Liberating Wealth Gathering
The Liberating Wealth Gathering will bring together people from the wealth hacker and progressive wealth holder communities, including the founding members of the Wealth Hackers Initiative, the winners of the first Wealth Hacker Challenge, curious wealth holders, and aligned partner organisations and collaborators.
The gathering aims to build a strong sense of community and identity in the wealth hacker movement, create space for meaningful connection between participants and the hacks they’re building, and dream together about how this nascent initiative might evolve.
The gathering will begin with a community dinner and an overnight stay on Tuesday 1 April, followed by a full day of workshops and unconference sessions on Wednesday 2 April.
This will be the first gathering of its kind and we hope it will become an annual event for the community.
Applying for a place
We are restricting the capacity to 50 people to ensure everyone is able to participate fully and to focus on relationship building. The first Wealth Hacker Challenge winners will be attending alongside the founding members of the Wealth Hackers Initiative. We have approximately 30 spaces left for those in our wider networks. We would like to curate a diverse group of people with a range of experiences of wealth practices, who are curious about or actively working on practical interventions to dismantle the wealth defence industry, and who are keen to connect with peers working in this niche. If you would like to attend please register your interest and we will let you know if you have been offered a place.
Registration deadline: 21 February 17:00 GMT
JRF is generously providing funding for this first gathering, including accommodation, food and venue costs for all 50 participants. We just ask you to cover your own transport costs to and from the gathering. If this is a barrier for you attending the gathering, please indicate this in the registration form, as we have a limited pot to cover travel costs if needed.
What is The Wealth Hackers Initiative?
Hosted by the Emerging Futures team from the UK’s Joseph Rowntree Foundation, a group of trans-local systems change practitioners and wealth justice advocates came together in New York City in October 2023 to share the innovative approaches, tools and technologies we have been discovering and developing that help shift wealth into a more thriveable economy.
Our work is focused on interventions that can dismantle the so-called “wealth defence industry”, i.e. the structures and strategies that support the accumulation of wealth and the prevention of its democratic redistribution. This industry includes legal professionals specialising in trusts, estates, private wealth, and tax law; financial services practitioners such as accountants, private bankers, family office managers, investment advisors, and wealth managers; and philanthropic entities such as donor-advised funds and foundations.
We believe that the wealth defense industry can be transformed by introducing accounting, behavioural, digital, finance, and legal hacks that redirect wealth in service of an economy that
is reparative rather than harmful;
is regenerative rather than extractive;
distributes power, wealth and opportunities rather than concentrating more of these things in the hands of fewer and fewer people
centres human and planetary flourishing rather than the creation of wealth for wealth’s sake
In 2024 we ran the first Wealth Hacker challenge to identify a cohort of six teams working on such hacks, who will be gathering for the first time. We also believe that there are aligned wealth holders, intermediaries and professionals who are ready to implement hacks in practice.
By bringing people together from across these positions in the system, we hope to explore how we can organise, collaborate and resource a deep transformation of the wealth system, one hack at a time.