When I was 23, I learned that I had inherited a million dollars.
Or rather, I learned that 13 years earlier, a trust fund had been set up with my name on it – one that had continued to grow, unknown to me, year after year. It persisted, past my grandfather’s death, through my high school and college graduations, only to make itself known through an email I received from a financial firm when I turned 21.
When I re-discovered this money, I was a recent college graduate with a degree in Feminist and Gender Studies; a newly employed AmeriCorps member; and a budding community activist raising funds for food sovereignty, volunteering for local mutual aid, and protesting police brutality. All to say, I was deep in trying to understand, and place myself in, systems of privilege and oppression.
Seeing this number — one million dollars — was not only overwhelming, it was betraying. I felt it put me in direct opposition to the communities I wanted to be part of, the social movements I was participating in, the academic frameworks I had studied, and the activist identity I was claiming.
My immediate response was: This money doesn’t belong to me. It belongs back in community.
So, that winter, I set up a call with the financial advisors assigned to this account and laid out my plan to begin redistributing portions of my individual trust.
I began giving, redistributing 10% of my assets during that first year alone. But I quickly found out that giving this money away – and investing it thoughtfully – was more challenging than I anticipated. Despite my name being on the account, I, like many young people with trusts in their name, did not have ultimate control.
The mistrust in trusts
We are in the midst of what is being called the Great Wealth Transfer — $85 trillion dollars is moving from baby boomers to millennials and Gen Z.
You’ve probably heard that before. But the truth is, it’s a bit of a misnomer. Most often, that money is not being transferred directly to next generation inheritors, but instead warehoused in legal trusts. Millennials and Gen Z are not receiving assets; their trusts are.
And the defining feature of a trust - the very reason for the legal format’s existence - is a lack of control.
The deeper I dug into the contents of my own trust fund — specifically, the investment holdings themselves — the more I realized that the entire structure was flawed.
As a beneficiary of the trust, I did not have ultimate control over how the money in the trust was allocated. A trust fund is not simply an investment account, but a legal entity designed to hold and manage assets on someone's behalf. It involves a grantor, who creates the trust fund and sets the terms (my grandfather); a beneficiary, who receives assets from the trust (me); and a trustee, who manages the fund’s assets and executes the grantor’s directives (this was the trust company).
And because my trustee was a for-profit corporation rooted in the conventional practice of constant, unquestioned, growth, my requests to both give bigger, and invest regeneratively, fell flat. In response, my representative at the trust company told me that the trust was not an outright gift; it was set up by my grandfather to serve his grandchildren, according to his intentions.
Millennials and Gen Z are not receiving assets; their trusts are.
Since my grandfather was no longer alive, and unable to speak explicitly to his intent, the trustees ascertained that the primary purpose of the trust was to simply “take care of the beneficiary.” This translated to maximizing the trust’s profitability.
So, when I asked how fast I could redistribute the money, the answer was that I was limited to giving only what would allow the trust to grow indefinitely — which they determined to be giving 3-4% annually.
With new limitations on the amount I could donate to grassroots or otherwise justice-oriented work, I turned to investments. It was here I found the greatest irony.
My portfolio, even when screened for environmental, social and governance standards, had a primary objective: constant financial growth. To achieve this, my holdings remained in publicly-traded multinational corporations. Though ESG screens worked to limit negative social impact, they continued to operate by profit-maximization. This inherently centered my portfolio on major corporations that reinforce inequitable power structures and exploit people and the planet.
A Grandmother’s (True) Trust
I began advocating for changes in this portfolio. However, the less lucrative private funds I proposed — those centered in local economies, land access, and growth-stage business — did not meet criteria.
Despite my best arguments (expressed in several long letters, emails, and calls) that the work of distributing wealth benefits all of us — creating conditions that will promote health, safety, and happiness for everyone — and as such is a benefit to me, the beneficiary; the liability attached to deviating from financial norms kept both me, and my financial advisors, trapped.
With no clear path for how to enact change from within this structure, another route began to take shape — bust the trust.
Here, I turned to family. Because trusts do not just hold assets, but relationships. They hold a family story, and all the dynamics associated with it.
With my grandfather gone, my grandmother became the closest proxy to donors' intent. With her explicit support — and secret legal advocacy from the estate attorney who had helped draft the trust’s legal documents 15 years prior — I, my mother, and my two younger siblings, wrote letters to the trust company advocating for dissolution of the account and outright distribution of assets.
And, after months of back and forth, it worked. That money was released. That freedom now puts us into the nuanced space of grappling with “What is enough?”and determining how to both allocate and relinquish control of what is more than enough. These are now our decisions to make. Not the trustees.
Trustworthy
My work in this space has grown beyond individual action.
I am now on the launch team building Trustworthy Impact, a 100%-impact oriented trust company that itself prioritizes social and ecological benefit, rather than just financial return, becoming a way to shift not only the culture around wealth, but the tools that govern it. We sit at the intersection of intergenerational transfer, working with clients who are ready to invest their resources ethically without giving them away entirely. This project is building momentum, currently in phase one of a capital raise that will support the team, infrastructure, and legal support necessary to incorporate. (We are actively looking for investors and donors to contribute.)
I also work as Director of Relationships for a group called Chosen Family Office, facilitating connections between values-driven wealth holders and financial professionals aligned with social, economic and climate justice.
And I have this story. Which I continue to tell because I am not alone in my privilege, and because I know that those with financial wealth have disproportionate tools to effect change.
Recently, I have increased the transparency with which I speak about generational wealth. This includes not only the ways my money continues to move, but also how this money has surfaced and expanded my own emotional response, relationships, and frameworks for change. There is much more to say on this, which I do through my substack “The BUSTED Chronicles.”
I share this story hoping that more contradictions and pathways can surface from it. And because sometimes, trust-building — with community, with family, with self — requires pushing back on the structures we’ve been told to preserve. It means expanding our understanding of trust.
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