Kay My Mentor
David Batker
Kay Treakle, my mentor, and I met decades ago in DC. For two years I could not write about Kay because I’d open my computer and be overwhelmed by tears. Kay, my dear friend, I miss her dearly. When we met all years before we talked up a storm full of energy, swearing, laughter and campaign strategy.
I’d worked at the World Bank and then with Greenpeace in Seattle. Bill Keller told me there was a job in DC that I should look at. I got the job, probably because I knew the World Bank well enough, and I moved to DC. Stunningly, the person who hired me was from Tacoma, and she had pioneered the Greenpeace work on the world Bank! Kay began with deadly pesticides banned in Europe and the US that the World Bank was promoting in Asia, Africa and Latin America.
Kay grew up in Ruston, enclave carved out by seceding from Tacoma because the copper smelter owners did not want to abide by Tacoma’s rudimentary 1911 pollution restrictions. Mr. Ruston, owner and Manager of the copper smelter sponsored the effort and 1 square mile was chopped out of Tacoma to create the city humbly named: Ruston. I grew up in Parkland, about 9 miles South of Kay’s childhood house. Prior to meeting, we’d gone to the Java Jive, Hobo Inn, Harvester, Point Defiance. We had Tacoma in common but rather instantly upon meeting struck up up a very dear friendship for decades.
She constantly coached me on campaign strategy and work, throughout our friendship. Our work also overlapped for decades. In Greenpeace I was the a full-time hire working on World Bank reform, and collaborated with Kay, the Bank Information Center and about 300 non-profits globally. Strengthening that movement was a passion for Kay.
We collaborated on hundreds of projects and many policies worldwide. Kay moved to be Bank Information Center (BIC) Executive Director. After many (but not enough) reforms at the World Bank I moved to the Philippines, home of the Asian Development Bank, another multilateral development bank (MDB) and also helped get the Philippine Greenpeace office off the ground.
Typically, this work involved stopping catastrophic projects, such as transmigration in Brazil and Indonesia, large dams, like Narmada, where 350,000 people were displaced with no compensation, or Yacarita, which involved massive corruption. Project disasters were used to very reasonably leverage policy change at the MDBs to stop continued failed lending. Thus, new World Bank policies while Kay worked on the banks included: forest policy (which banned logging of old growth); indigenous peoples’ policy which required informing and later consent; energy policy (requiring more renewable and efficiency lending); fisheries policy; Inspection Panel (to allow challenges to flawed projects); climate and biodiversity policy and many more. The incentive structure at all the MDBs needed to be changed. Promotions were based on how much money a task manager at the World Bank pushed out the door, and not on the value or quality of the outcomes of that lending. I leaned so much about campaign work, institutions and change from Kay.
One of the earliest and most important policy changes was the information policy. Prior to that, the World Bank could approve projects with 8 days notice, and no notice in the country or communities impacted. So communities would have no warning prior to project approval. That information policy change and increased notice was transformative in giving local communities some information and time to raise objections to ill-planned, corrupt and outright damaging projects. The initial policy change provided communities with a year notice, and then two-years of notice. That enabled an opening for real dialogue. The work was very challenging. We were both “inside” and “outside” players. We’d meet with Executive Directors and staff, and conduct Greenpeace actions and protests. Some of our DC collegues felt this could not be done. Yet, Kay was right, absolutely we could be blocking the entrance of the IDB with a pile of dirt, rainforest plants and animals and then walk in and meet with the IDB Executive Directors about the forest policy. Often, the actions gave us greater access. Fundamental to our work was not being cowboys and cowgirls riding in alone to make change, instead, we worked with environmentalists and activists from the countries impacted and supported their positions on forests and indigenous peoples’ rights, and thus built trust and life-long friendships many activists from Asia, Africa, Easter Europe, and Latin America.
At times this took a tremendous amount of trust and careful work, because our friends were under threat of arrest or much worse. Their safety was critically important to our work. We had many contacts in the World Bank. I remember being notified that 20 copies of one document had been produced, each with different typos so the Bank could track who’s hand was the source of leaked documents. Other times were also amazingly rewarding as when indigenous people in Thailand tied a bracelet around a World Bank Executive Director’s wrist and asked her to stop Pak Mun Dam. She was moved by that. That project had the first split vote of the Executive Directors and though it was funded marked a watershed where projects could be stopped.
At another protest where we blocked the entrance to the World Bank Annual meeting with a giant dam with activists chained into concrete barrels “Damn Narmada Dam.” The German World Bank Executive Director came out furious and I simply asked him if he’d ever talked to a person from the Narmada Valley, he said “no” so as protesters and actions proceeded I introduced him to our friend Shripad from Narmada. They talked and after a while I came back and asked the German Executive Director what he thought and he was curt: “I now understand why you are here.” He voted against any further funding of the project.
Perhaps one of the greatest lessons from Kay was her belief in non-violent disobedience and though she often sounded cynical about progress and what was happening, she also marked out and celebrated victories that were real for communities and policy changes.
Many times our job was to simply get information out to communities, and have World Bank staff and management talk to affected people so their voices could be heard directly.
There are several ways in which the MDBs impact nations: project lending, sector lending (like reforming the energy sector), intermediary lending (via national banks), privatization, structural adjustment and more. We worked on aspects of all of these policies. We worked on forest, marine, climate, ozone depleting CFCs, indigenous peoples’ rights, toxics, and the list is far longer. It was a period of many 16-hour days because we were working with BIC and getting information to so many affected communities and activists globally.
Another of Kay’s stellar lessons was there is no one that we cannot meet with and talk to as an equal. I felt the way Kay met and confronted the powerful, it really reflected her working class and Tacoma background.
While there Laurence Summers, then World Bank Chief Economist, later U.S. Treasury Secretary issued his famous export of toxic waste memo that we spread around the world and several times confronted him in person while at World Bank and at the US Treasury Dept. There is a lot written about that dramatic work. But with Kay we produced a 4’X3’ poster of Summer’s memo in full and wheat pasted it all over the World Bank and downtown DC, which was a real blast and got a stunning amount of attention by World Bank Staff who walked by them on the way to work.
Many people were really moved by this work, and came to join it from many campaign areas of Greenpeace, and many excellent people from NGOs came to strengthen Greenpeace, sometimes on leave from their organization to Greenpeace or switching jobs. Dewi Suralaga, Von Hernandez, Athina Ronquillo and many others.
Kay helped train at least thousands of people for campaigning on the World Bank, MDBs and banks in general. Kay helped create the movement, and with many others inside Greenpeace and certainly thousands of activists from other NGOs also worked to change projects and policies at the US Export-Import Bank, 35 other national export import agencies, other MDBs, bilateral agencies and such. Kay, left Greenpeace to be Executive Director of the Bank Information Center. I collaborated with her there as well conducting workshops and trainings in many countries where activists had protested but never walked into a bank to make change.
Kay then went to the C.S. Mott Foundation. Jim Puckett, I, Annie Leonard founded the Asia-Pacific Environmental Exchange in Seattle. Kay was our second funder, and APEX then split into the Basel Action Network (Jim Puckett, ED) and Earth Economics that I founded and ran for 21 years. Kay gave the organizations support and advice as she did to hundreds of organizations an with that start they thrived. I moved Earth Economics to Tacoma.
Kay called me and said she and Bruce wanted to move to Tacoma. I gave a recommendation for her, and Dell from the Harder Foundation called me. “Why would anyone at the C.S. Mott Foundation want to work for a small Tacoma-based foundation?” he asked. I can remember telling him Kay is not about large foundation, big money, fame or anything but results, and that Harder had the opportunity of the century to hire her. I was so happy when Kay and Bruce moved to Tacoma, it was as if my sister moved home.
Kay in the foundation meetings, would regularly have a bit of a tempest, swearing up a storm. I wildly loved this because it did shake some people up. The remarkable thing about Kay’s swearing was she did not swear with malice or to intimidate people.
Typically, across the decades, Kay and I met to eat and talk. How many times, I could not estimate. We met for breakfast, lunch or dinner. In DC we ate Laksa at a favorite Malaysian Restaurant. If breakfast in Tacoma, it was the Hob Nob Café off Write Park, the Harvester at lunch (both of which we’d eaten at when we were kids!) and then we explored loads of other restaurants in Tacoma. We also met and would have to go out to laugh and chat at many international campaign meetings in Brazil, Amsterdam, Bangkok or at funders’ network meetings. I always learned something from Kay and she was never shy about telling me if I screwed up on some campaign action or if I did well! We talked about campaigns, NGOs, foundations, people in our work, and so much.
Well, there are so many stories, cannot write about them and so I’ll end here. Kay was my mentor, she helped for my life’s work and was always honest, kind, sometimes sharp, but always without self-interest and hell-bent on doing good for our world.
Connected:
From Greenpeace, BIC and Harder Foundation, we were dear friends for decades.
