Luck and Power, with Garrett Neiman
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Legacy means a lot of things to a lot of people. To some, it's lasting integrity. It's building and maintaining a history of greatness. It's making an impact on people and community. For others, it's dependable security and assurance in an uncertain time. To us, it's all of that and more. It's a mindset, a brother and sisterhood of hardworking people dedicated to doing the right Let's talk legacy.
Welcome to Let's Talk Legacy. I'm your host, Gary Michaels. Today, our guest is awesome. Garrett Neiman is a serial nonprofit entrepreneur, an activist, founding CEO at College Spring, co-creator of Liberation Ventures, and senior fellow at Prosperity Now. He is also the author of the new book, Rich White Men, What It Takes to Uproot the Old Boys Club and Transform America. So welcome to the show. I appreciate it, Gary. Thank you so much for having me. Let's dig right into some questions and have a really healthy conversation here. We're going to talk about a few things today that for many of our listeners play major roles in shaping a legacy, which is what our show's about. And those are race and wealth.
You're dedicated your career to helping the rich give their money away to social justice causes. But I want to start with the hard question a lot of listeners might be thinking. You are a successful white man. So what qualifies you to speak objectively on things like inequity and privilege? And give us your background.
Yeah, absolutely. Happy to share a little bit of my journey. And I think the way I think about it is that really none of us are positioned to objectively speak about really anything, including social justice issues, that I think what I can offer is my own lived experience and path and take what feels helpful or useful in your own life and let the rest go. The connection to legacy for me runs pretty deep because I grew up in Orange County, California, the white affluent suburb. But then when I was six, my younger brother died in an accident, completely turned my family's whole life upside down. And I think going through that experience, it just really helped me see how life can be short and fragile.
Basically, as long as I can remember, I've tried to live a life that's meaningful and aligned with values and so forth. So for me, the main way that manifested is entering the nonprofit sector. My sister is adopted from China. I raised money for her former orphanage when I was in high school. And then When I went to college at Stanford, I started College Spring, which is a national college access nonprofit, helping low-income students of color prepare for the SATs and become the first in their families to go to college. And, you know, we served about 20,000 students during my tenure, raised $15 million, got recognized by the Obama White House. So on the one hand, it was this big success. But on the other hand, that decade of work really helped me see how Programs like ours, frankly, were really ill-equipped to address the deep systemic barriers that students of color and high poverty communities faced. And so I've been on a journey since to really try to understand the root causes of inequality, how they can be addressed. And also, you know, what is my role in the work?
as a white man, and particularly in a straight, able-bodied white man who grew up in a wealthy family and attended private schools, that I think there's a real desire among many people who share my background to contribute. But I think there's really, particularly in this moment, a lack of clarity about what that role can look like.
So you say that people at the top, often rich white men, too often are preserving their wealth over generations using what you call compounding unearned advantage. So what is compounding unearned advantage?
Unearned advantage is simply a way of saying that, you know, those of us who have advantaged identity markers, like growing up in a wealthy family or growing up white, growing up male and so forth, that does lead to some unearned advantages in our lives. And compounding unearned advantage is a way of talking about how
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