Kay Treakle is a whip-smart, funny, and accomplished activist, who worked tirelessly and successfully to protect the natural world that sustains us. I say “is” because those of us lucky enough to have known her are still applying her insights and lessons to our own lives. Kay died of liver cancer on June 10th, 2020, at the age of 65.
Kay was raised in a working class neighborhood in Tacoma, next to a 570-foot tall smoke stack, through which the ASARCO copper smelter showered pollutants on a thousand square miles of the Puget Sound basin for most of the 20th century. Kay and her three siblings grew up less than a mile away from the stack. The smelter dumped 630 tons of arsenic into the air the year before her birth. Arsenic is notoriously carcinogenic, even if it takes decades for the cancer to start killing you.
Kay graduated high school in 1972, immediately went to work, exploring possible roles in the world around her, as a farmer, an artist, and a chef. In 1977 she helped to start a Greenpeace office in Seattle. She was a front-line environmental activist, arrested at the site of the nuclear plant under construction near Satsop, and again jailed after blockading a supertanker in 1981, to prevent the Salish Sea from becoming the prime destination for Alaska pipeline oil. Both projects were stopped. Then she stepped up to organizing those campaigns, and finally leading the non-profit that sponsored the actions. She was the first Administrative Director of Greenpeace USA, later launched campaigns on pesticide use, and then served as national Campaign Director in Washington DC.
In 1992 Kay took a job at the Bank Information Center, a DC-based non-profit that assists people who suffer impacts of projects funded by World Bank loans. For eleven years she worked with numerous groups internationally, most often in Latin America, to help locals stop projects damaging their communities and environment, or to achieve mitigations to the harm that had already occurred. She also wrote extensively, and contributed to several books on the consequences of multilateral bank loans. She served as Executive Director of BIC for her final four years in DC.
In 2002 Kay jumped from the non-profit to the foundation arena, when she took a job as a program officer supervising international grants for environmental protection, through the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation in Flint, Michigan.
In 2005 she moved back to Tacoma, where she became the Executive Director of The Harder Foundation, which funds Northwest groups with programs designed to sustain the health of public lands. Anyone who took grants from Kay will attest to the fact that she was deeply into strategizing with them to ensure that their efforts were the most productive.
She retired from Harder in 2019, when her cancer prevented her from continuing work. She is survived by her husband, Bruce Hoeft, in Tacoma, and her son, Nathan, who still lives in the Los Angeles area.
If anyone wishes to make gifts to memorialize Kay, her preference was for contributions in her name to any of six non-profits: the Tacoma YWCA, Earthjustice in Seattle, The Olympic Peninsula Fund at The Harder Foundation, Planned Parenthood of Washington, the Surfrider Foundation, and Citizens for a Healthy Bay here in Tacoma.