In what ways has the environment featured in your giving and your work more broadly?

One of the first organisations that I was really inspired by is called Thousand Currents; I met them through a Resource Generation conference. They fund social movements in the Global South working at the intersection of climate justice, gender justice, decolonial justice. 

My mum and I have given together, too, for example to Angela Terry’s One Home climate solutions organisation (which sadly had to close recently due to lack of funding). Source International is another organisation I think is fantastic. They have climate scientists who work around the world providing evidence of the ways that nature and communities have been destroyed by different practices – mining in particular – and trying to get justice for those communities. 

There are many important climate activist networks in Europe. One is Collective Abundance, a participatory fund which grew out of the Leap Collective, which I’m involved in. Another is the Grassroots Network for Climate Justice; I’ve recently supported their member Tipping Point.

I also co-founded Resource Justice UK, which is a community of young people with wealth (often inherited) or class privilege who care about the future of the world we’re in and are interested in the redistribution of wealth, land and power. It was inspired by Resource Generation in the US.

At Resource Justice we do something called Praxis, which is a six-month political education curriculum where you share your money stories, talk about the assets you have access to and talk about whatever is meaningful for you around your class privilege. More broadly, we talk about inequality and colonialism and putting your personal story in the context of inequality and oppression more structurally. 

There’s also an element of thinking about your relationship to money and your emotions around it. Some people get stuck in this uncomfortable place that doesn’t really provide an incentive to act. So there’s a nurturing element to those groups, where you’re creating relationships and stepping into action. We come up with giving plans, with goals, we gently nudge each other on how it’s going. The status quo is very much not keen on redistribution, so people come up against a lot of barriers, and it can be really hard to overcome them on your own.

This is the great wealth transfer that we’ve been hearing a lot about. It’s really important to organise the generation that is inheriting a lot of wealth.

You had a growing awareness that you should be looking at the origins of your wealth, but was there a particular moment or experience that made environmental issues feel more urgent for you?

When I went to the Thousand Currents Leadership Academy in California, there was an exercise where we had to go into nature and just observe. I was looking at these microscopic insects and all the little movement that was happening on the soil – it was in a really beautiful place – and I remember just feeling a very profound sense of grief rising in me. Just observing how beautiful our world is, and feeling the grief that we’ve done so much harm to this planet and to nature. I’d been so dissociated from my own personal connection to that harm, in order not to think about it for so long. Feeling that grief was very powerful. 

Who would you say you’ve learnt from about how to be an effective philanthropist and social activist?

I would definitely say Thousand Currents; all of their team are incredible. I’m also learning from friends of mine who are Indigenous, who have a different relationship to land and to ancestors. I went to the Amazon with my friend Teku who is an activist from the Aymara; that was very powerful. We were in Ecuador, on the border with Peru, with people who live in that environment and are trying to defend it from logging and mining. You can learn from watching an amazing documentary, reading a great book or listening to a podcast, but you really can’t unlearn an embodied experience that you’ve physically had in a place. 

When we were setting up Resource Justice, there was already Resource Generation in the US and Resource Movement in Canada. Just seeing other people who had similar backgrounds and were walking the talk with their politics was very inspiring. When you come from a place of privilege, you’re not really interdependent with other communities and can keep your distance. You can be fearful of getting into the fray. To have a model of people who are on the front line was really impressive for me.

It’s that thing about risk: what kind of a risk is it for you? Every day, people all over the world are experiencing unbelievable risks fighting for justice. Activists are being killed all the time. So I think we need to reframe that very low tolerance for discomfort, and that very strong feeling of entitlement to a sense of safety and security which money can provide.

I can understand the desire to accumulate wealth in order to feel safe – it can come from trauma and different paths. Parting with money might feel scary because of all the messages we’ve internalised around what is actually a threat to your safety and what isn’t. As rich people, we have a very warped sense of what a threat is and what isn’t. We’re out of touch with reality, essentially.

I also think there’s a sense that you’re foolish or stupid if you lose money, or you don’t make money, or you give away too much money, or give to something that’s not impactful enough. So in terms of perceived risk, there’s also this losing face element, where no one wants to be seen as frivolous, or too idealistic.