Next-Gen Philanthropists Who Defy Giving Traditions — and Their Families

When Naomi Roswell stood with hundreds of other Jewish protesters in the Cannon rotunda at Capitol Hill, weeks after October 7, risking arrest to call for a ceasefire in Gaza, she felt a burst of clarity.

Instead of questioning herself — “What is my extended family going to think? Does this make me a bad Jew? XYZ?” — the 28-year-old heir to an oil fortune that helped build the state of Israel said: “It all just kind of clicked.”

Across the country, wealthy young progressives have been challenging their families’ approach to philanthropy and confronting complex legacies of wealth and power. As threats to progressive nonprofits mount — from a backlash against DEI to the potential loss of some charities’ tax-exempt status under a second Trump administration — these donors say the stakes have never been higher when it comes to protecting the movements they believe in, even if it means fracturing family ties.

There is this idea that “family unity and cohesion is a guiding value of our philanthropy, and that anything we do, we should all be able to do together,” said Roswell. “We’re getting to the point where that is no longer tenable.”

In the small world of young wealthy progressives, many have found a political home in organizations like Resource Generation, a group founded in the 1990s that helps people under 35 navigate the contradictions of holding wealth while working for social change.

The groups’ missions have been resonating. Resource Generation’s membership base has increased tenfold in the past decade; it currently counts over 1,000 members in 17 branches across the country. To join, members pay $500 per year in dues or 5 to 10 percent of their yearly giving — or in Resource Generation parlance — redistribution.

“For many, there’s been this kind of cognitive dissonance around their class identity” that can lead some members to hide their privileged background, said Yahya Alazrak, executive director of Resource Generation. “You know, ‘my dad is a CEO, and all the spaces I’m in really demonize CEOs.’”

As a result, “people really are seeking a community like Resource Generation to make sense of their access to wealth, to make sense of their [class] privilege, and how they can hopefully show up as a whole person in social movements,” said Alazrak.

Over the past three months, Naomi and her brother David, 33, have given roughly $250,000 to the In Our Name campaign, a fund launched to support pro-Palestinian organizations amid what organizers have decried as punitive defunding of charities for their pro-Palestinian stances. In the process, they’ve raised about $90,000 from family members who’ve joined in for a series of Zoom calls and conversations about the campaign.

The siblings have also raised plenty of eyebrows. Much of Naomi and David’s wealth comes from their great-grandfather Jacob Blaustein, co-founder of the American Oil Company and president of the American Jewish Committee in the immediate aftermath of Israel’s founding in 1948. A friend of David Ben-Gurion, the country’s first prime minister, Blaustein was also instrumental in funding the fledgling state, both through his philanthropic giving and as an advocate on U.S.-Israel relations and the establishment of reparation agreements between Israel and Germany.

Today, Blaustein’s legacy can be found in a collection of family philanthropies anchored by the Jacob and Hilda Blaustein Foundation, which had more than $120 million in assets in 2022. The Roswell siblings are trustees for a smaller family foundation started by their grandparents — the Elizabeth B. and Arthur E. Roswell Foundation — and often meet with family on matters relating to the other philanthropies, where they’ve increasingly found themselves at odds with their relatives over Israel’s military campaign against Gaza.

Where before “we could find a middle ground,” said David, today “the middle ground has fallen out.”

Putting Money Where Their Mouth Is

That means, of course, putting their money — or their parents’ or grandparents’ money — where their mouth is. Got an oil fortune? Give to climate change. Inherited wealth from weapons manufacturing? Support peace and disarmament initiatives. Family money traced to plantation slavery? Fund racial justice and reparations work.

For the Roswell siblings, that reckoning began not with challenging their family’s funding for Israel or Palestinians, but with climate change.

As a student at Oberlin College, David often felt bewildered that a campus with so many “rich lefty kids” couldn’t find money for progressive clubs to, say, charter a bus to a climate protest or pay a student activity fee.

“This is so stupid,” he’d think. “So many of us could literally pay for this. None of us are talking about it.”

A roommate introduced him to Resource Generation, and the rest is history. He credits the group with offering him an “amazing sort of political education,” which helped him bridge his identities as an heir and a progressive as well as approach his family about their giving.

Anna Carson DeWitt

Eventually, David helped lead his siblings and cousins to start their own fund within their family foundation, focused on “reparation and repairing harm, given our family’s history in oil,” he said. They directed resources to U.S. communities on the Gulf of Mexico affected by the BP oil spill, acknowledging their family’s connection to the industry’s environmental impact.

The initiative grew beyond their expectations. What started as a fund controlled by the fifth generation of their great-great-grandfather’s descendants expanded when older family members wanted to participate. Even their grandfather, now in his mid-90s, came around.

“He didn’t fully understand where we were coming from,” said Naomi, “but he trusted us because we were a cohesive group of his descendants who were passionate and engaged.”

Legacy and Power

If their great-grandfather built his fortune on oil and used it to pioneer a certain kind of Jewish philanthropy, David and Naomi’s generation has been the one to reckon with the fortune’s cost and question the contours of its beneficiaries.

They also form part of a long tradition of young progressives with inherited wealth, who have formed networks and giving circles, written books, and argued passionately with older relatives over how and where to share their family wealth.

Leah Hunt-Hendrix remembers being an activist in Occupy Wall Street, a movement of the early 2010s that excoriated economic inequality and corporate corruption, even as she benefited from the wealth of her grandfather, the Texas oil tycoon H.L. Hunt, who once funded highly conservative columnists and radio programs through his Facts Forum Foundation.

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“Why should I be getting to make these decisions when there are so many people who have so little?” she remembers asking herself even as a child growing up in New Mexico, where some of her peers lacked indoor plumbing.

Hunt-Hendrix explains the world can be a lonely — and disorienting — place for young progressives with inherited wealth, especially if that wealth comes from industries like oil, which are considered antithetical to the causes they care most about. After her work with Occupy Wall Street, Hunt-Hendrix founded a similar donor network called Solidaire, intended for progressive donors of all ages.

“It’s tricky because you’re either with other wealthy people who aren’t concerned with” wealth inequality, she said, or you can try to lean into your politics and become a “community organizer, but that wouldn’t be completely appropriate either.”

Lines in the Sand

Recent years have brought thornier challenges for members of Resource Generation. If the past decade has sparked tense but often tolerant conversations about wealth and giving at family foundations, some donors say that today the stakes — and accompanying friction — are higher.

In the past year, the Supreme Court’s ruling against affirmative action and the subsequent settlement of a suit against the Fearless Fund has sparked a DEI backlash that has already begun to affect many charities led by and serving people of color. The war in Gaza has torn apart the progressive philanthropic world, particularly along generational lines. And there’s concern that a proposed law to strip “terrorist-supporting organizations” of their tax-exempt status could be used more broadly to target politically disfavored charities with little due process.

“The strongest advice I could possibly give is: Do not pre-comply” with restrictions on DEI-focused nonprofits or groups at risk from politicization, said Isaac Lev Szmonko, organizing director at Solidaire. “Grassroots social justice movements need to keep existing during this time, and our job as the very, very, very protected and cushy field of philanthropy is to figure out how to keep supporting them.”

Some progressive donors see their peers as abandoning the country’s scrappiest, social justice-oriented nonprofits when they’re needed most. Some are pledging to redistribute all their stock market profits over the next four years to movements under attack, and several donors said they plan to double down on giving to their organizations of choice, even if these recipients lose their tax-exempt status.

“If your strategy continues to be: We’re saving for a rainy day — well, it’s pouring,” said Tema Okun, a longtime progressive donor and member of Solidaire’s board. “We’re in a tsunami of rain, so this is the time to take risks and to be bold and to be brave.”

For Solidaire members Rabbi Becky Silverstein and his wife Naomi Sobel, who commit about $4.5 million annually to various causes, October 7 demanded a shift in their giving. The couple’s wealth comes from a mining and construction fortune that Sobel inherited when she was in her twenties.

They started with a donation of $500,000 to support Palestinian communities through Solidaire’s Unity and Power Fund. Later, they gave $300,000 through the In Our Name fund, in what Silverstein describes as “a deeply Jewish sense of tikkun and teshuva — repair and healing— to say, ‘This is a mistake we’ve made. Now we can start to address that.’”

Even if organizations lose their tax status, Silverstein said he plans to continue supporting them: “It’s meaningful to have the opportunity and the resources to take real action, to stand in solidarity with people.”

For the Roswell siblings, October 7 also marked a turning point, where family fault lines around Israel might have hardened beyond repair.

“We’ve been dancing around the issue for decades,” said Naomi, with the foundations often attempting to strike a middle ground between support for Israel and concern for Palestinian rights.

Now, “there are conversations more direct than ever” about “whether continuing to do philanthropy together across the range of our politics towards Israel makes sense.”

Rather than try to win over the hardest fights first, they’ve focused on building with those who are open — starting largely with cousins in their own generation.

“It both feels like we’re fighting something,” said David, “but also carrying out a legacy in a way that I think the older generations would be really proud of — and are proud of.”