KAT TAYLOR IS A REBEL BANKER
SUBJECT Kat Taylor
OCCUPATION Impact investor
INTERVIEWER Dan Fitzgerald
PHOTOGRAPHER Angela DeCenzo
LOCATION San Fransisco, US
DATE February, 2019
ANTIDOTE TO Individualism
UNEXPECTED Singer
When our editor, Nathan, informed me that the theme of this issue was courage, Kat Taylor immediately came to mind. A singer, rancher and banking activist, Kat is a living embodiment of courage, in the heart-centred root of the word. She operates with love, honesty and radical transparency about her own and our society’s blind spots, all the while striving to live into a more inclusive, equitable and just world.
Kat’s activist spirit was awakened in her childhood, growing up during an incredible inflection point in human history. The civil rights movement was at its crescendo, and Kat recalls bearing witness to tragic moments of the times (such as the deaths of JFK and Martin Luther King) and feeling she couldn’t live in a society that allowed such injustices to happen. Raised in a banking family, Kat aspired for a different career trajectory—one that would allow her to bring freedoms to the marginalised—until, as a graduate, she realised that legal rights without economic opportunity were hollow. Since then, Kat has been at the leading edge of economic activism and impact investing. She is 100 percent committed to using all forms of capital to create, catalyse and nurture the systems that are conducive to a harmonious existence for all life.
Kat and her husband Tom Steyer focus on three key areas for their investing that they view as critical for effecting large-scale change: clean money, clean energy and clean food. She and Tom co-founded Beneficial State Bank, a California-based community development bank grounded in social and environmental values, with the goal of changing the banking system for good. The bank’s approach is one that respects all constituencies and allows customers to align their banking activities with their values. Its economic rights are owned 100 percent by a foundation, and can never be controlled by a private individual.
“I don’t know how we can not rationalise putting our natural commons back into public ownership and managing them like the commons that they are.”
Kat and Tom also founded the TomKat Ranch and Educational Foundation, which focuses on climate stability, healthy food and biodiversity. It serves as a learning laboratory for regenerative agriculture to optimise carbon sequestration, nutrition, water quality and availability, and animal welfare. In 2013, Kat co-founded NextGen Climate (now NextGen America), an environmental advocacy organisation committed to supporting candidates at all levels of government who will take action on climate change. In her spare time, she is actively pursuing the impeachment of President Donald Trump!
Kat’s empathy and compassion are grounded in an acknowledgement that we are present with no greater stature than any of the other creatures who share our Earth community. She is inspired by the challenges we face, but even more so by the solutions that currently exist and are being created. I had the privilege of sharing time and space with Kat in her San Francisco home in late January, and then again a couple of months later over Skype for this interview. She was sharp, unflinching, humble and deeply insightful.
KAT TAYLOR: I’m so honoured to be asked to do this interview. Honestly Dan! I was reading about your publication and I totally forgot that Dumbo needed his feather to fly until he didn’t.
DAN FITZGERALD: [Laughs].
Thank you for the opportunity.
I’m happy to be chatting with you again. It is almost as if we were back in your living room, sitting with your dogs [laughs]. I wish we were!
[Laughs]. Yes. And that little baby pug would be bothering you just as much once again.
What was her name?
Kiwi! As in the kiwi fruit.
Kiwi, that’s right. I love Kiwi.
[Laughs].
So maybe we can kick off. Kat, I’d love for you to share with us what, in this moment, your reason for being is. And how you’re
