United States
BUSTED shares stories and facilitates story-telling practice as a tool for organizing. Through writing, workshops, and open conversation spaces, BUSTED uplifts narratives that challenge the financial status quo.
Scaling
1 - 6 months
$25,000.00
Last update: October 05, 2023
Many people with access to wealth, particularly inherited wealth, lack the tools to examine the cultural and personal narratives that shape how they understand and respond to their privilege. I speak from this experience personally, as someone who inherited a million dollar trust fund at age 21.
For white and/or class-privileged inheritors like myself, guilt often accompanies this wealth. But guilt alone rarely results in meaningful action. Instead, it can silence, isolate, or create defensiveness.
In many wealth redistribution spaces, the conversation circles around questions such as:
How much should I give?
Where should I give it?
What if I’m told no—by my trustee, financial advisor, partner, or family?
These are valid and necessary questions. But answering them through financial planning, legal consultation, or philanthropic strategy alone doesn’t adequately touch the embedded cultural stories that uphold systems of extreme wealth inequality.
To truly shift power, we must also shift narrative. That begins with organizing through story. BUSTED is rooted in deeper inquiry:
What are the narratives we inherit about wealth?
How do they shape our behavior when wealth becomes accessible?
How is guilt unequally distributed across identities?
How do we move from guilt to responsibility?
What is our responsibility as people with class, financial, and/or racial privilege?
These questions have shaped both my personal journey as a multigenerational inheritor and my professional work as a donor organizer, educator, and guide for others grappling with similar realities. When engaged with, these questions generate beautiful and surprising reflections that can ground and sustain longer term wealth redistribution. BUSTED centers these questions through stories, workshops, and open dialogue.
Redistributing wealth requires organizing those with disproportionate resources to share power. Organizing, as narrative strategist Marshall Ganz puts it, is rooted in two fundamental questions:
How do we do it?
Why does it matter?
Answering these questions with strategies and spreadsheets is necessary but not always sufficient. To move people to action, we must also move them emotionally. Stories, not just numbers, generate empathy, build trust, and catalyze action.
BUSTED is a storytelling-centered project that uses personal narrative to:
Organize wealth holders toward redistribution and responsibility
Create space across class lines to examine the cultural narratives that shape our relationships with money
Normalize courageous, messy conversations about financial privilege
The project began with my own story, which involved three generations of my family challenging trust structure to unlock inherited wealth for redistribution. Sharing this story has become an entry point for others to reflect on their own relationships to wealth, legacy, and responsibility.
Recognizing how early individual wealth narratives become internalized, and seeking to show up in the formative spaces where they begin solidifying, BUSTED has been prototyping workshops on college campuses. These workshops, titled “Talking Money, Shifting Power,” are facilitated by a cross-class, multiracial team that includes myself, Jasmine Rashid, Mika Matsuno, Sahana Mehta, and Jacqueline Nkhonjera.
Talking Money, Shifting Power is a two-part workshop series designed to explore personal relationships with money and reimagine financial practices as tools for collective wellbeing and social change. The first foundational session invites participants into a reflective and relational space to unpack their personal and familial relationships to money, class, privilege, and power. Facilitators share their own money stories—tracing ancestral, childhood, and current narratives—to model vulnerability and complexity around wealth and class identity. Participants will be guided through a series of exercises and small-group discussions designed to:
● Uncover the "money stories" they carry from family, culture, and lived experience
● Identify how those stories influence their values, choices, and sense of self
● Reflect on how their choices today can disrupt harmful systems and contribute to a more just future
Building on the introspective groundwork of the first session, the second workshop offers participants a practical framework for turning financial values into action — exploring how individuals and communities can use money, regardless of how much they have, as a tool for justice, equity, and systemic change.
We are focusing on U.S. colleges with stark economic disparities—schools where students from the top 1% of income earners outnumber those from the bottom 60%. So far this has included, or will soon include, conversations at:
Middlebury College
Dartmouth College
Colorado College
Bates College
Bowdoin College
Colby College
These workshops create space for students, particularly those at wealth-concentrated institutions, to examine the personal and societal narratives they hold about money while encourage participants to see financial decisions as a form of activism.
Beyond campuses, I share my trust-bust story and facilitate dialogue at conferences and gatherings for wealth holders exploring their roles in social change. These spaces have included:
Forward Global Summit
Colorado Impact Days
Invest for Better
New England Women’s Investors Network
Vermont Community Foundation
Written and shareable narratives
Additionally, narratives are being spread through The BUSTED Chronicles, a Substack publication exploring money, family, privilege, and financial agency with a very personalized lens. This format allows for people to consume stories in the comfort of their homes, and share with others. My most resent article, detailing my family's trust bust, has been shared over 2,000 times and prompted enthusiastic outreach from other wealth holders eager to begin taking similar steps.
With additional funding, BUSTED could:
Develop and refine workshop materials
Compensate cross-class co-facilitators and collaborators fairly
Expand storytelling platforms and writing projects
Broaden our reach to more campuses and philanthropic communities
Our long-term goal is to build a network of wealth holders who are not just giving, but organizing; and a culture of authenticity in which talking money is a tool for connection and activism across social identity.
1. Expanded Cultural Narrative on Wealth
Participants and audiences engage with new, critical narratives about wealth, guilt, and responsibility, leading to deeper awareness and self-reflection around inherited privilege.
2. Increased Willingness to Talk Openly About Money
Participants build comfort discussing class and money with peers, family, and advisors, breaking long-standing taboos that uphold silence and shame.
3. Catalyzed Action Through Story
Workshop participants and readers of The BUSTED Chronicles are inspired to create giving plans, re-negotiate trusts, or engage politically as a result of the stories they hear and see themselves in.
4. Strengthened Cross-Class Dialogue
Workshops foster authentic connection across class and race lines, modeling a more inclusive and accountable way to address power inequities and build cross-class and multiracial coalition.
