S2E6: Ingrid Lakey on taking on the country’s 6th-largest bank and changing the activist culture on climate change

In our Season 2 Finale, we’ll hear about a group of Quakers who wanted to experiment with campaign strategy to tackle climate change. Their experiment ended up forcing one of the country’s largest banks to stop funding mountaintop removal coal mining after a multi-year campaign and hundreds of direct actions around the country. Ingrid Lakey describes intervening in a culture that prioritized personal solutions to the climate crisis and building an organization that was pro-confrontation and pro-system change. They built action teams around the country that shut down shareholder meetings and disrupted business as usual until their demands were met. Although the campaign started as an experimental intervention, it remains one of the most successful campaigns to take on climate finance.

Check out a writeup on this campaign at The Forge. 

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Ingrid Lakey is one of the founders of Earth Quaker Action Team, a grassroots organization working to build a just and sustainable economy using nonviolent direct action campaigns. EQAT’s first campaign succeeded in pressuring PNC Bank to stop funding mountaintop removal coal mining. More than ten years ago, she gave up a career in public radio to follow her leading to be a climate justice activist. Ingrid has been a trainer and facilitator for 25 years, leading workshops on anti-racism, diversity, team building, non-violent direct action, and conflict. She is a lifelong Quaker who was raised in a household where activism and spirituality were intertwined. 

Transcript

Andrew: Most of the campaigns we’ve profiled on this podcast were designed by groups or coalitions with a vision – the campaign was a way to get from the status quo, to their visionary future. In some cases, that vision was purely about playing defense – they just wanted to stop something bad from happening, like a new Amazon headquarters or police training facility. In others, they wanted to build their organization, like Southerners on New Ground’s Free From Fear campaigns. But today’s campaign story, to get the country’s sixth-largest bank to stop financing coal mining, was initiated as a skill-building intervention, by a group that really only got started for the purpose of running this campaign. The organizers wanted more people in Philadelphia’s movement ecosystem to learn the craft of campaigning – a very meta intervention. And one that seems plucked from the pages of Training for Change, and not only because it involves our founding director. We’re big fans of learning experiences that require organizers to learn by doing, and if we could think of a version of this podcast that involved a three-day campaign simulation… well, drop us a DM if you can think of how we might pull that off. 

So, the story you’re about to hear is a great example of having a laser focus on a campaign and a campaign objective and building organizational structures around it, rather than having an existing organizational structure that a campaign is incubated within. 

This story involves a group of Quakers, or people who belong to the Religious Society of Friends, so let me take a minute to say a little about who they are. These progressive Christians have played supporting roles in nearly every significant social movement. Where I’m standing in Guilford County, North Carolina, which happens to have been a major Quaker settlement in the 18th century, their pacifist and anti-slavery values led to this county voting against seceding during the Civil War, and to being a major hub for the Underground Railroad. Alice Paul and Susan B. Anthony were just two of many Quaker suffragettes, and Bayard Rustin, raised Quaker, got his first organizing job in the 1930s at a local Friends Meeting, which is what Quaker congregations are called. Quaker activists, who are predominantly but, like Rustin, not exclusively white, have been especially influential in the Philadelphia area. 

And while most of us have become accustomed to seeing Muslim and Jewish activists leading significant protests in 2024, it may be a little disorienting to imagine largely white Christians organizing dozens of civil disobedience actions against fossil fuel companies in 2011. So prepare yourself, that’s where we’re headed. 

But this story starts in 2009, when climate change organizing wasn’t yet in the mainstream the way it is today. We begin at a conference for Philadelphia-area Quaker activists who wanted to explore how to take action on climate change, and one of the speakers, a longtime campaign organizer and direct action trainer named George Lakey, suggested to the crowd that, rather than the individual actions middle class white people were obsessed with at the time, like recycling and using LED light bulbs, activists needed to interrupt the companies who produced the most climate pollution, and had to learn how to become a disruptive force as previous movements had done. Someone in the crowd challenged him to teach them, and he invited anyone interested to start meeting at his home. 

A study group formed, exploring topics like how successful campaigns had achieved their goals and what strategies they had in common.They also began cutting the issues related to climate change. They zeroed in on coal, and specifically mountaintop removal coal mining. A vibrant Appalachian resistance movement rooted in the mountains of West Virginia and Virginia was struggling to stop the destruction of an ecosystem spanning several states, much as today’s gas pipeline fighters must find leverage outside of the environmental regulators that have been captured by corporate interests. The study group mapped the pillars of support that allowed the coal mine operators to rip apart forests and streams, and realized one of the pillars ran straight into their backyards. PNC Bank, based in Philadelphia, was one of the largest financiers of mountaintop removal. But it didn’t have to be that way: the bank could easily adopt a policy excluding loans to mountaintop removal mining companies. But it would cost PNC some not-insignificant amount of the bank’s profits. To win a demand like that policy, the activists in the study group, who decided to name themselves EQAT, Earth Quaker Action Team, would have to cause or threaten to cause them even more lost revenue or higher costs, in the form of brand damage or lobbying expenses, from targeting the bank’s own pillars of support. PNC not only described themselves as a Quaker bank, which they had been before a wave of corporate mergers, but also marketed themselves as ‘the greenest bank’. 

Having landed on a target and a demand, it was time to pick strategies and tactics that would get EQAT past the campaign mile markers that would constitute what's sometimes called the critical path to victory, like forcing the company to respond publicly to criticism of its climate lending practices for the first time ever. The group knew they wanted to focus on recruiting one constituency, Quakers, to get involved in climate. But unlike many activists with a focus on recruitment, they didn’t primarily think of themselves as organizers or basebuilders. Rather, they thought it was more important to develop a smaller group of Quakers committed to disruptive action than build a mass base of Quakers taking action on climate. They very intentionally crafted an organization with a rebel identity, rather than an organizer or basebuilder identity. And they had diagnosed another movement tendency: what today’s guest, Ingrid Lakey, describes as a scattershot approach to activism – a passing emphasis on “whatever’s popping up,” rather than focusing on one campaign over time. 

All of this studying and cutting an issue and planning took place over the winter of 2009, and in the spring of 2010 EQAT moved into what Ingrid, in this interview, describes as their first phase of ‘practice’ direct actions, as she put it, to ‘limber up our muscles,’ in April and May, to raise the issue more visibly within Philadelphia activist circles. Their actions became more dramatic later that summer, building a small mountain in a bank branch lobby as part of a regional day of action, which Ingrid still describes as EQAT trying some things out, and at the same time, building more and deeper connections with Appalachian land defenders, which helped them recruit more Quakers into the fight. In February 2011 the campaign began generating more heat on PNC Bank by way of a secondary target, the Philadelphia Flower Show, which the bank treated as a huge advertisement for its green credentials and local corporate roots. EQAT sent in a team dressed as an imaginary Flower Crimes Division to occupy part of the expo, and were surprised that the host organization, the Horticultural Society, fearing even more bad publicity, discouraged the police from arresting their members. 

Continuing to find new ways to both keep the pressure on and recruit more activists outside Philly, the group led a 200-mile march to the bank’s headquarters in Pittsburgh, holding actions in branch lobbies and conducting trainings along the way. By late 2012 they had so expanded their ability to recruit, train, and host actions, they could hit fifteen branch actions in multiple cities on the same day. The next year, it was 16 branches in just the bank’s hometown, channeling the energy of student climate activists in town for a convention. When the bank moved its annual meeting to Florida to escape the group’s attention, they connected with high school and college students from the state who had reached out about getting involved, and for the second year in a row shut down the meeting within minutes of it getting started, generating negative attention in the financial industry press. 

In this interview, you’ll hear Ingrid reflect on how the group only slowly realized the importance of creating structures to absorb new activists, and of supporting them to stand up committees around the country. This was years before the 2016 Bernie campaign set the standard for those structures, but still EQAT managed to recruit and train campaign committee leaders years before the rest of us were using Zoom, and in 2013 were able to pull off a day of action that hit PNC locations in thirteen states. From the bank’s point of view, EQAT was roughly doubling its capacity to mobilize every year, rather than sending the same group of people to an annual meeting protest over and over. And their campaign escalations appeared unpredictable, and built on each other. And just like today’s faith-based direct action formations, many secular activists ended up joining EQAT or started PNC Bank campaign committees in other states, making it more difficult for the bank to discredit the group, particularly when dozens of high school students began joining in. 

Not only did the campaign achieve its public-facing, external goal, becoming what is still the only successful grassroots effort to force a financial institution to change its climate lending away from fossil fuel expansion projects, their internal goals were met as well. The actions EQAT planned required a bold, confrontational approach from participants, and the group’s recruitment tactics leaned heavily on civil disobedience trainings to encourage readiness for confrontation. 

And those actions consistently targeted a single pillar of support, the bank’s public image. Even when EQAT recruited bank customers to publicly close their accounts and move their money to another financial institution, they were clear that it was effectively a publicity stunt, attempting to cost the bank credibility with potential customers and partners, but they didn’t expect to cause an actual threat to the bank’s profits from moving customer deposits. After all, EQAT wasn’t set up to organize thousands or millions of customers, only dozens or hundreds of the most pro-confrontation Quakers. 

EQAT’s clarity on the leverage they could bring to bear on a specific point of weakness for PNC, their focus on recruiting a single constituency, their ability to dramatically scale up their escalations multiple years in a row, and their willingness to focus on one target and a single demand over several years of mobilization offer many insights into successful strategy.

Andrew: Ingrid Lakey, thanks for joining us on the craft of campaigns podcast. 

Ingrid: So glad to be here. Thanks for the invite.

AWG: If this campaign story were a movie, can you give us the trailer for what we're about to hear?

Ingrid: The realities of climate change were becoming headline news. So an audacious group of Quakers, small enough to fit in a living room, decided to take on the country's seventh largest bank, and won. They became a multi-generational, multi-faith force, challenging business as usual, and helped to build the movement to take on the financial backbone of the financial fuels industry. 

AWG: Nice. Oh, I can't wait to see this one. You gave us the teaser of that audacious living room sized group - were you one of those people in the living room? Or what's your connection as the storyteller here? 

IL: I was kind of one of the people in the living room. Back in the summer of 2009, I was, very, very, very pregnant. And there was a big group of Quakers, an annual summer gathering of Philadelphia area Quakers. The focus of that gathering was on climate change. My dad, George Lakey was one of the speakers at that. Different people were talking about different ways they're trying to address climate change. Whether it's lowering their individual carbon footprint or lobbying.

And my dad was like, you know what? It's time for us to do a nonviolent direct action campaign. And somebody raised their hand and they were like, how? Show us the way! Now, I wasn't there because I was too pregnant to go anywhere. But that fall, a whole group of Quakers started gathering in a living room, my dad's living room, other living rooms.

When I was able, I started attending those meetings with my very brand new baby. That's where we actually came up with this idea for the Bank Like Appalachia Matters campaign.

AWG: Maybe we should say something about your dad, since in that part of the story, there's a lot of people who are looking to him for support, guidance, insight, something. Can you just say something about then your dad and what his role was in starting Earth Quaker Action Team and where he had come from and got to that place where he was able to say very confidently, oh yeah, nonviolent direct action campaign.

IL: My dad has been an activist for decades and decades, something like seven decades, My dad has been a long-time activist, and he really has made that his life's work, running nonviolent direct action campaigns. He cut his teeth or started learning about campaigning in the civil rights movement, and then has been part of many, many movements since then.

He's also the founder of Training for Change. He's done a lot of thinking about the craft of campaigns, actually. About how do you come up with a strategy? How do you think about a target? How do we understand power? That has really been my dad's life's work. That's why he was invited to be on this panel of Quakers thinking about climate change.

He had some expertise around campaigning which was something that Quakers had done like back in our history. Quakers had been part of the abolition movement, part of the women's suffrage movement, part of the anti-nuclear weapons movement, and anti-Vietnam war movement.

But the last several years, Quakers hadn't been very involved in direct action campaigns. And so my dad was like, this is time for us to lean on our legacy and come back to that kind of speaking truth to power and disrupting the systems that are harming us. So he was sort of seen as this expert.

And that's why there was this person in the audience, actually a young adult who was like, show us the way, I'm down. I don't know how to do this, what you got? That's when we started having these living room meetings. Really for the first several years my dad was really kind of the coach, helping us think about both setting up the campaign and the organization to meet our goals, to win.

AWG: Awesome. So you're very pregnant. It's 2009. Someone says, show me the way. Your dad says, all right, cool. Let's do this. What else happens in sort of the first act first phase, even before there was a campaign? Sounds like even before there was a group, what else is going on leading up to launching this campaign?

IL: Certainly there were a lot of people taking action around climate change. If you can remember back to 2009 - I was just recently thinking about this - it's still at that point, when in the news, if they talked about climate change, they felt like they also had to talk about how it might not be real. Kind of equal time for both sides of the story. So that was a different context than I think we're in now. But we were definitely more and more under, as a Quaker, I would say under the weight of this true thing of climate change and that we needed to take action now.

That was happening in various places around the country around the world. There was activism. But in the Philadelphia area and again among Quakers there, there really wasn't any collective action happening. Also at that time, there got to be more and more energy and interest in people thinking about their own carbon footprint. Like, how do I make personal life changes so that I'm not contributing to climate change? But the danger of that was people would become so focused on their own practices. We weren't actually challenging any of the systems were moving climate change faster and faster - or moving us faster and faster toward the cliff.

There was real energy then of like, let's actually put the energy and the focus and our power toward the folks who can make a difference on a much grander scale than whether I take shorter showers or if I take public transportation. Those things are important, but that's not the system change that we need.

And so that was part of the energy of like, we need to have a specific target, a specific campaign that we can invite people into. The other thing I want to say about what we were really up to when we got started is we were realizing our campaign, what we came to as our campaign, was important in and of itself. One of our goals was about actually building capacity for the movement, beyond our campaign, and beyond even the climate justice movement, movements for justice. How do we skill up? How do we build our muscles for doing scary things? How do we take on the systems that have told us we're in fact powerless?

How do we turn the tables? And we realized that there's both internal work to do around that and taking on the systems that say, sit down, we don't want to hear from you. But there's also skill level work of how do you create a campaign? How do you choose a target? What kind of trainings do you do? What kind of support do people need to be able to do scary things? We were kind of like, all of this was important. The campaign itself was important, and the campaign was going to be a way of building the movement as well. We wanted it to be in service of justice movements in the U.S. and abroad.

AWG: So you guys are thinking about this big picture. Then how do you end up developing the focus in terms of this specific target? This is an opportunity, it's a thing we feel passionately about, let's have a campaign to stop this bank from financing mountaintop removal mining.

IL: The first step was there were a couple of people who said, I'll do some research about possible campaigns and then they all got together in my dad's living room. This is one of the ones I wasn't at because I was freshly a new mom and not ready for prime time. But the folks came together, brought laptops and were doing research together.

We realized that we wanted to be part of something. Not just out there on our own. Doing some research, we realized there was already an anti-mountaintop removal coal mining campaign. That work was happening mostly in Appalachia. We started looking at - well there's the big picture of climate change.  How do you fight climate change? Exhausted just thinking about that. We need to like, bring it in. So then we started thinking about coal. Okay, so what about coal? And then we got even more focused on mountaintop removal because there was already a movement working to end mountaintop removal coal mining in Appalachia.

So as we looked at mountaintop removal, we decided to use a tool called the Pillars of Power. We often have thought about power as sort of like, the powerful at the top, that's like the regular triangle: and at the top is the powerful, and then the rest of us are kind of at the bottom, without very much power. If you flip that, and you've got an upside down triangle. In this case, the mountaintop removal coal mining industry, and they're at the top. They have to be held up by pillars so that that unstable triangle doesn't topple over. So there's pillars that are holding up mountaintop removal, coal mining. 

So we took a look at that. We've got the coal companies. One of the really important pillars is the financing because mountaintop removal doesn't take actually a lot of people to blow up a mountain and take the coal out, but it takes a lot of money. It's all about the financing.

Coal companies are reliant on banks to get the financing to do mountaintop removal coal mining. That's where we realized we had a direct connection. I'm based in Philadelphia. Earth Quaker Action Team is based in Philadelphia. We're not that close to Appalachia, but our local connection was that a Pennsylvania bank, called PNC Bank, was one of the primary largest funders of mountaintop removal coal mining in America. So we're like, wait, this is a local issue for us now. 

The other piece of it is that PNC had Quaker roots as a bank. When there were several mergers ago, they had been a Quaker bank. They used that as part of their promotional material because Quakers have a reputation for integrity and trustworthiness. They talked about having Quaker roots. They called themselves the “greenest bank in the business.” And so we were like, this is a way for us to go directly at one of the pillars of support holding up mountaintop removal coal mining in Appalachia. And we can do it in the state that we're in, in Pennsylvania, and PNC banks are all over Philadelphia. 

That's how we actually chose that specific target. We realized climate change - too big. Even just saying coal - too big. Going at mountaintop removal, we knew that we had a specific target and one that we had direct access to, and one that we as Quakers felt also responsibility around, because they're using a Quaker name there and they're saying they're the greenest bank in the business, which you cannot do if you are also blowing up mountains.

AWG: You all zeroed in on this. It sounds like it was as simple as look, this is something we can do something about, there's a connection. There's a vulnerability, is what it sounded like. They have staked part of their reputation, maybe some part of their brand identity that they spend marketing dollars to protect, on the connection to a constituency that we're organizing specifically, like we are organizing Quakers, that is a constituency. So that's a vulnerability they have and a kind of power and leverage we might have. 

And obviously you guys felt strongly about what was going on in the mountains. In my experience, this is actually the most fraught time for a lot of campaigns - picking especially a demand, but also even a target.

I'm wondering, were there any strong feelings about, no - it's either this is the wrong target or this is the wrong demand. And we have to sort of struggle over that internally, or does it seem pretty straightforward to everyone that, yep, this is, this is what we're going to ask for and this is who we’re going to go after.

IL: We had to do a fair amount of homework. Finding out who is already doing this work and how do we connect with them? Let's connect with I Love Mountains. Let's connect with the Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition, Coal River Mountain Watch.

We need to educate ourselves about this. We need to be conscious of class differences as well. We don't in any way want to feel like this group from Philadelphia barging in to work that's already being done by  frontline communities in Appalachia where we're we've not been invited. So that felt really important. We were aware of that as a thing that does happen, and not wanting to do that. There have been Quaker connections with Appalachia over very, very, very many years. So we also felt like we had some integrity of being in relationship over time, with a region that is not our neighborhood.

Another thing that we did that was part of our getting ourselves geared up was we found a kind of a sister organization that really focuses on finance campaigns. Because really none of us were experts in finance. We're not a bunch of bankers. We were not a bunch of economists or whatever. This was not our area of expertise to even understand how does the banking industry work. So we connected in with another organization that became kind of a big sister to us. They really supported us to understand the system.

They also had some inside connections at PNC which was helpful for us as we moved through the campaign to have a sense of what was working.  Actually when it became close to our winning, we got kind of a heads up that we were in that direction, but those kinds of connections at the beginning were really important. Having those connections also meant that it was easier for people to say yes to the campaign.

We didn't have big grand fights about, was this the right campaign? But part of our strategy was also about the relationship building that we needed to do. My dad at the time was also a professor at Swarthmore College, and at Swarthmore they had Swarthmore Mountain Justice Group. There were already folks in our area who were thinking about mountaintop removal coal mining and trying to stop it. They were ready to join in with the campaign. 

AWG: Yeah, it seems like it was very much sort of the progressive zeitgeist. You weren't necessarily trying to just recruit progressive Quakers, but there were a lot of activists who were making trips down to the mountains where these site fights were happening at the time.

It reminds me a lot of #StopCopCity. We're recording this right now when there are tons of groups all over the country just acting in solidarity with #StopCopCity. That to me felt like a similar moment, so it's interesting that you name this convergence. You are a specific constituency. We did a lot of different research about the pillars and - oh, finance. Oh, this one bank that's trying to market to us. And, financing is how they're blowing up these minds. There are actually young people locally who are getting really activated around that. The Venn diagram of it is that we have a connection, they have the target that has a vulnerability, this feels very important and urgent to us and to some part of our base, and go for it. Whereas there might've been more struggle if it was only one of those things. There might've been more options on the table that seemed equally good, but this one just kind of really stood out to you all. 

This is one of the largest banks in the country at the time. Is it just kind of, well, we're going to do what we can to shame them?  Or did you have a deeper understanding or theory? It's always a hypothesis about - we're going to cost them money; we're going to threaten some kind of institutional relationship, customer relationship. What was the theory of how we were going to win?

IL: We were just using pillars of power all over the place. And so then once we chose PNC, we thought, what are the pillars holding up PNC Bank? And one of those pillars is public support, right? It is their image, their brand that they were very interested in protecting. And so a lot of what we were doing was going after their brand.

One of the tactics that we used was “move your money,” to get people to actually close their bank accounts. We did actually get several million dollars moved. Now for a bank of that size, it's not that that really hurt their bottom line. We weren't doing a boycott campaign where we were actually trying to hurt their bottom line financially. But by doing that, having people do an action - not just like quietly go close their account - but each person who would go close their account - it became an action, a direct action that we would support and make hay over. 

All of those were about people taking personal responsibility for where their money is going while demanding that the bank take responsibility for where the  money is going. While we used a “move your money,” part of it, it wasn't the same as a boycott campaign. Really all of the actions we did were pretty much going after their brand.

There's another tactic we'll get into too that wasn't public, but was actually what many people would call “birddogging” where we were actually going after individual board members and the CEO. 

AWG: Cool. So campaigns about to launch and your thought is if we can hurt their brand image enough, they will stop this kind of financing, which is just, I'm assuming one of their business lines. I'm not sure if you guys were able to crunch the numbers about how much profit is bringing in or anything, but that's kind of the thinking:  if we can affect their brand identity, they'll back off of this one. Take us into the launch of the campaign and how that worked.

IL: So, in the fall of 2009, we figured out, we got a campaign. We're ready.vThen it was January of 2010 when we just said, we want to be an organization. At that point of one campaign, we felt like we needed the structure of an organization.

That's when we actually founded Earth Quaker Action Team, or began the process of that. We're all volunteers at this point. Everyone is involved primarily because of a concern about climate change. Many of the people who got involved, we had to do a lot of kind of education or sort of outreach. A lot of people didn't know about mountaintop removal coal mining, including me. Before we began this campaign, I didn't even know about it. We watched a movie about it and we started helping to understand the issue. We had a lot of people start showing up of like, I care about climate change and I don't know what else to do - let me join in. We started doing some very small actions that were super simple.

Folks may know about Fossil Fools Day, which is April 1st. That April, we did a Fossil Fools Day and dressed up in goofy clothes and went to right outside the headquarters of PNC and acted out a little bit. It was super no big deal, very easy to do.

I won't say it's a no big deal because it's actually not something people generally do. So in that way, it is a big deal. We're asking people to do something that's very outside the comfort zone but it was just to start practicing, right? Like limbering up our muscles. I feel like it was like our way of stretching in a way.

That spring, 29 miners were killed in the Upper Big Branch mine accident. PNC Bank was a major investor in Massey Energy, which was the coal company. We did a memorial service in the rain in front of that PNC headquarters. Again, that took very little creative energy, but it was like, how do we show up and start getting this on people's radar?

That September was very cool. There was a major, major convergence in Washington DC called Appalachia Rising. We wanted to go to that. We collaborated with Swarthmore students - Swarthmore Mountain Justice - and Reverend Billy and the Stop Shopping Choir. We participated in Appalachian rising, and then we went to the nearby PNC bank and we went into the bank and we built a small mountain in the lobby. We had a Quaker meeting for worship there, and the choir sang, and five of our folks got arrested. So that was our first civil disobedience action. 

This was all part of us trying some things out, and as we do these things, that's how the word is being spread and we're making more connections. Being at Appalachia Rising was a really powerful thing for me. It felt really important to be able to connect with other activists and folks who are from Appalachia doing this work. And that was part of like just bringing people in and saying like, this is the issue. This is what mountaintop removal coal mining is. This is what our local connection is to it. 

Another piece of what was going on at that time is a lot of Quakers, and I think other activists, but a lot of Quakers, had a very scattershot approach to activism. So it was like, show up to one-off marches, write some letters, whatever's popping up, go and do a thing.

But most people weren't really focusing on one campaign or one issue, so we had to go for a culture change in he local Quaker area of saying like, if you care about climate change: throw down with us on this campaign, which was hard. And there were definitely people were like, well, why aren't you doing fracking? We should be doing fracking, or do this and fracking. 

We had to say, we've chosen our campaign. So there was a lot of needing to set boundaries, especially in that first act. That first act was a lot of like, we're not going to come and just do an education session for your Quaker meeting. And we're also not going to come to everything that you care about. What you care about is important, but we're doing a campaign and we need to be disciplined in doing this campaign. That's how we were going to make change. It's not just about us feeling good. 

The other piece about how we decided to start was really in claiming an identity as rebels. We wanted to be a rebel organization. Some folks may know about Bill Moyer and his framework of the four rules of social change. That was very influential for us in thinking about what we were up for. We decided the thing that was missing in Quakerism around climate change was the rebel role.

There were already people who were doing advocacy, lobbying. We got that. I mean, that's good. People are doing that. They're folks in the helper role, helping folks who are being directly affected by climate disasters and people changing their own personal carbon footprint and things like that. That was happening. And there was some organizing going on. But we realized we needed to really focus on this rebel role and to claim that as a space. Partly because what we knew is that we were going to be asking people to do scary things and we don't want people to come and say, well, I'm up for just writing some postcards for you.

There's nothing wrong with postcards, but that's not what we were up to. That's not the campaign we were running. So we wanted to be really clear in our identity that what you're coming to do is take direct action. I think that was an important part of our clarity at the beginning of, what role did we want to play in the movement?

Moving forward, another thing that we realized is training was going to be really important. This is not too surprising since my dad's a founder of Training for Change. But we had a huge really core belief that training was going to be critical. That everybody - we'd all get to grow. The point of this was for all of us to grow in our capacity, to do nonviolent direct action campaigns, to take on scary things to get outside of our comfort zone. 

February of 2011 we had a major training in memory of Judy Bonds, who was a really powerful coal activist, anti-coal activist, who died of I believe it was lung cancer from breathing the coal dust.

We had a big training and that's where we met all these amazing people who came in and we're like, I want to skill up, show me. We did a beautiful training, and then that was followed by our first independent civil disobedience action. And that was at the Philadelphia Flower Show, which is actually kind of an internationally known event.PNC Bank, that year, was the sponsor. 

There were lots of moments in this campaign like that where we didn't know that ahead of time when we picked the campaign. But lo and behold, they had like a major exhibit in the middle of the convention center in Philadelphia. We did an occupation and we went in as the Flower Crimes Division and we encircled it in police tape and sang songs and we had t-shirts that said Flower Crimes Division, this whole thing. We were planning to stay there until we were arrested. 

Another big lesson we learned was - we were thinking, of course PNC Bank will want us out of there right away. That was a situation where it wasn't PNC Bank's call, it was the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society who ran that event. They were not interested in a headline that came out saying “Quakers arrested at flower show.”

We learned that in the process we designed this to go a certain way, it's not going to go that way. We negotiated a graceful exit, or actually I would say a powerful exit, which is what we wanted. We wanted to make sure that we left feeling empowered. We kind of worked it out with the police that they would escort us out. They didn't arrest anyone, but we left singing. We sang a labor song called Step by Step on our way out. It was a beautiful action. It was a powerful action. And also one we learned a lot in. That was, that was a big deal. 

So anyway, we did a whole bunch of different tactics over that next year. We started this Move Your Money campaign. The end of Act One was when we decided to do a walk from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh. Pennsylvania is a very big state. I want to just say it's a really big state. We ended up walking 200 miles across the state and we set it up so that people could come in for a day or a few days.

And we had two folks who were our anchor walkers who walked the whole thing. And that was my dad and Gail Newbold, another Quaker. We did direct actions almost every day. The whole route was designed to stop at PNC Bank branches where we did actions and then in the evening we would give a talk at a church or at a quicker meeting or at a community group.

And that was a really, really powerful experience for us of organizing, first of all, because to get people from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh is an amazing effort. We had this whole structure of different people on different teams. Some people were on the food, some people were on transportation, some people were on planning the actions. We had to just figure all that out, which was extraordinary and exhausting. It took a huge effort. We reached a lot of people, and it involved a lot of people because different people would connect in with different parts of it. But another big lesson for us was once it was over, we were toast.

We were wrung out. And we hadn't created a mechanism to follow up with people. We had connected with all these people, we'd organized all these people, and we didn't quite have a way of then following up, giving them a next step, inviting them, or having a way for them to really join the campaign.

I think that was just a really important part of our learning. We did it. Huge success in that way. And also an important part of our learning, which it took us a while to actually truly learn the lesson.

AWG: What happened next? What was the next phase?

IL: I would call Act One that I just described as sort of the “learning how to be bold and how to do a nonviolent direct action campaign.” Because for most of us, we had never done it. There were some people who had experience like my dad and others who did have a lot of experience. Daniel Hunter is one of the people who was part of really helping to craft this as a campaign. But we were in such a serious learning mode of what is nonviolent direct action, first of all, and what's a campaign?

Act Two, I would call “experimenting with escalation and building power.” And that's where we continued on this track of doing trainings, trainings, trainings, trainings. We started experimenting with doing multiple actions in a day in multiple locations.

So we did a training in late 2012 where we trained a bunch of people and then had 15 actions in different locations simultaneously. That was another piece of our realization, oh we can be bigger and activate more people. In that case, we weren't going for a big mass action. We wanted dispersed actions, partly because part of our strategy was we wanted the honcho, the Philadelphia area general manager of PNC, to have to get phone calls from all of these local branch managers saying, “Oh my God, there's a bunch of Quakers at my, at my bank. What do I do?” We wanted it to be this dispersed experience from PNC where they would just not know when we were coming or who was coming. 

I just want to say I keep saying Quakers, but the truth is actually we were not only Quakers. We really were multi-faith, and in many cases people were joining who didn't have a faith tradition at all. Folks who started seeing that there was something to this campaign that was for them. While Earth Quaker Action Team, we declare our Quakerness, it was not like you had to be a Quaker. It was not our act of proselytizing. It was just saying we are going to use some Quaker practices. Come in knowing that, and you are welcome. Um, so that's really, really important because, I think that's a part of our identity as Quakers. We're in no way limited to only being Quakers, which has been really important. 

As we were experimenting and escalating, we also decided we wanted to try out another tactic that many people call bird-dogging. That was a term that was hard for some folks, especially some of our Quaker members. And so we decided to call it spotlighting. And really like our whole campaign was about shining a light on PNC's role in mountaintop removal coal mining. So we used a lot of words around light, shining a light. So we called it spotlighting. For who we are and how we wanted to show up, we didn't really want it to be about shaming or demeaning the person that we were coming to talk to. There are different choices around that, but we really made a choice that was important to us. 

Actually we had a group of folks go spotlight at an action where one of the PNC Board of Directors was getting an award. A couple of our folks pretended to be the press and we did a debrief afterward we decided, actually, we don't want to pretend to be anybody else. For us as a group, what feels important is that we be in our integrity and show up as who we are. And that might mean we won't get access to some places, but that's what's important to us. That's a value that we hold. So from that point forward, we ended up showing up in various places to talk to folks who have direct decision making power.

And that's what felt important about the way that we were spotlighting. We didn't spotlight or birddog a local bank branch manager. They have no power in whether PNC Bank loans money to coal companies. But the Board of Directors sure does. Right. The CEO sure does. So we were really trying to be very clear who has direct decision making power and how do we show up, um, and, and challenge them directly on their role.

So we did that. And I have to say it was really scary for a lot of people and very uncomfortable for a lot of people to do that. Because we're just not trained to challenge people in power in a direct way. 

AWG: Can you say more about that? I think a lot of people listening would say, well, whether or not you're comfortable challenging people, why wouldn't you try to make them ashamed? You alluded to - there are different choices, this is just one of them, different options. But there may be people listening who have never actually heard of rationale for why a committed campaigning organization that actually does kind of want to make people feel bad - in the sense of like, we want them to rethink their choices, and think we made a bad choice, now we'll make a different one. But so then why not try to shame them as part of that?

IL: Because I don't think you have to. My power doesn't come from making you feel small, or making you feel bad about yourself. I don't believe that's where my power really comes from. It doesn't mean we don't get to have a true and honest conversation where I get to challenge you on your responsibility. That's accountability. That's true accountability in my mind. Just making people feel bad? People then can go very different directions about that. If you make me feel bad, I could also double down on what I'm doing. That doesn't necessarily change my mind or have me to see what you're actually talking about.

People have different choices to make about that. But it was never about trying to make me feel powerful and you feel less powerful, but about me really trying to say to you, use your power to do something different because what you're doing is harming. So it's not stepping away from saying what you're doing is harming others at all. But it's not saying you're a bad person. 

For me as a Quaker, I have a belief that there's that of God in everyone. Everyone, including a bank manager, including the CEO of the bank, there is that of God in there. And that's the part I want to speak to. That part of me, that part of God that's in me, I want that to connect to the CEO, the part of God that's in him, 

AWG: How did you measure, evaluate, assess? Okay, we are building the kinds of capacities that we think we need to build in order to eventually win. Or this is the kind of response we're getting or data we're getting either from inside the company or around the company that let us think we are closer than we were to forcing a crisis that will cause them to agree to our demands.

IL:I think at this point we didn't, we weren't hearing a lot from the bank  I mean, they were certainly not appreciating our showing up, and they most of the time would just shut down their bank. So we were interrupting business as usual, for sure. We were getting a reaction, no question, from the bank.

We didn't have indicators that that was changing their policy at that stage. So a lot of it was like, how are we using tactics that are supporting people to grow? How are we learning from that? And how is it inviting different kinds of people in to the campaign because we were still trying to build a base, right? And welcome people into the campaign. 

Another tactic we used was a fast. We did a 40 day fast in the spring of 2013. And that was around Easter, Passover. We invited people to fast and people did that in various ways. There was a couple I know who fasted from alcohol. There was somebody else who fasted from television. Other folks who would fast from different things that they were like, it will be some kind of a sacrifice for me. My dad actually fasted from eating food for 40 days. We were asking people to find some way to be public about their fast.

Again, that looked different for different people, but it was about getting people to say, what is this? How can I be personally showing up in a way, in a way that it has also some spiritual depth. And it didn't have to look a certain way. For folks who practice Christianity, Easter is a really important time. Lent is the 40 days leading up to Easter in which your practice is to give us something up. We want different ways for people to feel connected to the work that we were doing. And that was in preparation for further escalation. So we felt like that was sort of a spiritual practice that we can invite people into that was inviting us toward further escalation that we had coming down the road.

This 40 day fast was in preparation for the PNC shareholder meeting in Pittsburgh. That’s where the national headquarters for PNC Bank is in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. So we decided to show up in Pittsburgh with a Quaker practice, which is called a meeting for business. The way Quakers do their businesses, they meet and have a meeting for worship with attention to business. So whatever decisions need to be made. And so we decided at that one, we would go to the PNC shareholder meeting. We would buy shares, like one share of PNC to get access to the shareholder meeting.  And we would hold our own meeting for business during their shareholder meeting. So they had their agenda and we had ours. We actually printed agendas that we brought and we had different people prepared to stand and speak when they felt moved. So we were like coming from a place of being spiritually grounded. It was a Quaker meeting for worship as far as we were concerned. And so someone would stand and call out the name of one of the board of directors and say their name and make a statement about mountaintop removal coal mining and then say, which side are you on? And then the rest of us, we were sprinkled throughout the whole audience, and the rest of us would then sing, Which side are you on, Jane?  Which side are you on? Or whichever name of the director was. 

They ended that meeting in 20 minutes. They ended their meeting in 20 minutes. Because they just could not conduct business. Because we were conducting our business. That was another example where brought a lot of different people in and we got to go in in pairs so we could support each other to do what is actually a pretty scary thing of standing up in the middle of somebody else's meeting and interrupt it with what feels like a far more important agenda item.

That had a direct impact on their ability to do their business. They shut down their own meeting because they couldn't conduct their business since we were busy having a meeting for business in the style of friends. 

Also we got a lot of press for that. I want to say that's another piece of the question of how do we measure some success or not, or what's working? At least at that point, the business press covers shareholder meetings, especially in Pittsburgh. PNC is a huge presence in Pittsburgh. The business press was there. So we got written up about that. So it's another way of spreading the word about this campaign and PNC's culpability for mountaintop removal coal mining in Appalachia. 

I would say the sort of end of Act Two was PowerShift. That October, this is 2013, PowerShift was in Pittsburgh. Once again, one of these things - this is a coincidence! Or Quakers might say it's way opening. 5,000 students gather in Pittsburgh for PowerShift, which is an annual gathering of student activists around climate change.

EQAT went. We led a bunch of trainings at PowerShift and then held the biggest bank branch action in U.S. history to stop business as usual for PNC Bank. We did 16 PNC Bank branch actions across the city of Pittsburgh. Most of them were in Pittsburgh. And we had, again, these diffuse groups, going different places. Some were able to go into the bank branch and have a Quaker meeting for worship in the bank. Some bank branches just shut down. We had big sheets that we had painted on them “locked out for telling the truth.” The day ended with an action where five of our folks got arrested for telling the truth at PNC Bank.

That got major press coverage for us, which was again really important. And it was a way of just connecting with all these young people from PowerShift. It was a thrilling day of people showing up with such clear purpose and connection. 

But again, we had to be reminded of this lesson we had not truly learned before with our green walk for jobs and justice. We realized that we could do more. Doing all these bank branch actions in one day was huge, but we still didn't have a mechanism for how to connect with these students when they went back to their campuses, which takes us to Act 3, I guess. 

AWG: Can we just roll into Act Three?

IL: Act Three is really applying the lessons learned and doing it well. In April 2014, there was another PNC shareholder meeting, and we had decided, okay, we've done that. We don't need to just do this every year. It doesn't need to just be like a ritual of ours. Except we found out PNC was going to move it to Tampa, Florida. Again, in the world of coincidence or way opening, we had actually just recently connected with young people - middle schoolers and high schoolers - in Florida who wanted to learn about nonviolent direct action campaigns.

So we thought, okay, PNC is going there. This is a great opportunity. We sent some people down to train folks down there. And the plan was to do another PNC shareholder action, which we did. It involved 22 Floridians and six Philadelphians who went in and they shut down that shareholder meeting even faster that time. It felt very much like it had the effect of - PNC up to that point might have thought of us as kind of a local group. And now it was a little like, you can't hide. It definitely had an escalatory energy. I think they felt that too.

Then that summer was a big gathering of Quakers - In Pittsburgh. It's a national gathering that happens in different places every year. That particular year, it happened to be in Pittsburgh. So we went, we led a workshop for a week which ended in a day of action where we had Quakers go all over Pittsburgh to seven different bank branches to do actions.

It was this beautiful opportunity bringing 200 Quakers from around the country doing direct action together and using a Quaker practice that is dear to us, is at the heart of our experience of Quakerism - which is meeting for worship - in a bank branch where almost nobody had done that before.

So that was extraordinary. One of the things though, is we had learned our lesson finally. Going into that, we knew we have to come out of this with a way to keep people activated, have ways that they get to come back and really join this campaign. After the gathering, Matthew Armstead, who was our campaign coordinator at the time, put on his living room wall all 200 people and then figured out who were leaders among them. And then we planned to do four trainings in different regions of the United States so we could train these folks leading us to in December, our huge action called Flood PNC. We had actions in 13 states and the District of Columbia, organized by people who had been engaged with us at Friends General Conference. So it was like, wh, we did it. We actually learned that lesson of having a way of supporting people who have shown up to show up again, which is so, so important in campaigning. 

The other thing that happened at the Friends General Conference gatherin, in Pittsburgh is that a few of our folks went to spotlight, or birddog, the CEO of PNC Bank. It was on July 4th, so it was a holiday. Three people went off to his house. We found where he lived. He came out in his jogging shorts and had a half hour conversation with our people. Which also felt like a sign. That is not something someone would do if they really thought they didn't need to pay attention to you. So that felt like a very clear indicator that we are on their radar and they're not just dismissing us. Super important. 

We started getting indicators that fall that there were conversations happening within PNC about changing their policy. We did an action the following February in which we were trying to deliver something to PNC, a quilt that had been made by a hundred different people about loving mountains.

We were told by security that the bank is in negotiation about their mountaintop removal policy. It was then right after that in March that PNC made an announcement that they were no longer going to fund mountaintop removal coal mining. We won. It took five years, 125 actions, a lot of experimentation, a lot of joy. There were also tears, there were some fights, there were some arguments, and there was celebration. And it was an extraordinary learning opportunity for all of us and a really important win, I think, for the movement.

AWG: So great when the movie ends in victory. Can you take us through, whether it was that day or that week, but was there a sense of, we're just kind of grinding on? Or we recently got some wind in our sails? Or we're starting to hear from the company? What was that like? 

IL: When we started hearing some rumors that PNC was actually going to change their policy, there was a range of feelings, right? Some people were like, yeah, right. Just total cynicism. Believe when I see it, it's going to be BS, whatever they do, we can't trust them. To the other side of like, yay we won! Moving on! We needed to give attention to every part of that spectrum. If we hadn't, it would have been pretty hard when it really did happen and we won. But we actually got to have a celebration and to be able to name places where we might still be disappointed because it didn't end mountaintop removal altogether.

That still is a practice that's happening, but where we could also claim the win of, we did hit at and took a big chunk out of that pillar. That's a win and we have to have some wins. There's a lot for us to feel a lot of pain about and the hardness of so many things. And so we have got to find the places where we've got some wins. And I think most people got to a place of yeah, we have to celebrate this. 

AWG: You all had a celebration, and I think it'd be helpful just to hear - because it can also be sometimes. It's great and it's just euphoric but it can also be kind of a letdown to not have a campaign anymore for some people. And then have to face, well, now what do we do now? Whether we call it a victory or a partial victory or whatever, but just to end this part of the story, if you could just tell us sort of like a little bit about that aftermath? Because I feel like we don't talk a lot about that “after we win” piece and the different ways that can look. 

But also, give us the long story short of how you all got to your current campaign. I know there's been lots of campaigns since then, but I do think it's important for people to know that EQAT is still waging finance campaigns around climate. Just give us a little teaser about what that is before we spend a few minutes unpacking what some insights you think are from this campaign.

IL: Great Because we had a heads up that PNC was going to change their policy, we realized that we actually needed to start thinking about what was next, even before we had officially won. So we had a small group of people who decided to start doing research and thinking about, what would be a next campaign for us?

One of the things that had been hard and we had been challenged about in the Bank Like Appalachia Matters campaign with PNC was that it was not a campaign that specifically took on race. Philadelphia is a majority Black city and so it felt like that felt like a disconnect for folks. And so we were clear that in our next campaign, we wanted a campaign that actually explicitly was talking about race and talking about racism and the connection between racism, economic justice, and climate change.

While we're still trying to keep our campaign going and then have a win and celebrate the win, we're also beginning to start a new campaign. We at that time also decided we wanted a campaign that was in fact local, truly local, which was a hard, hard decision because we had become a kind of national campaign and while still based in Philadelphia, we had made all these connections in other states, which was so exciting. And yet we felt really led to have a campaign, which we called the Power Local Green Jobs campaign, which was based in Philadelphia and the Philadelphia region. It was targeting our electric utility to get them to increase how much solar they were using. That's the short version. 

So we ran that campaign for several years. We did get some really important concessions there. We didn't win the full campaign in the way that we wanted to, but it became clear that we weren't going to. It felt so important that we not continue on a campaign that we didn't feel was going to win, and that we actually had to put our energy into another campaign that we thought we could win. It's so hard to give up on a campaign. But also important to go for something that we think we can achieve.

That brought us to our current campaign, which actually is massive. It is an opportunity where EQAT is part of a global campaign against Vanguard, which is the largest investor in fossil fuels in the world. So we became sort of the local hub for Vanguard since their headquarters is just outside Philadelphia.

We're working with the Sunrise Project, a global organization, and we are targeting Vanguard. It turns out Vanguard is invested in just about every bad thing. What we're really working on is, how do we do this campaign in a way that really recognizes frontline communities, all the places that Vanguard is supporting pretty awful things to happen. And we're staying very focused on our role with Vanguard, in relationship to their headquarters, which is in our backyard. 

AWG: Awesome. Thank you for sharing all of that with us. I'm especially curious if you think from this story, if there are insights that you have learned, or you all as an organization learned, that you feel like are especially relevant for us today, thinking about the shape our movements are in.

One of the guests in our first season talked about the “movement plagues” that are facing us or challenges particular to our moment and “movement antidotes.” But I'm just curious about if there are lessons that feel especially relevant that you'd like to share with us. 

IL: I think finding connections. So whether that's elders to connect with, who maybe have seen a lot over time and have a different kind of perspective. Maybe it's organizations who have particular kind of expertise. But really, where do you get support? Who can you connect with? Who's going to support you to continue in your learning and process what you're feeling?

I think that's such a huge part of what we need to do. And I think it's actually part of learning, even if we don't necessarily always think of it that way. How are we processing our experience, our emotional reality, so that we can look at our behaviors and what we need to change or our strategy, the strategy arc, all of those pieces. And I think we do that best when we have support from other people. Sometimes that's people within our group, and I think it can be really helpful when it's people who are not part of our group just because they might have a different kind of attention. 

I think the practice of debriefing is just so critically important. We just have to learn from our experience and there are lots of ways to do that, but I just think everything should be debriefed. My family makes fun of me about this because like, I want to debrief dinner. I want to debrief everything, but I think debriefing is really critical in our staying in the game and in our staying in these fights. Otherwise, I think we're just going to burn out. 

Building our capacity to do scary things. It was a huge thing for us in the first campaign, the second campaign, the current campaign, to figure out, what is my growing edge and how do I skill up for it? How do I get to try something new? How do we stay in there, in relationship, in that? So, you know, part of this is like, if you've never been an action lead before, or you've never been a police liaison before, or you've never risked arrest before, or you've never interrupted a shareholder meeting before, what support do you need to do that? And then how do you debrief it afterward so that you get the learnings from it and grow as a result?

Another thing that felt really important from the PNC campaign is that we didn't have a requirement or sort of an ideological expectation that people be anti-capitalist to participate. We didn't care. It was really like, this is the campaign, a specific target and a specific goal, a specific demand. How you feel about banking in America or capitalism is how you feel about it. We really were not trying to go for ideological agreement. And I think that can be hard. But I think trying to pay attention to that - if we're only organizing people who already agree with us on all the things, I don't think we're going to win.

I'm sure there are lots of people who want to have a fight with me about that. That's fine, but from my perspective, we would not have won that campaign if we had made demands of people's beliefs about banking. That wasn't actually the point. Just even having real conversations about, who do I believe I can work with to achieve a goal? Who do I believe I can't work with to achieve a goal? To just be really sitting with, what is true and what is just a belief or an assumption?

I have another one, which is, I really think it's important to honor your cultural practices and values. So for us as a Quaker organization, spirituality is at the heart. We don't super define that in ways that I feel like are restricting for people, but it was really important that we start an organization where we could talk about spirituality. We could invite spirit in. It's been, and is still, so critical that if we had tried to take that away, I don't think we would have been as effective. I think it's part of what gave us the grounding and the courage to stick with it for five years, right? It takes a lot to stick with it.

I think it's really important for us to be aware that banks and our targets are learning from our tactics. That's hard because what we were doing in 2010, 2012, 2014 is now not groundbreaking in any way, right? And so what does it mean for us to keep learning? How can we be more creative? How can we do things that are consistent with the culture of our group, but that are still destabilizing for our target? We have to learn faster than them and create faster than them. It's a huge invitation to creativity. I'm really excited to see what is yet to come. But we can't rely on the tactics of our first campaign anymore. We have to create something new. 

And then, I think just the reality that it takes a long time to win. Sometimes somebody can get a quick win, but often it takes a long time. And to really think about, how are you supporting your people to hang in there, and maybe to take breaks, and to come back? Do what the self care that you need, the group care, but to realize – It was in year four of our campaign that Chris Baker Evans, who was our organizer then, had read something that it takes five years to win a campaign. Well, in year four, we were getting tired and grumpy. It was a great time to hear that it took about five years. Year four ended up, we were on fire and won the campaign in year five. So just that perspective, having a big picture makes such a difference.

AWG: Awesome. Thank you for sharing and for your willingness as an organization to be pretty transparent about the different considerations you all have used over time, and the growing pains of going from one campaign to the other. Thank you, Ingrid, for your time. 

IL: Oh, thank you.