“We commit, in our lifetime, to shifting at least one third of the assets we don’t need to community stewardship, ownership, and control.”

The Good Life Pledge is a framework for capital activism created by Taj James and Kat Taylor in 2020. The core thesis of the GLP is that communities have imagined and are already working on effective solutions but lack capital resources at a scale commensurate with the scale of the problem. We can meaningfully accelerate progress towards the world we want to see by ambitiously transferring assets to community ownership and control. When the community has ownership over local resources, they make different decisions about how to use those resources, and those decisions lead to shared prosperity, self-determination and thriving.

Scale: at least ⅓

Asset Orientation: the assets you control, not just income, not just shaving off returns, but spending down. And not just for nonprofit operating expenses. The goal is to move beyond point solutions that address immediate suffering to build sustainable asset bases in communities.

Your Agency: of the assets you control. We get that in family and other wealth contexts you may not make all the decisions. The focus is on what you do control.

Community Wealth: by transferring assets to community stewardship, ownership, and control, we create the conditions for realization of Just Transition principles in the way we move capital.

The GLP is for you if you….

…find yourself or your institution (or will find yourself) in a position of having more assets than you need to personally thrive.

…are yearning to better understand your role in creating a more just and regenerative world. Maybe you feel a little stuck, you want to do the right thing but aren’t sure what that is.

…are dissatisfied with traditional philanthropy (even if you do a lot of it) and find yourself wondering if your efforts in philanthropy really matter.

Traditional grants are crucial to solving immediate suffering and urgent needs.

Asset transfer is the most powerful form of philanthropic gift. It is the gift that keeps giving, multiplying and circulating in service of a communities’ creativity, wellness and wellbeing. Over time, effective asset transfer can reduce and even eliminate the need for traditional grants.

Assets are the Foundation: The more shared assets a community has, the more capital they can access at the lowest cost to scale community-led solutions.

Assets are the Key: that unlocks loans, investment and government resources that, in turn, play an important role in creating more community health and wealth.

At least a third. More is great. Ideally everyone would follow the principle of enoughness and only keep what they need to thrive and transfer the rest. The ⅓ starting point is inspired by the Development Without Displacement mandate to shift 1/3 of the Land/Housing and Jobs out of the speculative market and into the commons.

Assets you don’t need. Family wealth and Foundation dynamics can be complicated. If you don’t control, focus on your influence and on spending down the assets you don’t need to thrive.

To start, figure out what is enough. What do you actually need to thrive? Commit at least 1/3 of everything else to accelerating Just Transition and community Self-Determination. It doesn’t need to be GAAP-precise. There is more complexity here and part of the GLP project is to simplify this math.

Generally, a GLP community will be one where:

1. Leaders use Just Transition and/or Restorative Economics as organizing principles.

2. There is a shared vision of a community wealth strategy and where point solutions to specific problems are woven into a broader strategy.

3. Has or plans to have programs in the key Community Wealth strategy playbook: Anchor Project, Loan Fund, Incubator, Land Trust.

The first five “core” communities in are Richmond Our Power Coalition, Allensworth Township, The Big We - Historic Clayborn Temple, The Village SF, and Inside Circle.

Great! You have the “scale” part of the GLP covered. But in addition to increasing the scale of capital stewards’ effort the goal of the GLP is to orient around Just Transition through asset transfer and community wealth building. This reorientation is the key to the GLP. As a counter-example, one could give everything away to a foundation with a more traditional approach which would not drive a Just Transition.

It depends. Our hope would be that capital stewards unlock more capital through the GLP approach and all of that new capital would be deployed to GLP oriented communities. Traditional nonprofits provide crucial services that solve real needs in communities and we don’t want to encourage a quick shut off of operating grants to these organizations. Most of the time, a gradual shift of at least some existing giving from the traditional approach to GLP-style asset transfer makes sense.