connection, reflective ritual, and bonded around a deepening alignment of our social justice movement resourcing values. I remember feeling so lovingly held and cared for by my Friends through our long days and late nights of dreaming, scheming, and healing together. I had arrived at the retreat feeling physically run down, mentally exhausted, and emotionally depleted from an especially wily year in my role as Program Director at the Grassroots Institute for Fundraising Training (GIFT).² I left feeling refueled, reoriented, and regrounded in the power of my leadership. My Friends expressed their trust and confidence in me and gifted me a deeply transformative experience to help refocus me in my mission:

I am activating our people. We are prepared. And I am ready...

A few months later I officially separated from GIFT and on February 4, 2019, I helped birth the Wealth Reclamation Academy of Practitioners (WRAP). Our mission is to empower and unite emerging Resource Mobilizers, many of us as grassroots fundraisers still grappling with or healing from our own HBN (heartbreak-by-nonprofit), to organize wealth for our communities and social justice movements.