Why I Brought My Toddler to Protest at Citi CEO Jane Fraser’s House

Most families spend their weekend mornings running errands, with friends, or at the playground. But on a chilly Saturday in January, my little family of three joined 35 parents and kids bright and early for a different kind of activity: protesting outside Citi CEO Jane Frasers’ posh West Village apartment building.

Here’s why: According to the U.N., more than 43 million children have been displaced by climate disasters in the last six years. On average, that is 20,000 children displaced by climate change per day—20,000 children whose toys, clothes, and comforts were gone in an instant, 20,000 more children every day who don’t have a place to sleep at night because of climate disasters. And 20,000 children every day who are terrified, facing an uncertain future. The U.N. report also noted that whether short or long term, displacement amplifies “risks of exploitation, child trafficking, and abuse, while also exposing children to malnutrition, disease, and inadequate immunization,” compounding children’s trauma and putting them at greater risk of death.

We arrived early in the morning at Fraser’s fortress of a building. We brought toys, instruments, snacks (of course), and a 40-foot banner representing the children displaced by fossil fuel disasters. We read a story about Citibank, talked about what home means to us, chanted, and sang.

As long as Jane Fraser and Wall Street continue to fuel climate disasters with money for new fossil fuels, they don’t deserve peaceful Saturday mornings.

Passersby and building residents gawked at us. Some took photos. The doorman quickly closed the massive gate to the building’s interior parking lot (in Manhattan!) and called the police. Within 10 minutes there were several police officers and cars parked on the narrow street informing us we could be arrested for playing music without a permit. Arrests would have left a lot of toddlers alone to roam, so we yelled and sang at the top of our lungs.

We were there to tell Jane Fraser to wake up to the real world impacts of her choices as Citi’s chief. 20,000 children are displaced every day—not by chance or because of unforeseen disasters, but because of the greed of companies that continue to fund fossil fuel expansion in flagrant opposition to a decades-long consensus of the world’s scientists. While we go about our day-to-day lives, fossil fuel and Wall Street CEOs like Fraser are knowingly evicting millions of children from their homes from the comfort of their boardrooms and mansions.

Despite ambitious climate rhetoric from Fraser, a fancy LEED-certified headquarters, and her statement that she wants Citi to “be known as the bank with a soul,” Citi has funneled $332.9 billion to fossil fuels since the 2016 Paris agreement, fueling the disasters displacing children around the world. Citi is also the No. 1 bank funding fossil fuel development in Africa and the second biggest funder of oil and gas expansion n the Amazon basin. Among Citi’s biggest fossil fuel clients are ExxonMobil, which has no plan to transition away from oil and gas, and Saudi Aramco, whose funding relationship with Citi saw the bank named in a U.N. complaint on climate-linked human rights violations. This makes clear that despite what Fraser says, Citi is anything but the bank with a soul; there is nothing more soulless than displacing millions of children for profit.

And children aren’t just being displaced by the fossil fueled climate crisis: They are starving. According to Save the Children, 27 million children were hungry or malnourished in 2022 due to extreme weather caused by climate change. If banks like Citi continue pumping money into fossil fuel expansion, that’s ensuring that more children will starve.

As a parent, I shudder at the thought of being unable to feed my child. And I know how important having a safe home is for all children and their caregivers. I also know that the millions of families most impacted by climate disasters around the world don’t have the opportunity that I do, as a New Yorker, to show up on the doorstep of the financiers who are profiting from fossil fuel destruction.

Once we got home, my toddler sang “Wake Up Jane” and “fossil fuels gotta go”—his version: Fa Fa Foo Ga Ga Go—as he played with blocks. He’s too young to understand why we were there, but I hope when he’s older he remembers his mom on a bullhorn outside the home of a CEO poisoning the planet.

As long as Jane Fraser and Wall Street continue to fuel climate disasters with money for new fossil fuels, they don’t deserve peaceful Saturday mornings. It’s time for Fraser and all of Wall Street to wake up to the impacts of their choices on children around the world. We’ll keep showing up until they change course—at their offices, their galas, and, yes, even at their homes.