FY 2021
Kay Wilson
Member Spotlight
Kay Wilson
Kay Wilson grew up outside of Pittsburgh in an area marked first by deindustrialization and later by fracking. And, because her mother had a chronic illness, she also witnessed the injustices of the medical system. “There weren’t a lot of jobs, and my mom always had medical bills. That was my family’s story,” she says.
All this led her to become active in the environmental and healthcare justice movements, and she went on to get her bachelor degree in industrial and labor relations. There, saw even more clearly the ways corporate power impacted her family and her neighbors. She realized, for example, that the terrible health outcomes in her area and her mother’s illness wasn’t just fate—rather, it was something that executives in a distant board room “decided was acceptable to do to the people in my area. That was just a huge wake-up moment.”
Today, Wilson is getting her law degree and continuing to fight for justice. When she heard about Corporate Accountability’s Giving Circle through Resource Generation, she was immediately interested. She was drawn both to the mission and our campaign challenging water privatization in Pittsburgh: “to see all those connections, it was just an awesome fit,” she says.
Wilson, who came into wealth through her fiancé, met each month with fellow Giving Circle members and staff. There, she learned more about corporate power and the strategies Corporate Accountability and our allies’ employ in our campaigns to counter that power. She also learned how to fundraise from her networks to support the work. “Learning about the connections to my own life was hugely powerful,” she said. “I got to take not only my own background, but also all this new knowledge I got from Corporate Accountability and go out in the world and do something good with it, which was really awesome.”
Watch a short excerpt from our conversation with Kay, where she talks more about how the Giving Circle helped her to take action in alignment with her values.
